In a multistate network of U.S. hospitals during January–March 2021, receipt of Pfizer-BioNTech or Moderna COVID-19 vaccines was 94% effective against COVID-19 hospitalization among fully vaccinated adults and 64% effective among partially vaccinated adults aged ≥65 years.
> At one point, he became so angry at the lack of adequate sourcing to intelligence claims that he declared: "I'm not reading this. This is bullshit," according to the magazine.
He did read it in full, of course. And he brought the fake vial of Iraqi anthrax to the presentation, too. A known unknown of known bullshit, I guess.
A lie that probably cost hundreds of thousands of lives (unless, as he also said, they already decided to go to war in which case, he also lied to the UN Security Council about their intent).
As Powell's chief of staff Col. Lawrence Wilkerson once recalled, that speech resulted in a resumption of hostilities for a war that already received Security Council approval back in the '90s - the original war never stopped, as no truce was ever agreed to, only detente. North and South Korea are in a similar state of detente. Powell's speech itself was an effort to receive political support for reengagement.
He was also successfully honey-pot-ed by my country, Romania, at about the same time (early 2000s), googling "corina cretu" and "colin powell" should reveal some Romanian texts (easily translatable via Google Translate) plus some photos. Old habits die hard, I guess (I'm talking about my country's tactics, which I guess we learned from our big neighbour further East).
Is that really the standard for calling someone a war criminal? National leaders always lie about the reasons for war, whether they are the attackers or the defenders.
No doubt that Colin Powell did the wrong thing when he lied to the UN, but let's not throw around the term "war criminal" to mean "someone who did the wrong thing."
That is not a war crime. Keep in mind that the Allies lied about all kinds of things during WWII in order to legitimize our involvement, and that we killed millions of people during the war. Countries always lie about war and people always die in war, those are just facts.
Yes, the Allies comitted war crimes in WWII, i don't see how that matters for modern war criminals. Conspiracy against peace is a real war crime, including in the US.
I guess you and I must disagree. Either you think war crimes are no big deal, because according to your broad reading of "conspiracy against peace" pretty much anyone who participates in any war is a criminal, or else you think there is no justifiable war whatsoever. Personally I think WWII was entirely justified, that the Allies had to win that war, and that fighting to win meant that large numbers of people would die. I also believe that war crimes are a big deal and that it is wrong to conflate "war crimes" with "doing something wrong" or "participating in war I disagreed with" or "being on the wrong side of the war."
> crime against peace, in international law, is "planning, preparation, initiation, or waging of wars of aggression, or a war in violation of international treaties, agreements or assurances, or participation in a common plan or conspiracy for the accomplishment of any of the foregoing".[1] This definition of crimes against peace was first incorporated into the Nuremberg Principles and later included in the United Nations Charter. This definition would play a part in defining aggression as a crime against peace. It can also refer to the core international crimes set out in Rome Statute of the International Criminal Court (genocide, crimes against humanity, war crimes, and the crime of aggression), which adopted crimes negotiated previously in the Draft code of crimes against the peace and security of mankind.
> An important exception to the foregoing are defensive military actions taken under Article 51 of the UN Charter. Such defensive actions are subject to immediate Security Council review, but do not require UN permission to be legal within international law. "Nothing in the present Charter shall impair the inherent right of individual or collective self-defence if an armed attack occurs against a Member of the United Nations." (UN Charter, Article 51) The Security Council will determine if the action is legally the "right of individual or collective self-defence", or it may appoint another UN organ to do this.
Meaning that defensive wars are OK. Conspiring against the peace, aka waging a war of aggression, is not. Which is why the Allies fighting against the Axis aren't war criminals for being in the war, but for their actions there ( unrestricted submarine warfare, the Laconia incident, the bombings of civilian targets including Nuremberg, etc.). The Axis' war crimes including them starting the wars ( against Poland, Soviet Union, Greece, Yugoslavia, etc.) and their despicable behaviour in them ( Holocaust, treatment of civilians and POWs, bombing of civilian targets, etc).
> Powell's chief role was to garner international support for a multi-national coalition to mount the invasion. To this end, Powell addressed a plenary session of the United Nations Security Council on February 5, 2003, to argue in favor of military action. Citing numerous anonymous Iraqi defectors, Powell asserted that "there can be no doubt that Saddam Hussein has biological weapons and the capability to rapidly produce more, many more." Powell also stated that there was "no doubt in my mind" that Saddam was working to obtain key components to produce nuclear weapons.[61]
It's hard to deny he worked hard to justify an illegal war of aggression, which, as we've established is a war crime.
Please name one american war criminal higher than a soldier killing innocents in the dozens ( like someone who ordered a war or a strike or torture or kidnapping or whatever) who was actually tried and served time for his crimes. That just doesn't happen with US war criminals, so the question is moot.
I didn't ask for a successful prosecution, I just asked for examples of people attempting to put him on trial.
Here are 4 arguments, drawn from 10 seconds of Googling, put forward for trying Bush and other members of his administration. The usual names are here - Cheney, Rumsfeld, Tenet:
And that' a war crime, specifically "crime against peace". A really cut and dry case of war criminal. Too bad he didn't face trial and spend any time in prison.
> A crime against peace, in international law, is "planning, preparation, initiation, or waging of wars of aggression, or a war in violation of international treaties, agreements or assurances, or participation in a common plan or conspiracy for the accomplishment of any of the foregoing
That's pretty much the definition of crimes against peace.
With due respect, I feel it is quite disingenuous to characterize Powel as either a warmonger or as being personally responsible for the deaths of a million people. In fact, he is reported to have called the Neocon cabal as 'a bunch of fucking crazies' during the build-up to war in Iraq.
If Powell is the one responsible, are you absolving Donald Rumsfeld and more importantly Dick Cheney of responsibility? How about the join houses of congress and the US press. Do they all get absolved of responsibility because Powell gave a speech at the UN?
The US was going to war and though he did not like it, Powell was tasked with speaking to the UN about it. Did he know some of what he said was not sustained by facts, or even that they were lies? Sure and he regretted it the rest of his days.
The important point is, Powell at the UN or not, the US was going to war. Laying all the deaths on him is completely scapegoating a fine man and thus excusing the true Neocon powerbrokers who are ultimately responsible.
"Do they all get absolved of responsibility because Powell gave a speech at the UN?"
No, obviously not.
"Did he know some of what he said was not sustained by facts, or even that they were lies?"
If he didn't know all the facts perhaps he should have had the moral fortitude to not beat the drums to a war machine that resulted in so many innocent deaths
> If Powell is the one responsible, are you absolving Donald Rumsfeld and more importantly Dick Cheney of responsibility
Nope, responsibility is not exclusive. All of them bear undiluted responsibility for their actions and the deliberate and forseeable consequences. Two people collaborating in a murder aren't each half-murderers, they are both unqualified, unmitigated murderers.
I’m no fan of Colin Powell but IMO the responsibility for those deaths does not fall on him specifically. The US was going to war in Iraq with or without the UN’s backing, everything Powell did was window dressing. False, deceitful and criminal window dressing, but still.
The nature of modern complex organizations like the United States is that no one person is responsible for everything. You can't so much as get $600 checks to every American without the support of a sizable bureaucracy, let alone single-handedly wage a land war halfway around the world and remake the government of 40 million people.
But that doesn't mean we have to let our sense of morality hold nobody culpable, as if everyone is part of a firing squad and you can't prove who had the blank. Merely signing up for the firing squad shows that you intended to kill, and the responsibility for the death falls on all the people in the squad (as well as all the people who organized it and decided to put a particular prisoner in front of it, etc.), not none of them.
"The US" was only going to war in Iraq because a lot of people arranged things so that it could happen. It's probably true that if any one person decided not to participate, it would still have happened. But if enough people decided not to participate, it wouldn't. And we saw clearly in the last months of the previous presidency that one high-ranking individual can certainly make things a lot more difficult for a president who wants to wage war and that more generally "resistance inside the administration" can be at least partly effective.
I think if we're going to say that an illegal war happened, that people lost their lives because of it, and that it would have been good and moral to try to stop the war, we also need to say that it was bad and immoral to go along with making it happen.
If the standard is that you have to be fully responsible for the war to carry any responsibility for the war, than nobody is responsible. No wonder no one was punished except Judith Miller, lightly.
I guess the war was nobody's doing, huh? Powell just jumped on the bandwagon when was was already inevitable. Blair thought the US was implacable, and wanted to bring the UN along so the UN didn't look powerless. GWB was a lovable idiot, whose only mistake was having too much faith in his advisers.
