Monthly Archives: October 2021

By Michael F. Duggan

Shakespeare could have written the script, although parts of the final act are still unclear.  Call it The Tragedy of Colin Powell.

I am an admirer of Colin Powell.  I think of him as one of the most notable American leaders of the past half-century, but I see him as a tragic historical figure for what he might have been and for his legacy.  He was a good and possibly a great man and could have been the George Marshall of the early twenty-first century, if only… 

He certainly had qualities of greatness in him, and the Powell Doctrine (which could just as easily be called the Grant, Eisenhower, or MacArthur Doctrine), which combined with the latest technology, produced magnificent operational results in the Gulf War of 1990-91.¹  At the time, many of us saw Desert Storm as a masterstroke of measured realism, a police action to expel an invader and restore the territorial sovereignty of Kuwait.  More recently it has been called into question as a significant expansion of U.S. involvement in the Middle East.²  It was also a motivation for those who launched the September 11 attacks.

Powell embodied the American Dream and is our patron saint of success by merit. The son of Jamaican parents in the South Bronx, he rode an ROTC scholarship all the way to the Halls of Power. My father, a West Pointer, went through the Army Infantry School with him at Fort Benning. He once observed that even then “everybody knew the sky was the limit for that guy.”

My view of Powell is not set in stone, but I would like to see him as a sensible, moderate realist, soldier-statesman, the “Reluctant Warrior” with two purple hearts whose legacy was forever tarnished by lesser men.  Was his failure in the run up to the Iraq a casualty of the zeal and manipulation of others, the collateral damage of an undeclared war?  Was it an honest mistake?  In my opinion, Powell’s “Pottery Barn” warning of “you break it, you own it” is a better indication of his realism and gives a fairer idea of his doubts surrounding the 2003 invasion and occupation of Iraq.

I see Powell as a tragic figure for two closely-related reasons, but my overall opinion of him is still in flux.  I would hate to think that he was just an attractive, if slick, political operator, like Obama, whose modus operandi was often to split the difference with the stronger voices in the room.  I think he had more integrity and insight than that, but again, I don’t know. Something gnaws at me—something doesn’t seem quiet right about his performance at the United Nations Security Council on February 5, 2003.   

The preponderance of evidence from his long career suggests that he was a realist at heart.  But there is also Colin Powell the charming public speaker who played down differences between himself and former bosses and colleagues.³  When it comes to the Iraq War, being in favor of a diplomatic solution and then being the decisive factor in selling it to the world is a difficult position to explain.  And yet we must reconcile this division between Powell and Realist and Powell the Apologist, the reconciler of irreconcilable positions.  

I was against the invasion and occupation of Iraq from before the start and was not swayed by Powell’s testimony at the United Nations.  I saw it as phony—the antithesis of Adlai Stevenson’s performance at the U.N. that help prevent a war in 1962.  I sided with Kennan and Scowcroft (and Scott Ritter) and saw no evidence that justified an invasion.⁴  Some friends of mine did, if briefly, question their opposition to the invasion because of their faith in Powell.  And Powell’s advocacy gave others in the media and elsewhere the cover to embrace a catastrophic policy.  To me it looked like a cynical stunt exploiting Powell’s nearly universal popularity to sell an unjustified war.  As Powell’s Chief of Staff, Larry Wilkerson, observes:

“That’s how bad I felt about the presentation, which I thought was hokey, circumstantial crap.  And then I realized that, you know, Colin Powell had given it.  He had Mother Teresa poll ratings.  That’s the reason it was so effective, because Colin Powell gave it.  When Colin Powell held up that little thing and said, not in a post-9/11 world… people believed him.  They wouldn’t have believed Dick Cheney.  They wouldn’t have believed George Bush.  They wouldn’t have believed Condi Rice… But they believed Colin Powell.”⁵

Wilkerson believed, not that the evidence presented was necessarily wrong, but that it was circumstantial—inconclusive—and could lead to different interpretations.  It was not a basis for going to war.⁶

Giving Powell the benefit of the doubt, I believe that he is tragic for two reasons:  

1. The fact that he was used to justify the 2003 invasion of Iraq is disturbing.  My reading, and that of other historians, is that during the Bush II administration, he was knuckled-under and outmaneuvered by two of the most brutal and shrewd bureaucratic infighters in U.S. history, Cheney and Rumsfeld.⁷  He was a former soldier who might have felt that he had to follow the orders of the administration in which he served.  And because he was the first African-American secretary, he likely felt that he could not resign in protest, a la William Jennings Bryan.⁸  Both of these things made his actions inevitable at the time.  It was a no-win situation, and he knew it.  And once done, it was final, it led to a failed policy, it could not be undone, and he would always be remembered for it.  Thus a tragic historical figure.
2. A former infantry combat officer who served in Vietnam, Powell was an innovator of an outlook that specifically sought to avoid the kind of war he was used to legitimize. Thus his role as a cabinet member produced results that were diametrically opposed to what he likely saw as his historical importance and in some ways his life’s mission as a military planner and soldier. 

