Date: 2024-07-17 Page is: DBtxt003.php txt00021151
PEOPLE
GENERAL COLIN POWELL DIES AT 84
A former chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, secretary of state and national security adviser, Mr. Powell died on Monday, his family said.
GENERAL COLIN POWELL DIES AT 84
A former chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, secretary of state and national security adviser, Mr. Powell died on Monday, his family said.
Colin L. Powell in 2004. Credit...Doug Mills/The New York Times
Original article: https://www.nytimes.com/2021/10/18/us/politics/colin-powell-dead.html
Burgess COMMENTARY
My recollections of General Colin Powell are very positive largely informed by his service in the military culminating in his leadership role during the Gulf War of 1991 when the USA and allies pushed Iraq out of Kuwait. It is sad that his amazing service was sullied by the Bush 45 administration's Iraq intervention of 2003 when Powell was serving as Secretart of State. The people in the Bush administration that provided the material for his infamous presentation to the UN Security Council did not serve Powell well nor indeed the country. In my rather modest tole in global international development and some work I did in Niger, I seemed to know more about the back story related to the 'yellow cake' being sold to Iraq than the experts sitting in Washington. Why Niger was negotiating to sell 'yellow cake' to Iraq was very little to do with Iraq's need for fissile material but much more to do with the need for Niger to get some money to run the country. Years before the Franch had developed uranium mines in Niger and built processing facilities to produce 'yellow cake' to serve the French nuclear power program. When these facilities were built there was a worldwide shortage of nuclear fuel for power stations, and this French investment was economically sound. But decades later, nuclear fuel for power stations was abundant and the price below production cost. At this point the French very generously 'donated' the mines and processing facilities to the Government of Niger ... who instantly were now the owners of an industry that could do very little but lose money into the future. I don't know how much of this was in the Washington conversation when General Powell was being briefed for his speach to the United Nations. My guess is 'not very much!'
Peter Burgess
By Eric Schmitt
Oct. 18, 2021 Updated 8:38 a.m. ET
Colin L. Powell, who in four decades of public life served as the nation’s top soldier, diplomat and national security adviser, and whose speech at the United Nations in 2003 helped pave the way for the United States to go to war in Iraq, died on Monday. He was 84.
He died of complications from Covid-19, his family said in a statement. He was fully vaccinated and was treated at Walter Reed National Military Medical Center, his family said.
Mr. Powell was a path breaker serving as the country’s first African American national security adviser, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff and secretary of state.
Born in Harlem of Jamaican parents, Mr. Powell grew up in the South Bronx and graduated from City College of New York, joining the Army through R.O.T.C. From a young second lieutenant commissioned in the dawn of a newly desegregated Army, Mr. Powell served two decorated combat tours in Vietnam. He later was national security adviser to President Ronald Reagan at the end of the Cold War, helping negotiate arms treaties and an era of cooperation with the Soviet president, Mikhail Gorbachev.
As chairman of the Joint Chiefs, he was the architect of the invasion of Panama in 1989 and of the Persian Gulf war in 1991 that ousted Saddam Hussein from Kuwait but left him in power in Iraq. Along with then-Defense Secretary Dick Cheney, Mr. Powell reshaped the American Cold War military that stood ready at the Iron Curtain for half a century. In doing so, he stamped the Powell Doctrine on military operations — armed with clear political objectives and public support, use decisive and overwhelming force to defeat enemy forces.
When briefing reporters at the Pentagon at the beginning of the gulf war, Mr. Powell succinctly summed up the military’s strategy to defeat Saddam Hussein’s army: “Our strategy in going after this army is very simple,” he said. “First, we’re going to cut it off, and then we’re going to kill it.”
It was a concept that seemed less suited to the messy conflicts in the Balkans that came later in the 1990s and in combating terrorism in a world transformed after the attacks on Sept. 11, 2001.
By the time he retired from the military in 1993, Mr. Powell was one of the most popular public figures in America.
In an interview with The New York Times in 2007, Mr. Powell analyzed himself: “Powell is a problem-solver. He was taught as a soldier to solve problems. So he has views, but he’s not an ideologue. He has passion but he’s not a fanatic. He’s first and foremost a problem-solver.”
Once retired, Mr. Powell, a lifelong independent while in uniform, was courted as a presidential contender by both Republicans and Democrats, and became America’s most political general since Dwight D. Eisenhower. He wrote a best-selling memoir, “My American Journey,” and flirted with a run for the presidency before deciding in 1995 that campaigning for office wasn’t for him.
He returned to public service in 2001 as secretary of state to President George W. Bush, whose father Mr. Powell had served as chairman of the Joint Chiefs a decade earlier.
But in the Bush administration, Mr. Powell was the odd man out, fighting internally with Vice President Dick Cheney and Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld for the ear of President Bush and foreign policy dominance.
He left at the end of Mr. Bush’s first term under the cloud of an ever-worsening war in Iraq, and growing questions about whether he could have and should have done more to object to it.
A full obituary will follow.
Eric Schmitt is a senior writer who has traveled the world covering terrorism and national security. He was also the Pentagon correspondent. A member of the Times staff since 1983, he has shared three Pulitzer Prizes. @EricSchmittNYT
Colin L. Powell