It's true what they say - success has many fathers, but failure is an orphan.
That’s a pretty big leap in logic. GWB, Rumsfeld, Cheney et al we’re all very clearly responsible for the mess that unfolded. I was simply pointing out that Powell had a peripheral role in the events. Not absolving him, but I feel like Powell gets an outsize level of attention because his actions were public and broadcast. It gives those scheming behind the scenes (even before 9/11) a free pass.
> IMO the responsibility for those deaths does not fall on him specifically.
While this is true, you're not allowed to criticize the flawlessly angelic Intelligence Community on HN.
Holding up the CIA as a bastion of virtue whilst denouncing the public faces of our war crimes is the best way to maintain your karma here. When Tony Blair passes, be sure to dance on his grave too, because the GCHQ puppetmasters did absolutely nothing wrong.
It's always best for one's personal reputation to shoot the messenger, not the man behind the curtain.
> Holding up the CIA as a bastion of virtue whilst denouncing the public faces of our war crimes is the best way to maintain your karma here.
You’re joking, right? The CIA is shit on all the time. It’s a fucking joke just like most other state run agencies that are all self-interested and don’t actually look out for the public good.
The CIA is responsible for huge amounts of horrible shit across the entire world. Constantly instilling puppet dictators and destabilizing countries for generations now - all for the glory of US capitalism and imperialism.
Doesn’t mean Colin Powell is absolved either. Everyone involved is to blame. Even the voters.
I wouldn't hold CIA and other intel agencies up as a bastion of virtue, and I appreciate they've done a lot of terrible things. I can't really make broader moral judgements about how they handle their respective missions, though, since they mostly operate in the dark. All I can say about the CIA, for example, is they're somewhere between A: the most oppressive, lawless, brutal institution to exist post WW2, and B: flawed saviors of humanity from nuclear/other apocalypse. Who really knows? Those that do probably can't say much.
Intel agencies do have the problem that if they go off the rails, there's not many paths to reform outside of direct involvement. I also strongly suspect that they're doing some terrible and unnecessary things to this day (e.g. still ruining lives in a protracted battle with Marx's ghost) and need reform, but that's really the strongest claim I can make.
If he didn't deliver that speech, they would have found someone else to do it (and he would have been fired). The responsibility lies with Bush and Cheney, not with the messenger.
Not even remotely the same situation. Nuremberg was about officers delivering and obeying direct orders to kill civilians and commit war crimes. Powell simply delivered a speech to get international support for a war the US was going to fight no matter what. He had nothing to do with the war crimes.
The US wasn't going to fight it "no matter what." The US was going to fight it if the US government was reasonably capable of doing so, which depended on political support at home, the ability to find allies, and functioning internal logistics. All of these things he had a hand in.
Suppose he fled the US for some neutral country, resigned his position, and made a public announcement that he knew that the case for war was fraudulent and that the international community had an obligation to stop the US. What would have happened?
Suppose he simply resigned to spend more time with his family the night before his speech to the UN.
Suppose he did not decide (as he did in real life) that he was going to support the president in waging war without the support of the UN, and he told the world as much.
Suppose he insisted on having more time to review the material himself before making the speech to the UN.
There were a number of times where he could have changed the course of history. Yes, it would have come at significant personal cost to himself and perhaps significant embarrassment of America on the world stage. If you're unwilling to do that for a raise, sure, that seems reasonable; if you're unwilling to do that to prevent tens of thousands of deaths, you are absolutely morally culpable for those deaths.
The invasion of Iraq on false premises was itself a war crime, and the killings of Iraqi soldiers was just as immoral as killing civilians. Quoting one of the rulings at Nuremberg: "War is essentially an evil thing. Its consequences are not confined to the belligerent states alone, but affect the whole world. To initiate a war of aggression, therefore, is not only an international crime; it is the supreme international crime differing only from other war crimes in that it contains within itself the accumulated evil of the whole."
The point is, after a while of getting told "No, I'm not going down in history as that guy. You set up optics that disincentivize doubling down on the poor behavior, whereas capitulation only reinforces it.
I know it's a stretch and I don't want to Godwin the discussion too much, but that is really not an excuse. The Nuremberg trials clearly rejected this "Nuremberg defense", but of course it was the beaten party standing before the court back then.
But in principle, since 1945, no one can evade personal responsibility for a clearly unlawful act by pointing to superior orders.
Yet, USA is doing similar for decades and goes through with it because they can. Just look at their bouts with ICC, as also the case of Guantanamo Bay. Whether a Soldier can evade personal responsibility is still just a matter on which side they serve.
I hope we get to day when we can extend responsibility to even the voters. Vote for mass murder, get the ultimate penalty... Would make world much better place.
"They did it too" was an acceptable defense at Nuremberg; Donitz was not sentenced for the specific crime of unrestricted submarine warfare because the Allies had done the same thing (the US in the Pacific). Iraq also lied to the UN many times.
Really though, this is a stupid comparison. People generally remember the Nuremberg trials in the context of the Holocaust -- genocide, slave labor, and all the horror that accompanied it. Colin Powell did nothing remotely close to any of that, and while there is plenty of criticism to throw at the US for the invasion of Iraq there was no genocide, no ethnic cleansing, no slave labor camps, and a dozen US soldiers were thrown in prison by the US for having tortured and humiliated prisoners under their command.
No, Dönitz got away with his unrestricted sub warfare order because the allied powers committed a war crime and hushed it up:
> Operating partly under the dictates of the old prize rules, the U-boat commander, Korvettenkapitän Werner Hartenstein, immediately commenced rescue operations. U-156 broadcast her position on open radio channels to all Allied powers nearby, and were joined by the crews of several other U-boats in the vicinity.
>[...] En route, the U-boat was spotted by a B-24 Liberator bomber of the US Army Air Forces. The aircrew, having reported the U-boat's location, intentions and the presence of survivors, were then ordered to attack the sub.
>[...] The commanders of the Kriegsmarine were quickly issued the Laconia Order by Grand Admiral Karl Dönitz, which specifically forbade any such attempt and ushered in unrestricted submarine warfare for the remainder of the war.
>[...] During the later Nuremberg trials, a prosecutor attempted to cite the Laconia Order as proof of war crimes by Dönitz and his submariners. The ploy backfired and caused much embarrassment to the United States after the incident's full report had emerged.
It's also specifically not about genocide vs non-genocide but about legal vs. illegal orders. Just because you represent the US of A you cannot lie to the whole world to start a war. I mean, you can as evidenced by Powell, but a lot of people will spit on your grave for that.
I am reminded of the “To Be or To Do” [1] story about the late Colonel John Boyd.
Powell had a hard choice, yet life often puts us in such situations. He should have resigned, in my view. If he did not, he shares in the responsibility for what was done.
If you are talking about Iraq, these people were not exactly living happy lives under Saddam rule. Colin lie is inexcusable, but Iraq war was a good thing for Iraq. Net zero at least.
(Feel free to downvote, downvote is used for disagreement on HN these days.)
I spent 6 years there, including some time "on the economy".
Iran-Iraq War and Post-Gulf War 1 sanctions were each worse for Iraq than the 2003 invasion (by far). The various problems with the occupation (which mostly fall on Bremer/CPA and GWB/Cheney) were probably within an order of magnitude of Iran-Iraq and sanctions, maybe even directly comparable. Rise of ISIS (also a separate thing) and general sectarian violence as also bad at that level.
It's hard to tell how far back the causality chain you should go. A simple "kill Saddam, put any reasonable other person in, don't extensively reconstruct the government, GTFO" was what I was assuming would happen in 2003, which probably would have been net-positive for Iraqis. If you are bundling "invasion in 2003" with CPA + sectarianism + ISIS, then they're collectively highly net-negative for Iraqis, but I don't think they were necessarily linked in 2003.
I still would have opposed it as a US person (because it was a distraction from Afghanistan, which ALSO should have been concluded in late 2001 vs turned into a 20 year quagmire...)
Colin Powell has a decent place in my memory for his work in the 1990s and before, but he definitely spent his reputational capital in lying to UN, even if it didn't ultimately influence the course of action. I could certainly agree with him perhaps even overdrawing that account in total.
The estimates vary, but between half a million and a million people have died from the war and its aftermath. Not including Syrian Civil War or Libya, which were absolutely consequences of destabilizing the region.
No matter how bad Saddam was, invading was a bad solution.