What about the argument that the circumstantial evidence for weapons of mass destruction in Iraq was suggestive and that a majority of people inside government believed that Hussein had such weapons?  Here I don’t know what to believe.  Larry Wilkerson notes that Powell was dubious about the existence of WMD well before the speech at the U.N.⁹  The public line is that Powell preferred a diplomatic solution to the Iraqi invasion of Kuwait, but when one was not forthcoming, and with sufficient reason to believe Hussein could have WMD, he willingly got onboard the military option.  Hmm.  If this is the case, then the performance at the U.N. denotes a colossal failure of judgment by a noteworthy man.  

In literature, the tragic hero is one who is better than most people—one who pushes the limits of human potential—but who is flawed and therefore sympathetic.  Perhaps Powell is a new kind of tragic hero: a person who is better than the prevailing currents of his or her times.  Thus he fails, not because of his own flaws, but those of his milieu and his inability to change them (and a moderate realist in a time of ideologues is bound to be either a nonstarter or else a tragic figure with or without a tragic flaw).  It was not his flaw, but rather a hopelessly flawed administration that failed him.  He was a rational island in a sea of delusion and was inundated by the rising tide of an ill-considered war footing.  At least that it what I would like to think.  

Of course the other possibility also exists: that he made a horrible mistake by making an all-too common assumption about the illusory casus belli of the Iraq War.  Here the great historical observer would have seen through the clutter, noise, and distractions.  At the very least, he would have acted more cautiously given the questionable nature of the evidence.  Failure to do these things would seem to rob him of the title of being a great man, making him even more tragic but also more human, reduced in stature. 

Ultimately, to be considered a great figure, you must get the biggest (and last) things right.  Your career must been seen as ascending.  Churchill had the Dardanelles, and if he had died in 1925 or 1930, he would have been regarded as a failure.  But he also had the Blitz, D-Day, and V-E Day.  Powell had the Gulf War and a speech that sold the Iraq War to the world—a war that resulted in the deaths of tens, perhaps hundreds of thousands of people and in essence handed Iraq to Iran (to be fair, the war would have happened with or without Powell’s speech).  I suspect that we may never know whether his error was imposed on him (or if an exaggerated version of the evidence was sold to him), was the result of his own misjudgment, or some combination of the two.

The question then is the degree to which the contributions of an otherwise impressive career will counterbalance his failure as Secretary of State in peddling the invasion of Iraq.  It is difficult to assess this at this early point.  But from what I know of him, I hope that historians and our people will be kind to the memory of a noteworthy public servant and will remember him more for his Doctrine than a one-off dog-and-pony show at the U.N.

Notes

1. The Powell doctrine may be seen as a military analog to the realism of Kennan and Scowcroft.  Its eight point checklist: 1). Is a vital national security interest threatened? 2). Do we have a clear attainable objective? 3). Have the risks and costs been fully and frankly analyzed? 4). Have all other non-violent policy means been fully exhausted? 5). Is there a plausible exit strategy to avoid endless entanglement?  6).  Have the consequences of our action been fully considered? 7). Is the action supported by the American people? 8). Do we have genuine broad international support. See https://www.atlanticcouncil.org/blogs/new-atlanticist/the-powell-doctrines-wisdom-must-live-on/
2. See Andrew Bacevich, America’s War for the Greater Middle East (New York: Random House, 2016), 133-134.  
3. See Juan Williams’, The History Makers interview “An Evening with Colin Powell,” April 2006.
4. See Brent Scowcroft, “Don’t Attack Saddam,” The Wall Street Journal, August 15, 2002 and Albert Eisele’s interview “George Kennan Speaks Out,” The Hill, September 26, 2002.
5. Larry Wilkerson, War is not about Truth, Justice, and the American Way (New York: Real News Books, 2015), 107.
6. Larry Wilkerson, War is not about Truth, Justice, and the American Way, 111.
7. See Bartholomew Sparrow, The Strategist, Brent Scowcroft and the Call of National Security (New York: Public Affairs, 2015), 531-532.
8. Larry Wilkerson sees Powell’s decision not to resign in more personal terms observing “[i]t’s not his character t quit.  It’s his character to keep going, and to keep trying to change things.  It’s is character to keep cleaning the dog poop off the carpet in the Oval Office.” Wilkerson continues, saying that, although he wrote a letter of resignation immediately after the speech, he stayed with Powell out of loyalty and because he saw his boss as the only plausible counterbalance to Cheney and Rumsfeld in the Bush II White House. Larry Wilkerson, 109-110.
9. Larry Wilkerson, War is not about Truth, Justice, and the American Way, 109.