Colin Powell Dead at 84

Andrew Donaldson

Born and raised in West Virginia, Andrew has been the Managing Editor of Ordinary Times since 2018, is a widely published opinion writer, and appears in media, radio, and occasionally as a talking head on TV. He can usually be found misspelling/misusing words on Twitter@four4thefire. Andrew is the host of Heard Tell podcast. Subscribe to Andrew'sHeard Tell Substack for free here:

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10 Responses

  1. Philip H says:

    Secretary Powell served his country in many roles with honor and distinction. The one stain – which he acknowledged often afterwards – was his full throated defense of a weak contrived “intelligence” brief on WMDs before we invaded Iraq. I still don’t know if he ever really recovered in public perception, but he tried to make it right often in the after years. And his autobiography is still a good read.

    May he rest in peace.Report

    • Chris in reply to Philip H says:

      That’s one really big stain. And it’s not the only one. His military career was covered in stains.

      May he spend a separate eternity in hell for each of the millions of lives his lies ended or irreversibly altered.Report

      • Chip Daniels in reply to Chris says:

        I always think of that line from Apocalypse Now: “Convicted of murder…sh!t, that’s like handing out speeding tickets at the Indy 500.”Report

  2. Pinky says:

    He always seemed like the kind of guy who comes off well in Woodward’s books, where a guy like Schwarzkopf ends up forgotten. I’d say the real blot on his record was the way he played the media game. But for his service, he deserves honor. RIP.Report

  3. J_A says:

    Though not going to express myself as bluntly as Chris did above, I, too, am very unwilling to give Powell anything near a pass for his “stain”.

    When on February 5, 2003 Colin Powell addressed the United Nations, asserting that there was “no doubt in my mind” that Saddam was working to obtain key components to produce nuclear weapons, he was either willingly and knowingly giving his full support to what he should know it was, charitably, a massive exaggeration of the information available, or, less charitably, a blatant lie.

    And if he didn’t know it, either he was the victim of a convoluted plan of the White House to dupe him into standing in front of the UN, to cravenly exploit the respect he commanded those days, or he, lazily or cowardly, decided he didn’t really want to ask questions and, as they say today, do his own research. If the former, his silence after finding out he had been tricked and used, instead of denouncing the lies and those that lied to him and the world, speaks volumes about him, . If the latter, well, really lazy and coward before the fact is hardly better than lazy and coward after the fact.

    So Chris is right that Colin Powell has a lot of Iraqi ,and American, and coalition, blood in his hands, and whatever lame attempts he made afterwards to claim that he was not really responsible for his words did not impress meReport

  4. North says:

    I must, reluctantly, agree with Chris and J_A. One’s reputation doesn’t easily recover from midwifing easily the most cataclysmic foreign policy decision for the US since ‘Nam.

    And I say that with a certain trembling because I can’t honestly say for certain that if I’d been old enough and on the internet enough in the early aughts to write down my opinion that I wouldn’t have supported the Iraq invasion. I loathed Bush W so I’d like to think I’d have opposed it but I don’t remember feeling very exercised in opposition to it and I certainly wasn’t opposed to Afghanistan before of Libya afterwards and both those also ended up being in error.Report

  5. Jaybird says:

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  6. Jaybird says:

    From Public Enemy:

    Report

  7. Colin Powell became a brigadier because the military realized it didn’t have nearly enough black generals, searched for colonels who had been overlooked, found him, and promoted him. Powell, who’d benefited from Affirmative Action, was a strong proponent of it, as unpopular as that was in GOP circles.

    So, say what you will about him, he was no Clarence Thomas.Report