My understanding is that the entire area is just brutal in general and Saddam was actually the least evil solution available at the time. He held it together through brutality, but he still apparently held it together, and now look at it.
People need to live free, not to be held slaves under the least evil dictator. I’m sorry for all commenters here who value pity lives more than freedom.
Under SH, there was a total information blockade, internet was not available, people simply could not know what is happening outside of Iraq except for what is provider by government sources.
Are we evaluating the wisdom and virtue of people's actions based on whether they keep them in the limelight? Just because your protest won't necessarily win out doesn't mean you shouldn't mount one.
I swear most of HN barely reads a thread before firing off some half-baked retort. The comment above about Phil Donahue was a reply to this:
>Imagine if he had resigned in protest at the decision to push for the invasion of Iraq. He would now be hailed as a hero around the world.
Nowhere in the above reply about Donahue was there an implication that people shouldn't protest, or that the virtue of their actions are based on whether those actions keep them in the limelight.
Phil Donahue is 85. I imagine he's been taking things a bit easier for 10 or 15 years. It's not as though Colin Powell has been making headlines for a while either, and for no doubt similar reasons. This has nothing to do with whether or not he should have taken a stand against the war in Iraq. I agree with disneygibson: Colin Powell had an exceptional career, all of which led up to that moment, where he simply blew it.
The only reason why you say he blew it at the end is because it was on public display. Perhaps his whole career progression was being a company man who followed orders blindly but we were never privy to it.
Sure, or at least they'd discussed firing him because of that (but it was in advance of the invasion, I believe), but he was already what he might have considered retirement age when that happened. Could he have gone on elsewhere if he'd wanted to? I bet he could have done. Maybe he just didn't want to.
I don't know about that. Bernie Sanders and Ron Paul both raised their profile significantly, and while there have been hiccups since then, they're both much more prominent than they were before 2003 — Ron Paul's son may have even benefited by association.
Nice to hear Russ's name on HN. Not completely forgotten I see. He also opposed the Patriot Act when it was extremely popular which I thought was courageous.
Incorrect. He would be hailed as the first African American Secretary of State with a decorated military career that resigned to protest lies and an unjust war.
Textbooks a century from now will include his name. It could have been in a positive light, but now his name will be forever tarnished.
Ironic that his predecessor (Kissinger) is still alive. I say it's "ironic" because Kissinger opened US relations with China, which ultimately set off a series of events leading to Powell's death.
I wonder if that was partly resulting from the aid both of them got after the US invasions? Or just general population trends in Middle East countries? From my quick study it appears they have higher population growth than surrounding countries.
Contraception and abortion are legal in India. India even had a female head of state before western countries. That didn’t prevent their population growth.
Hopefully cnn staff will join him. They helped push a lie that killed 981,000 innocent civilians which half of were children. Rott in Hell. Now they turned it on us.
First printed in the August 13, 1989, issue of Parade magazine,[41] these are Colin Powell's 13 Rules of Leadership.[42][43]
It ain't as bad as you think.
Get mad, then get over it.
Avoid having your ego so close to your position that when your position falls, your ego goes with it.
It can be done.
Be careful what you choose. You may get it.
Don't let adverse facts stand in the way of a good decision.
You can't make someone else's choices.
Check small things.
Share credit.
Remain calm. Be kind.
Have a vision.
Don't take counsel of your fears or naysayers.
Perpetual optimism is a force multiplier.
Basically rules to be a "yes-sir" man. Talk is cheap. Do the walk. And that failed at walk will be greatly remembered in American history. He could easily just resigned when being forced to act at UN. He choose to go on and display his wmd nonsense act in the process assisting Rumseld, blow 10+ trillions and gotten at least 8K American boys died on fabled WMD. He knows it is a lie showing he was a hypocrite or don't know which them absolute idiot. Either case, not a trait of a great man.
There was also the slide deck that elaborated on these. A lot of good sense in it, regardless of what you think of him: https://www.hsdl.org/?view&did=467329 [PDF]
"Don't let adverse facts stand in the way of a good decision." So predetermine a decision is "good", then ignore facts to the contrary? Is this what we saw on display at the UN?
Ignoring "adverse facts" seems to me to be one step away from simply adopting "alternative facts". Turns out it wasn't just one step away - it was a mere one administration away!
Colin Powell is a textbook case of "A thousand 'Atta-boys!' and one fuck-up!".
He joined the Army in the 1950s, served through 2 tours in Vietnam, and made it all the way to Chairman of the Joint Chiefs by the end of the 1980s, leading the military through Operation Desert Storm and the post-Soviet era. That's a rare career for ANY American, let alone a black one.
But all that went "poof!" after his shameful performance at the UN in 2003. Agreed that he should have resigned in protest instead. What an ignoble reputational end to an otherwise amazing role model. RIP Sir.
I don't really see rising through the ranks of the U.S. military through the 70s/80s/90s as particularly praiseworthy either. Powell did the job he did at the UN because he was a company man and had been for a long time. And in addition to a few tut-tuts and a black mark on his record, it also kept him in the good graces of the Washington foreign policy blob, with all the sinecures, speaking fees, magazine profiles, and mostly-hagiographic obituaries that come with it.
Do they disagree with any arguments, or just wishful thinking? My Lai and the UN are just the most glaring examples of him putting his career before everything else.
I still don't understand how a person who tried to cover up (in the most laughably inept manner) the massacre of civilians by the US Army didn't spend the rest of his life as a pariah, let alone get positive press in the media for decades. Then add in his lying to the UN to start a war and you wonder if there's no crime that can't be forgiven as long as that person supports the powers that be.
I have had discussion with people who I must credit with being sincere, who believed Mr Powell was a true American Hero whose accomplishments and achievements should be lauded and emulated. I didn't agree with or understand their arguments well enough to try repeating them.
I think those arguing that way were praising a faithful servant to any master, with no morals or principle of his own. as if thats a good thing to be. I hope im wrong and just failed to understand them.
The court cases allowing many of of the Vietnamese atrocities to go unpunished allowed people to claim they were "just following orders." You might not be wrong...
You mean covering up war crimes and lying to the UN to start wars, and being rewarded by the establishment for doing it? I should hope not.
You realize when he was tasked with looking into one of the worst US war crimes in recent history he said it couldn't have happened because the Vietnamese and US soldiers are like BFF's. Worst coverup in history, yet his loyalty was rewarded.
I was 17 when we invaded Afghanistan and 19 when we invaded Iraq. Through the lead-up to both of those conflicts I remember watching scores of demonstrators marching outside the White House, chanting slogans against the wars. What did they know that Colin Powell did not?
The invasion of Afghanistan should not be lumped in with Iraq.
The first had broad public support in both parties and in the public. ... over 90%. As well as support from NATO, the EU, and many other nations as it was an operation to get Osama Bin Laden after 9/11.
The invasion of Iraq was far more controversial and motivated by oil politics.
> The invasion of Afghanistan should not be lumped in with Iraq.
> The first had broad public support in both parties and in the public. ... over 90%
Certainly. But that is exactly what leaders are for: Good leaders worth mourning transform knowledge and sage wisdom into actions that should sometimes run counter to popular public will, and do not always bow under public pressure. Good leaders guide their people away from tragic error, at times when popular opinion would lead the population into the abyss, like it did in 2001.
If your conception of leadership is people who at all times merely execute the public will, then what you have are actually automata. Why bother with human leaders at all, then? We could just automate government to follow public opinion based on mass polling.
Invading Afghanistan to destroy Al-Qaeda after 9/11 was probably the correct decision.
Staying there for 20 years, on the other hand, including after killing Osama Bin Laden on the other hand... That probably had more to do with having US soldiers on both the Chinese and Iranian borders. ...which is also probably why they both quietly supported the insurgency with Pakistan.
I was a lowly undergrad polisci major at the time. I never demonstrated but it was clear as day to me that the preemptive invasion of Iraq would not be the cut and dry operation it was sold as -- and I can prove that I'm not claiming 20:20 hindsight because I kept the essay I wrote after hearing conservative NYTimes columnist William Safire speak at my school promoting the invasion in the weeks leading up to it. An excerpt:
> "His discussion on the war with Iraq is where I most disagreed with Mr. Safire. He spoke almost exclusively in terms of logistics and not potential realities. To him Iraq was a threat pure and simple and the United States had the obligation, the right, and the capability to neutralize that threat, with or without the UN. He offered troop estimates from potential allies in Turkey and the UK, and the explanations of the military superiority of the US as if anyone in the audience was wondering if the US had the means to militarily incapacitate Iraq."
