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Colin Powell: the ‘nice guy’ who helped destroy a country
The first casualty of war is truth. Nowhere has this been more evident than in the life of Colin Powell, former secretary of state and former top general of the US, says MARC VANDEPITTE
Former US secretary of state Colin Powell
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AT the age of 84, Colin Powell has died. He had the image of a dove, but war crimes were hidden behind it.
Powell was national security adviser to Ronald Reagan and the first black commander-in-chief of the US military. In 2001, he became the country’s first black secretary of state.
In personal dealings he was described as a “pleasant” and a “nice” man. To many blacks he was also a role model. That may all be true, but those things do not prevent him from having an extremely bloody track record, laced with war crimes.
In 1968, Powell, then 31 years old, was in charge of investigating the My Lai massacre in Vietnam.
Between 350 and 500 unarmed civilians were killed by US soldiers, including women and children. Powell covered up the massacre and wrote in his report “that relations between American Division soldiers and the Vietnamese people are excellent.”
In the 1980s, Powell was one of the leading generals who armed and trained the Salvadoran army and death squads. They were responsible for the slaughter of 75-80,000 Salvadorans. In 1989 he was in charge of invading Panama.
He is best known for the famous speech he delivered to the United Nations security council in 2003 in which he claimed to have evidence that Saddam Hussein, the then leader of Iraq, had weapons of mass destruction. This blatant lie was intended to arouse public opinion in favour of invading Iraq.
The invasion, ensuing war and civil war completely devastated the country, killing nearly 300,000 Iraqis. Most of them were civilians.
Powell certainly wasn’t the biggest hawk in the Bush administration at the time, but he may have been the only one who could have stopped an invasion.
He could have refused to spread that blatant lie before the UN. He would almost certainly have had to resign then, but perhaps a lot of other staffers would have followed him in that and government leaders from other countries would have opposed the invasion.
Muntadher Alzaidi, the journalist who became world famous for throwing his shoe at president George W Bush’s head, expressed sadness in a tweet that Powell was denied a war crimes trial for his central role in the invasion of Iraq.
“I am sure that the court of God will be waiting for him,” he wrote.
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