And the concluding sentence:
> "Safire said quite effortlessly that Saddam is a threat that must be neutralized at all costs, but he doesn’t think the costs will be all that great. If he and Bush are wrong it will be one of the greatest political blunders in recent history."
Everyone knew that Iraq was a war of W's choosing and was mostly motivated by the influence of Cheney and Rumsfeld. The doves were uniformly against war as anything but a last recourse, and the idea of starting one on shaky pretenses was abhorrent to us. What we didn't know ahead of time was that the pretenses were even thinner than we imagined and there weren't in fact WMDs, which made the whole thing all the more farcical and tragic.
They knew Iraq did not have WMDs. The invasion would not happened if it did.
The rhetoric had changed from WMDs to regime change just before the invasion of Iraq.
Also the character assasination of Kofi Annan (and stories on his son) by Western media at the time for an illegal war (according to the UN rules) was amazing.
The famous John Bolton “Libya model” of disarmament comment comes to mind.
You would have been 7 when Desert Storm happened, then. Desert Storm is an episode that will probably be classified as a historical anomaly in hindsight, but in 2001, it was our most recent large-scale military action. Desert Storm was limited, focused, and... wait for the 1990s SNL joke you might be too young to remember... "prudent." Whether it was a good idea or not, whether it accomplished anything positive or not, it seemed to prove we had learned the lessons of Vietnam.
I think that affected everyone's expectations about the invasions of Iraq and Afghanistan. I was cynical about our motivations and our ability to accomplish anything with the invasions in 2001 and 2003, and was opposed to anything more than punitive action against Al Qaeda in Afghanistan, but still I did not foresee the scope of what happened. I thought there was no way an American administration could get suckered into the same kind of conflict, led on by the same chronic overpromising from generals. They would know that the generals would never tell the truth about what they could accomplish by military means. They would know a majority of the society would be bitterly polarized against us as foreign invaders. They would know the inherent difficulty of what they were trying to do. They would know they weren't being told the truth about the situation on the ground. They wouldn't make the mistake of accepting unrealistic definitions of victory.
That's probably what Colin Powell was counting on. Instead, we made all the same mistakes over again, and looking back we see the continuity of Vietnam and Afghanistan, with the Gulf War just an anomalous blip in between.
I wrote a different comment, then re-read your comment above, and deleted my original reply.
All I can say is that I thought about Desert Storm when I wrote my original comment. I may have been 7 or whatever, but I did grow up in the period after Desert Storm and I remember clearly how infallible American military might was thought to be in popular opinion.
> That's probably what Colin Powell was counting on.
God knows. Why would you distance Powell from the other "generals would never tell the truth"? I'm not sure I would.
> Why would you distance Powell from the other "generals would never tell the truth"?
That's a fair question. My first reason was that Powell was in the State Department under W, and the State Department has a more skeptical attitude towards our military capabilities than the military itself does. My second reason, which may be wrong-headed, was that I assumed that the military tendency to misrepresent situations in an optimistic way comes from their desire to do the job. I.e., they say fighting will succeed because it's their job and they want to do it, and then when it isn't going well, they say it's going great because they want to prove that they can do it. Just like a developer downplays the complexity of a challenging project because they're excited about tackling it, and when they get in over their head, they won't admit it because they don't want the project cancelled before they can complete it, no matter how long it takes. (Like that, except with killing.) Since Colin Powell wouldn't be responsible for directing the invasions as a general, I didn't think he would be influenced by that aspect.
EDIT: I think in retrospect what I didn't understand about the Gulf War was that some people viscerally loathed the lessons of Vietnam, hated the idea that the U.S. military could be "defeated," and chose to interpret the Gulf War not as a vindication of applying the lessons of Vietnam, but as proof that the lessons of Vietnam no longer applied. Your comment about the infallibility of American military might reminded me of that.
The 2003 Iraq war was, most people now know, based on a lie. What most people didn't know, and still don't know, is that Desert Storm itself was based on a lie. Like the 2003 lie, it backfired. It's a long story, but if reading what the US ambassador to Iraq at that time told Saddam will point you in the right direction. She's died years ago, but her name is April Catherine Glaspie [0]
UN inspectors had been in Iraq for years looking for signs of WMDs or their development. They never found them [0], so the US got rid of the inspectors and used fabricated 'evidence' from an Iraqi defector as proof of WMDs.
a) Iraq had nothing to do with 9/11, indeed Iraq and al Qaeda were idealogical opponents.
b) Iraq had no "weapons of mass destruction"; cite Hans Blix, others.
c) Iraqi leader Hussein had completely capitulated, meaning GWB had effectively won without firing a single shot.
d) Bush Admin and their sources were lying and didn't care that every one knew they were lying.
WRT Afghanistan, I don't readily recall what intelligence failures were publicly known at the time. Complicity of Pakistan's ISI. Allowing bin Laden to escape. The tar pit of dealing with Taliban, the misc war lords of the Northern Alliance.
Many objected to Bush Admin's focus on Iraq at the expense of the Afghanistan effort.
Many more objected to Bush Admin's violation of the Powell Doctrine, in both Afghanistan and Iraq.
Many pointed out the advocates for invading Iraq, mostly the neo-cons (aka chickenhawks), simply wanted war, regime change, and so forth. They'd said as much for over a decade. They seized the crisis of 9/11 to enact their plans. It was all very audacious and unapologetic.
Biden voted for the act which required Bush to make certain determinations, which he did in bad faith. While we can (and I did at the time) argue that the bad faith was predictable, supporting the law is still different than actively perpetrating the bad faith determination to initiate the war.
"I'm going to give the crazy guy the gun, and let him choose whether to kill all these people, and it's not my fault."
So tired of this idea that powerful people are free of responsibility for their actions. Biden VOTED FOR THE ACT which everyone knew was bullshit and hundreds of thousands of innocent people died.
> So tired of this idea that powerful people are free of responsibility for their actions
That's irrelevant; distinguishing between distinctly different acts is not absolving either of liability; in fact, I explicitly noted the basis of moral liability for each of the distinguished acts.
> b) Iraq had no "weapons of mass destruction"; cite Hans Blix, others.
I think that overstates the case. There was no good proof they did have those weapons, and a lot of stuff was fabricated or blown out of proportion to support their having them, but there was also a lot of reason to suspect they had them (including that we/our allies had supplied them to Saddam the past!...plus prior use against the Kurds and Shia). I think the consensus opinion now is that Saddam was trying to make others (especially within Iraq) believe he had a viable WMD capability, but that he didn't have an active program at the time of invasion.
What they knew that Colin Powell also knew was that Colin Powell was lying. Many of the lies weer debunked, in near real time, by the major press (and/or UN weapons inspectors), not just showing that the claims were false but also the specific indications that the US government knew them to be false..?
I was 30 and 32. I just listened to the weapons inspectors. I wasn't surprised at all when all of Hussein's bluster was about putting on a domestic show of opposition and not appearing weak, apparently I understand dictators better than the CIA.
Also when Rice was testifying that if Hussein had HEU that he was 9 months away from a nuclear device I knew she was lying without lying, because I'm probably 9 months away from a (crude) nuclear device if you give me enough HEU (and let me buy some chemicals to make explosives).
The yellowcake nonsense was also clearly nonsense in real-time, and Iraq had nothing to do with 9/11 because Hussein would have put to death any Salafists he could find.
I also was old enough then to remember this guy explaining why invading Iraq was a bad idea:
And fast-forward to today and Michael R. Gordon who put forward the argument in the NYT that Iraq was building a nuclear bomb (the "aluminum tubes") is the same journalist who wrote the sick Wuhan lab workers piece in the WSJ (which once again only quoted "intelligence sources say..." and was otherwise fact-free). When someone is getting you very, very angry at a foreign power you should question why (Democrats would do well to look at all the hype around Russia and all the nothing being done about the Trump administration by Biden).
Basically, a role model for people NOT to role model to. Being a yes sir man with very little self opinions and assertions aren't exactly what we want our kids to aspire to.
The only reason we knew who Colin Powell was is because he lied about My Lai. Lying about Iraq was the crowning achievement of a lifetime of being the kindly, authoritative black face parroting deceptive establishment narratives to the public.
This is your reminder that being assigned to cover up the My Lai massacre was the thing that really jumpstarted Powell's career. His 2003 UN speech was part and parcel of what his career was built on.
The NY Times and Washington Post also refused to publish the My Lai massacre before an unknown at the time freelance journalist Seymour Hersh broke the story in the western press more than a year after. There are also a great visuals of the massacre in the Ken Burns documentary Vietnam War.
Two major national news press outlets — The New York Times and The Washington Post, received some tips with partial information but did not act on them.
Ridenhour called Seymour Hersh on 22 October 1969. The freelance investigative journalist conducted an independent inquiry, and published to break the wall of silence that was surrounding the Mỹ Lai massacre. Hersh initially tried to sell the story to Life and Look magazines; both turned it down. Hersh went to the small, Washington-based Dispatch News Service, which sent it to fifty major American newspapers; thirty accepted it for publication.[157] New York Times reporter Henry Kamm investigated further and found several survivors of the Mỹ Lai massacre in Sou
I find it interesting that you frame fighting in Vietnam as something admiral. I can understand why those drafted against their will may have chose the option but surely the most admiral thing to do would have been to refuse and suffer the consequences?
> That's a rare career for ANY American, let alone a black one.
I had to do an image search of him because until now, I didn't think of him as "black". He's certainly mixed race, which would make him black and white. Is it usual in USA to call people black if they kinda look black?
Edit: according to Wikipedia, his ancestry is mixed Scottish and African, parents immigrants from Jamaica. He was raised in South Bronx, so he's culturally black even if he doesn't look that black.
“Culturally black” is the only kind of black there is. That’s why if you look even a little black you end living the black experience, because that’s how people approach you.
Let's also not forget that he was not alone to push for the war. For younger people out there, the New York Times, of all media sources, was warmongering from Day 1.
Not just the NYT. Every major news org, including right-wing radio shows, were beating the drums of war. If you were against the war effort, like I was, you were called "anti-American".
From what I can remember, the notable exception was Knight Ridder¹ who drew a lot of flak for investigating the fabricated stories being used to justify attacking Iraq.
In Ireland, the major media outlets accepted (mostly, uncritically) the claims of the neo-cons (I don’t remember them treating seriously the reports of UN weapons inspectors who were actually on the ground in Iraq). The only dissenting voice I remember in the mainstream media was Robert Fisk, writing for the British Independent.
There is a comedy skit in the Dave Chappelle show called the Racial Draft where the “whites” draft Colin Powell and Condolezza Rice as one of their own:
Original title: "Colin Powell, military leader and first Black US secretary of state, dies after complications from Covid-19"
From the article:
> "We have lost a remarkable and loving husband, father, grandfather and a great American," they said, noting he was fully vaccinated.
The ongoing high profile, fatal breakthrough Covid-19 cases should not be underestimated. They are to be expected statistically, but taken individually continue to feed into the idea that "vaccines don't work" and conspiracy theories.
With ~90% efficacy, how do you expect that to work when rolling the dice thousands of times?
It's a heck of a lot better than none. And sadly people still don't care to treat Covid seriously, and nowhere near high enough vaccination rates in most places - thus no herd protection yet.
> With ~90% efficacy, how do you expect that to work when rolling the dice thousands of times?
The data shows we are very far from 90% efficacy with the Delta variant.
> in a report released from the Ministry of Health in Israel, the effectiveness of 2 doses of the BNT162b2 (Pfizer-BioNTech) vaccine against preventing COVID-19 infection was reported to be 39%, substantially lower than the trial efficacy of 96%
If you think the mRNA vaccines aren’t the best we can do right now, then why don’t you use that deep knowledge of vaccine development and make one yourself?
> The ongoing high profile, fatal breakthrough Covid-19 cases should not be underestimated. They are to be expected statistically, but taken individually continue to feed into the idea that "vaccines don't work" and conspiracy theories.
It's not expected when the administration and other "health agencies" keep parroting that COVID19 would be over tomorrow if everyone was vaccinated. They are lying just as much.
EDIT: a new publication on this very topic:
"Increases in COVID-19 are unrelated to levels of vaccination across 68 countries and 2947 counties in the United States"
The paper you linked explicitly advocates for increasing vaccination rates. It just says that the effort to vaccinate should be supplemented with hand washing, distancing, and testing.
I see many people here hating on Colin Powell and perhaps there is cause for that. In my opinion though, I will remember him an uncommonly principled man.
Did he have party loyalties? Sure. Did they sometimes conflict with his personal views? Sure. I'll admit that there were some disappointments.
However, his ultimate ability to break with powerful past loyalties that conflicted with his personal views and to speak publicly about this schism makes him a hero in my opinion.
Though he was a staunch republican at the time, there was a brief moment in my life, when members of both political parties hoped he might run for president under their banner. I don't think that can be said of any other modern figure.
The key phrase back then was "anti-American". And if you criticized GW when he was leading those war efforts, you were guilty of treason. At least that was what Dick Cheney said.
What good is frail old man, coming out of the fog of war too late and muttering partial regrets? Does it revive the dead? Rebuild the cities? Heal any wounds or wash toxins from the jungle? The words of the living past to the present are as worthless as the symbolic actions of the left against past injustices, while ignoring the present ones.
> I will remember him an uncommonly principled man...
Might as well say the same of Stalin, Kissinger, Mauo Te sing, ...
He literally lied out his ass his entire career, starting with the report on the 1968 Mai Lai massacre ... where he basically white washed and probably strong-armed the media to cover it up, since nobody would touch it for nearly a year until a journalist just blasted it out to as many newspapers as he possibly could reach and like 50 published it, and then bigger publications followed.
Otherwise we'd maybe never know of the atrocities we committed during vietnam by massacering women and children.
I'd really hate to meet someone you think is an unprincipled man, because honestly I'd hate to meet this guy you think is 'uncommonly principled'.
Americans don't seem to have a problem with war crimes, as long as it's their military who commits them. Even Russia seems more modest in this regard - when they down a passenger airliner, at least they don't pretend it was the right thing to do and don't proudly decorate the perpetrators.
> Reading these comments it seems America has forgiven him... I assure you the rest of the world won't forget...
People working the “defense industry” (you know - making weapons to kill millions of innocent civilians) are just showing up in this thread a lot. This guy is the reason they have their jobs. Colin Powell is a piece of shit to anyone who doesn’t work in that sector. Dude straight up lied and got entire states worth of people murdered all for his own vanity.
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[ 5.0 ms ] story [ 221 ms ] threadIn a multistate network of U.S. hospitals during January–March 2021, receipt of Pfizer-BioNTech or Moderna COVID-19 vaccines was 94% effective against COVID-19 hospitalization among fully vaccinated adults and 64% effective among partially vaccinated adults aged ≥65 years.
> At one point, he became so angry at the lack of adequate sourcing to intelligence claims that he declared: "I'm not reading this. This is bullshit," according to the magazine.
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2003/jun/02/usa.iraq
He did read it in full, of course. And he brought the fake vial of Iraqi anthrax to the presentation, too. A known unknown of known bullshit, I guess.
A lie that probably cost hundreds of thousands of lives (unless, as he also said, they already decided to go to war in which case, he also lied to the UN Security Council about their intent).
What a war criminal.
No doubt that Colin Powell did the wrong thing when he lied to the UN, but let's not throw around the term "war criminal" to mean "someone who did the wrong thing."
> crime against peace, in international law, is "planning, preparation, initiation, or waging of wars of aggression, or a war in violation of international treaties, agreements or assurances, or participation in a common plan or conspiracy for the accomplishment of any of the foregoing".[1] This definition of crimes against peace was first incorporated into the Nuremberg Principles and later included in the United Nations Charter. This definition would play a part in defining aggression as a crime against peace. It can also refer to the core international crimes set out in Rome Statute of the International Criminal Court (genocide, crimes against humanity, war crimes, and the crime of aggression), which adopted crimes negotiated previously in the Draft code of crimes against the peace and security of mankind.
> An important exception to the foregoing are defensive military actions taken under Article 51 of the UN Charter. Such defensive actions are subject to immediate Security Council review, but do not require UN permission to be legal within international law. "Nothing in the present Charter shall impair the inherent right of individual or collective self-defence if an armed attack occurs against a Member of the United Nations." (UN Charter, Article 51) The Security Council will determine if the action is legally the "right of individual or collective self-defence", or it may appoint another UN organ to do this.
Meaning that defensive wars are OK. Conspiring against the peace, aka waging a war of aggression, is not. Which is why the Allies fighting against the Axis aren't war criminals for being in the war, but for their actions there ( unrestricted submarine warfare, the Laconia incident, the bombings of civilian targets including Nuremberg, etc.). The Axis' war crimes including them starting the wars ( against Poland, Soviet Union, Greece, Yugoslavia, etc.) and their despicable behaviour in them ( Holocaust, treatment of civilians and POWs, bombing of civilian targets, etc).
> Powell's chief role was to garner international support for a multi-national coalition to mount the invasion. To this end, Powell addressed a plenary session of the United Nations Security Council on February 5, 2003, to argue in favor of military action. Citing numerous anonymous Iraqi defectors, Powell asserted that "there can be no doubt that Saddam Hussein has biological weapons and the capability to rapidly produce more, many more." Powell also stated that there was "no doubt in my mind" that Saddam was working to obtain key components to produce nuclear weapons.[61]
It's hard to deny he worked hard to justify an illegal war of aggression, which, as we've established is a war crime.
Here are 4 arguments, drawn from 10 seconds of Googling, put forward for trying Bush and other members of his administration. The usual names are here - Cheney, Rumsfeld, Tenet:
https://trialinternational.org/latest-post/criminal-complain...
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2008/jul/08/usa.wa...
https://www.thedailybeast.com/the-play-putting-george-w-bush...
https://www.salon.com/2014/12/20/put_the_evil_bastards_on_tr...
And here's a "tribunal" in Malaysia who actually did convict Bush and Blair in absentia:
https://www.aljazeera.com/opinions/2011/11/28/kuala-lumpur-t...
Notably absent from all these perp lists? Colin Powell.
That's pretty much the definition of crimes against peace.
This is very sad news. I personally disagreed with many of his actions, especially the Iraq/WMD story, but even so I had a lot of respect for him.
If Powell is the one responsible, are you absolving Donald Rumsfeld and more importantly Dick Cheney of responsibility? How about the join houses of congress and the US press. Do they all get absolved of responsibility because Powell gave a speech at the UN?
The US was going to war and though he did not like it, Powell was tasked with speaking to the UN about it. Did he know some of what he said was not sustained by facts, or even that they were lies? Sure and he regretted it the rest of his days.
The important point is, Powell at the UN or not, the US was going to war. Laying all the deaths on him is completely scapegoating a fine man and thus excusing the true Neocon powerbrokers who are ultimately responsible.
No, obviously not.
"Did he know some of what he said was not sustained by facts, or even that they were lies?"
If he didn't know all the facts perhaps he should have had the moral fortitude to not beat the drums to a war machine that resulted in so many innocent deaths
Nope, responsibility is not exclusive. All of them bear undiluted responsibility for their actions and the deliberate and forseeable consequences. Two people collaborating in a murder aren't each half-murderers, they are both unqualified, unmitigated murderers.
He knew it was all BS and I knew when I was watching him live.
But that doesn't mean we have to let our sense of morality hold nobody culpable, as if everyone is part of a firing squad and you can't prove who had the blank. Merely signing up for the firing squad shows that you intended to kill, and the responsibility for the death falls on all the people in the squad (as well as all the people who organized it and decided to put a particular prisoner in front of it, etc.), not none of them.
"The US" was only going to war in Iraq because a lot of people arranged things so that it could happen. It's probably true that if any one person decided not to participate, it would still have happened. But if enough people decided not to participate, it wouldn't. And we saw clearly in the last months of the previous presidency that one high-ranking individual can certainly make things a lot more difficult for a president who wants to wage war and that more generally "resistance inside the administration" can be at least partly effective.
I think if we're going to say that an illegal war happened, that people lost their lives because of it, and that it would have been good and moral to try to stop the war, we also need to say that it was bad and immoral to go along with making it happen.
It's true what they say - success has many fathers, but failure is an orphan.
While this is true, you're not allowed to criticize the flawlessly angelic Intelligence Community on HN.
Holding up the CIA as a bastion of virtue whilst denouncing the public faces of our war crimes is the best way to maintain your karma here. When Tony Blair passes, be sure to dance on his grave too, because the GCHQ puppetmasters did absolutely nothing wrong.
It's always best for one's personal reputation to shoot the messenger, not the man behind the curtain.
You’re joking, right? The CIA is shit on all the time. It’s a fucking joke just like most other state run agencies that are all self-interested and don’t actually look out for the public good.
The CIA is responsible for huge amounts of horrible shit across the entire world. Constantly instilling puppet dictators and destabilizing countries for generations now - all for the glory of US capitalism and imperialism.
Doesn’t mean Colin Powell is absolved either. Everyone involved is to blame. Even the voters.
Intel agencies do have the problem that if they go off the rails, there's not many paths to reform outside of direct involvement. I also strongly suspect that they're doing some terrible and unnecessary things to this day (e.g. still ruining lives in a protracted battle with Marx's ghost) and need reform, but that's really the strongest claim I can make.
Someone else could have been the messenger, and Powell could have also resigned in protest and become a whistleblower.
Instead he lied, deceived the public, and unequivocally supported the wars.
Suppose he fled the US for some neutral country, resigned his position, and made a public announcement that he knew that the case for war was fraudulent and that the international community had an obligation to stop the US. What would have happened?
Suppose he simply resigned to spend more time with his family the night before his speech to the UN.
Suppose he did not decide (as he did in real life) that he was going to support the president in waging war without the support of the UN, and he told the world as much.
Suppose he insisted on having more time to review the material himself before making the speech to the UN.
There were a number of times where he could have changed the course of history. Yes, it would have come at significant personal cost to himself and perhaps significant embarrassment of America on the world stage. If you're unwilling to do that for a raise, sure, that seems reasonable; if you're unwilling to do that to prevent tens of thousands of deaths, you are absolutely morally culpable for those deaths.
The invasion of Iraq on false premises was itself a war crime, and the killings of Iraqi soldiers was just as immoral as killing civilians. Quoting one of the rulings at Nuremberg: "War is essentially an evil thing. Its consequences are not confined to the belligerent states alone, but affect the whole world. To initiate a war of aggression, therefore, is not only an international crime; it is the supreme international crime differing only from other war crimes in that it contains within itself the accumulated evil of the whole."
But in principle, since 1945, no one can evade personal responsibility for a clearly unlawful act by pointing to superior orders.
Really though, this is a stupid comparison. People generally remember the Nuremberg trials in the context of the Holocaust -- genocide, slave labor, and all the horror that accompanied it. Colin Powell did nothing remotely close to any of that, and while there is plenty of criticism to throw at the US for the invasion of Iraq there was no genocide, no ethnic cleansing, no slave labor camps, and a dozen US soldiers were thrown in prison by the US for having tortured and humiliated prisoners under their command.
> Operating partly under the dictates of the old prize rules, the U-boat commander, Korvettenkapitän Werner Hartenstein, immediately commenced rescue operations. U-156 broadcast her position on open radio channels to all Allied powers nearby, and were joined by the crews of several other U-boats in the vicinity.
>[...] En route, the U-boat was spotted by a B-24 Liberator bomber of the US Army Air Forces. The aircrew, having reported the U-boat's location, intentions and the presence of survivors, were then ordered to attack the sub.
>[...] The commanders of the Kriegsmarine were quickly issued the Laconia Order by Grand Admiral Karl Dönitz, which specifically forbade any such attempt and ushered in unrestricted submarine warfare for the remainder of the war.
>[...] During the later Nuremberg trials, a prosecutor attempted to cite the Laconia Order as proof of war crimes by Dönitz and his submariners. The ploy backfired and caused much embarrassment to the United States after the incident's full report had emerged.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Laconia_incident
It's also specifically not about genocide vs non-genocide but about legal vs. illegal orders. Just because you represent the US of A you cannot lie to the whole world to start a war. I mean, you can as evidenced by Powell, but a lot of people will spit on your grave for that.
Powell had a hard choice, yet life often puts us in such situations. He should have resigned, in my view. If he did not, he shares in the responsibility for what was done.
[1] https://dnipogo.org/john-r-boyd/to-be-or-to-do/
(Feel free to downvote, downvote is used for disagreement on HN these days.)
This is a silly argument.
I wouldn't even know where to start. This is such an obviously illogical argument. I mean, man, c'mon.
Iran-Iraq War and Post-Gulf War 1 sanctions were each worse for Iraq than the 2003 invasion (by far). The various problems with the occupation (which mostly fall on Bremer/CPA and GWB/Cheney) were probably within an order of magnitude of Iran-Iraq and sanctions, maybe even directly comparable. Rise of ISIS (also a separate thing) and general sectarian violence as also bad at that level.
It's hard to tell how far back the causality chain you should go. A simple "kill Saddam, put any reasonable other person in, don't extensively reconstruct the government, GTFO" was what I was assuming would happen in 2003, which probably would have been net-positive for Iraqis. If you are bundling "invasion in 2003" with CPA + sectarianism + ISIS, then they're collectively highly net-negative for Iraqis, but I don't think they were necessarily linked in 2003.
I still would have opposed it as a US person (because it was a distraction from Afghanistan, which ALSO should have been concluded in late 2001 vs turned into a 20 year quagmire...)
Colin Powell has a decent place in my memory for his work in the 1990s and before, but he definitely spent his reputational capital in lying to UN, even if it didn't ultimately influence the course of action. I could certainly agree with him perhaps even overdrawing that account in total.
No matter how bad Saddam was, invading was a bad solution.
Well, citizens of Iraq tend to disagree with you.
https://www.businessinsider.com/heres-what-life-in-iraq-was-...
Not to mention all the destruction of priceless monuments that the war brought about: https://www.jstor.org/stable/24590678
A story of single person is too little evidence to claim it for all citizens of Iraq or even for majority of them.
Now internet is more or less available in Iraq.
Instead, he didn’t. What a waste of an exceptional career.
>Imagine if he had resigned in protest at the decision to push for the invasion of Iraq. He would now be hailed as a hero around the world.
Nowhere in the above reply about Donahue was there an implication that people shouldn't protest, or that the virtue of their actions are based on whether those actions keep them in the limelight.
DC is a town that rewards failing upwards.
Would that include President Obama?
but that's only because Powell lead the charge with the false narrative.
That said, of course he should have.
Textbooks a century from now will include his name. It could have been in a positive light, but now his name will be forever tarnished.
A good number of them partially because of his actions.
I dont understand why the American news media neglected to report on that.
Another interesting observation: Halliburton ran the supply chain for both the Vietnam war and the Gulf wars.
Not alot of sympathy from me for that guy.
Yes you read that correctly: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Halliburton
What surprised me and I noticed then when Donald Rumsfeld died. Both Iraqi and Afghanistan have nearly doubled their populations since 2001:
https://www.worldometers.info/world-population/iraq-populati...
https://www.worldometers.info/world-population/afghanistan-p...
I wonder if that was partly resulting from the aid both of them got after the US invasions? Or just general population trends in Middle East countries? From my quick study it appears they have higher population growth than surrounding countries.
First printed in the August 13, 1989, issue of Parade magazine,[41] these are Colin Powell's 13 Rules of Leadership.[42][43]
(c)WikipediaIt was for the people in Afghanistan and Iraq.
> Don't let adverse facts stand in the way of a good decision.
That one certainly didn't age well.
"Don't let adverse facts stand in the way of a good decision." So predetermine a decision is "good", then ignore facts to the contrary? Is this what we saw on display at the UN?
Ignoring "adverse facts" seems to me to be one step away from simply adopting "alternative facts". Turns out it wasn't just one step away - it was a mere one administration away!
He joined the Army in the 1950s, served through 2 tours in Vietnam, and made it all the way to Chairman of the Joint Chiefs by the end of the 1980s, leading the military through Operation Desert Storm and the post-Soviet era. That's a rare career for ANY American, let alone a black one.
But all that went "poof!" after his shameful performance at the UN in 2003. Agreed that he should have resigned in protest instead. What an ignoble reputational end to an otherwise amazing role model. RIP Sir.
As to "company man" ... Watch "Mars Attacks!" for the best portrayal of Colin Powell to hit the big screen.
I still don't understand how a person who tried to cover up (in the most laughably inept manner) the massacre of civilians by the US Army didn't spend the rest of his life as a pariah, let alone get positive press in the media for decades. Then add in his lying to the UN to start a war and you wonder if there's no crime that can't be forgiven as long as that person supports the powers that be.
I think those arguing that way were praising a faithful servant to any master, with no morals or principle of his own. as if thats a good thing to be. I hope im wrong and just failed to understand them.
I'll have you know that William Calley Jr served three-and-a-half years under house arrest.
Did you see any other black men doing the same thing?
You realize when he was tasked with looking into one of the worst US war crimes in recent history he said it couldn't have happened because the Vietnamese and US soldiers are like BFF's. Worst coverup in history, yet his loyalty was rewarded.
Nothing. They just had different interests: his to promote his career and feed the imperial machine, theirs to end war.
>If you’re not even 20, that outcome might not have been obvious. But if you served two tours in Vietnam and are in your 50s, you should know better
If you care about the country/justice/etc, which is a big if in politics.
The first had broad public support in both parties and in the public. ... over 90%. As well as support from NATO, the EU, and many other nations as it was an operation to get Osama Bin Laden after 9/11.
The invasion of Iraq was far more controversial and motivated by oil politics.
They are completely different animals.
> The first had broad public support in both parties and in the public. ... over 90%
Certainly. But that is exactly what leaders are for: Good leaders worth mourning transform knowledge and sage wisdom into actions that should sometimes run counter to popular public will, and do not always bow under public pressure. Good leaders guide their people away from tragic error, at times when popular opinion would lead the population into the abyss, like it did in 2001.
If your conception of leadership is people who at all times merely execute the public will, then what you have are actually automata. Why bother with human leaders at all, then? We could just automate government to follow public opinion based on mass polling.
Staying there for 20 years, on the other hand, including after killing Osama Bin Laden on the other hand... That probably had more to do with having US soldiers on both the Chinese and Iranian borders. ...which is also probably why they both quietly supported the insurgency with Pakistan.
False: Afghanistan offered twice to give up Bin Laden, and Bush refused even to negotiate with them: https://www.theguardian.com/world/2001/oct/14/afghanistan.te...
The Afghan War allowed Bin Laden to escape to Pakistan and live for over a decade in safety and comfort.
https://news.gallup.com/poll/8038/seventytwo-percent-america...
72% would be a blow out in any election.
> "His discussion on the war with Iraq is where I most disagreed with Mr. Safire. He spoke almost exclusively in terms of logistics and not potential realities. To him Iraq was a threat pure and simple and the United States had the obligation, the right, and the capability to neutralize that threat, with or without the UN. He offered troop estimates from potential allies in Turkey and the UK, and the explanations of the military superiority of the US as if anyone in the audience was wondering if the US had the means to militarily incapacitate Iraq."
And the concluding sentence:
> "Safire said quite effortlessly that Saddam is a threat that must be neutralized at all costs, but he doesn’t think the costs will be all that great. If he and Bush are wrong it will be one of the greatest political blunders in recent history."
Everyone knew that Iraq was a war of W's choosing and was mostly motivated by the influence of Cheney and Rumsfeld. The doves were uniformly against war as anything but a last recourse, and the idea of starting one on shaky pretenses was abhorrent to us. What we didn't know ahead of time was that the pretenses were even thinner than we imagined and there weren't in fact WMDs, which made the whole thing all the more farcical and tragic.
The rhetoric had changed from WMDs to regime change just before the invasion of Iraq.
Also the character assasination of Kofi Annan (and stories on his son) by Western media at the time for an illegal war (according to the UN rules) was amazing.
The famous John Bolton “Libya model” of disarmament comment comes to mind.
I think that affected everyone's expectations about the invasions of Iraq and Afghanistan. I was cynical about our motivations and our ability to accomplish anything with the invasions in 2001 and 2003, and was opposed to anything more than punitive action against Al Qaeda in Afghanistan, but still I did not foresee the scope of what happened. I thought there was no way an American administration could get suckered into the same kind of conflict, led on by the same chronic overpromising from generals. They would know that the generals would never tell the truth about what they could accomplish by military means. They would know a majority of the society would be bitterly polarized against us as foreign invaders. They would know the inherent difficulty of what they were trying to do. They would know they weren't being told the truth about the situation on the ground. They wouldn't make the mistake of accepting unrealistic definitions of victory.
That's probably what Colin Powell was counting on. Instead, we made all the same mistakes over again, and looking back we see the continuity of Vietnam and Afghanistan, with the Gulf War just an anomalous blip in between.
All I can say is that I thought about Desert Storm when I wrote my original comment. I may have been 7 or whatever, but I did grow up in the period after Desert Storm and I remember clearly how infallible American military might was thought to be in popular opinion.
> That's probably what Colin Powell was counting on.
God knows. Why would you distance Powell from the other "generals would never tell the truth"? I'm not sure I would.
That's a fair question. My first reason was that Powell was in the State Department under W, and the State Department has a more skeptical attitude towards our military capabilities than the military itself does. My second reason, which may be wrong-headed, was that I assumed that the military tendency to misrepresent situations in an optimistic way comes from their desire to do the job. I.e., they say fighting will succeed because it's their job and they want to do it, and then when it isn't going well, they say it's going great because they want to prove that they can do it. Just like a developer downplays the complexity of a challenging project because they're excited about tackling it, and when they get in over their head, they won't admit it because they don't want the project cancelled before they can complete it, no matter how long it takes. (Like that, except with killing.) Since Colin Powell wouldn't be responsible for directing the invasions as a general, I didn't think he would be influenced by that aspect.
EDIT: I think in retrospect what I didn't understand about the Gulf War was that some people viscerally loathed the lessons of Vietnam, hated the idea that the U.S. military could be "defeated," and chose to interpret the Gulf War not as a vindication of applying the lessons of Vietnam, but as proof that the lessons of Vietnam no longer applied. Your comment about the infallibility of American military might reminded me of that.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/April_Glaspie
[0] https://www.berkeley.edu/news/media/releases/2004/03/18_blix...
Rhetorical question?
WRT Iraq, it was public knowledge that:
a) Iraq had nothing to do with 9/11, indeed Iraq and al Qaeda were idealogical opponents.
b) Iraq had no "weapons of mass destruction"; cite Hans Blix, others.
c) Iraqi leader Hussein had completely capitulated, meaning GWB had effectively won without firing a single shot.
d) Bush Admin and their sources were lying and didn't care that every one knew they were lying.
WRT Afghanistan, I don't readily recall what intelligence failures were publicly known at the time. Complicity of Pakistan's ISI. Allowing bin Laden to escape. The tar pit of dealing with Taliban, the misc war lords of the Northern Alliance.
Many objected to Bush Admin's focus on Iraq at the expense of the Afghanistan effort.
Many more objected to Bush Admin's violation of the Powell Doctrine, in both Afghanistan and Iraq.
Many pointed out the advocates for invading Iraq, mostly the neo-cons (aka chickenhawks), simply wanted war, regime change, and so forth. They'd said as much for over a decade. They seized the crisis of 9/11 to enact their plans. It was all very audacious and unapologetic.
> Many pointed out the advocates for invading Iraq, mostly the neo-cons
Don’t forget Biden who ultimately co signed the act.
So tired of this idea that powerful people are free of responsibility for their actions. Biden VOTED FOR THE ACT which everyone knew was bullshit and hundreds of thousands of innocent people died.
That's irrelevant; distinguishing between distinctly different acts is not absolving either of liability; in fact, I explicitly noted the basis of moral liability for each of the distinguished acts.
I think that overstates the case. There was no good proof they did have those weapons, and a lot of stuff was fabricated or blown out of proportion to support their having them, but there was also a lot of reason to suspect they had them (including that we/our allies had supplied them to Saddam the past!...plus prior use against the Kurds and Shia). I think the consensus opinion now is that Saddam was trying to make others (especially within Iraq) believe he had a viable WMD capability, but that he didn't have an active program at the time of invasion.
Nothing.
What they knew that Colin Powell also knew was that Colin Powell was lying. Many of the lies weer debunked, in near real time, by the major press (and/or UN weapons inspectors), not just showing that the claims were false but also the specific indications that the US government knew them to be false..?
Also when Rice was testifying that if Hussein had HEU that he was 9 months away from a nuclear device I knew she was lying without lying, because I'm probably 9 months away from a (crude) nuclear device if you give me enough HEU (and let me buy some chemicals to make explosives).
The yellowcake nonsense was also clearly nonsense in real-time, and Iraq had nothing to do with 9/11 because Hussein would have put to death any Salafists he could find.
I also was old enough then to remember this guy explaining why invading Iraq was a bad idea:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pT7Ik_X1HU0
And fast-forward to today and Michael R. Gordon who put forward the argument in the NYT that Iraq was building a nuclear bomb (the "aluminum tubes") is the same journalist who wrote the sick Wuhan lab workers piece in the WSJ (which once again only quoted "intelligence sources say..." and was otherwise fact-free). When someone is getting you very, very angry at a foreign power you should question why (Democrats would do well to look at all the hype around Russia and all the nothing being done about the Trump administration by Biden).
Reference: http://www.consortiumnews.com/archive/colin3.html
Edited to add: he also appears to have lied under oath about his knowledge of the Iran-Contra affair.
Ref: https://consortiumnews.com/2000/121900b.html
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mỹ_Lai_massacre#Media_coverage
Two major national news press outlets — The New York Times and The Washington Post, received some tips with partial information but did not act on them.
Ridenhour called Seymour Hersh on 22 October 1969. The freelance investigative journalist conducted an independent inquiry, and published to break the wall of silence that was surrounding the Mỹ Lai massacre. Hersh initially tried to sell the story to Life and Look magazines; both turned it down. Hersh went to the small, Washington-based Dispatch News Service, which sent it to fifty major American newspapers; thirty accepted it for publication.[157] New York Times reporter Henry Kamm investigated further and found several survivors of the Mỹ Lai massacre in Sou
I had to do an image search of him because until now, I didn't think of him as "black". He's certainly mixed race, which would make him black and white. Is it usual in USA to call people black if they kinda look black?
Edit: according to Wikipedia, his ancestry is mixed Scottish and African, parents immigrants from Jamaica. He was raised in South Bronx, so he's culturally black even if he doesn't look that black.
I am sure he hasn't profited from any Military contract, or the influence he had from the office he occupied.
Thank you for putting up a black banner for Mr. Powell. Very appropriate.
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
In Ireland, the major media outlets accepted (mostly, uncritically) the claims of the neo-cons (I don’t remember them treating seriously the reports of UN weapons inspectors who were actually on the ground in Iraq). The only dissenting voice I remember in the mainstream media was Robert Fisk, writing for the British Independent.
¹ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Knight_Ridder#Iraq_War
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=2z3wUD3AZg4
https://www.sun-sentinel.com/news/fl-xpm-2004-02-24-04022301...
From the article:
> "We have lost a remarkable and loving husband, father, grandfather and a great American," they said, noting he was fully vaccinated.
The ongoing high profile, fatal breakthrough Covid-19 cases should not be underestimated. They are to be expected statistically, but taken individually continue to feed into the idea that "vaccines don't work" and conspiracy theories.
I expect better. I expect a vaccine that would have saved Colin's life.
It's a heck of a lot better than none. And sadly people still don't care to treat Covid seriously, and nowhere near high enough vaccination rates in most places - thus no herd protection yet.
The data shows we are very far from 90% efficacy with the Delta variant.
> in a report released from the Ministry of Health in Israel, the effectiveness of 2 doses of the BNT162b2 (Pfizer-BioNTech) vaccine against preventing COVID-19 infection was reported to be 39%, substantially lower than the trial efficacy of 96%
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC8481107/#CR6
It's not expected when the administration and other "health agencies" keep parroting that COVID19 would be over tomorrow if everyone was vaccinated. They are lying just as much.
EDIT: a new publication on this very topic:
"Increases in COVID-19 are unrelated to levels of vaccination across 68 countries and 2947 counties in the United States"
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC8481107/
I will not grieve for a war criminal.
Did he have party loyalties? Sure. Did they sometimes conflict with his personal views? Sure. I'll admit that there were some disappointments.
However, his ultimate ability to break with powerful past loyalties that conflicted with his personal views and to speak publicly about this schism makes him a hero in my opinion.
Though he was a staunch republican at the time, there was a brief moment in my life, when members of both political parties hoped he might run for president under their banner. I don't think that can be said of any other modern figure.
Those against war are considered extreme and fringe
Might as well say the same of Stalin, Kissinger, Mauo Te sing, ...
He literally lied out his ass his entire career, starting with the report on the 1968 Mai Lai massacre ... where he basically white washed and probably strong-armed the media to cover it up, since nobody would touch it for nearly a year until a journalist just blasted it out to as many newspapers as he possibly could reach and like 50 published it, and then bigger publications followed.
Otherwise we'd maybe never know of the atrocities we committed during vietnam by massacering women and children.
I'd really hate to meet someone you think is an unprincipled man, because honestly I'd hate to meet this guy you think is 'uncommonly principled'.
Reading these comments it seems America has forgiven him... I assure you the rest of the world won't forget...
People working the “defense industry” (you know - making weapons to kill millions of innocent civilians) are just showing up in this thread a lot. This guy is the reason they have their jobs. Colin Powell is a piece of shit to anyone who doesn’t work in that sector. Dude straight up lied and got entire states worth of people murdered all for his own vanity.