Colin Powell, dead of COVID-19 complications.
I don’t care that Powell “secretly opposed” or “spoke out against” the illegal invasions after the fact. He went before congress to sell a lie. He knew it was a lie designed to “justify” and invasion. There is no forgiveness nor absolution for that.
An honourable man would have said no. An honourable man would have gone public and said the claims of WMD were a lie. Powell was not an honourable man, he was a participant in war crimes.
Some might call it puerile, but as I heard said about him in 2001:
Colon Bowel went before congress and talked about WMDs.
He passed a lot of wind, but he didn’t produce ****.
Thanks for bringing this up.
I’ve probably got the details all wrong, but I have a very strong memory of him speaking out in favor of invading Iraq, and I believe making a claim along the lines of “there is evidence of weapons of mass destruction, but we can’t reveal the sources or the specifics of that because it would compromise national security ”
And just being surprised that we didn’t even fabricate “evidence” of WMDs, but then again, we didn’t have to, no one cared about the original reasons after it happened…
Exactly.
But if Powell had been honorable when he was in the army in Vietnam, he would not have done the coverup of the My Lai massacre implications, which is what got him on the chain of promotions that positioned him to help Bush cause the deaths of 200,000 innocent civilians etc in Iraq.
The thing about it was that it was pretty obvious at the time that the WMD claim was a lie.
The fact that every other group that inspected Iraq said that there was no sign of WMDs, and that the Bush administration refused to give any evidence, made it pretty clear that they were lying. Especially if you’d been through the Vietnam era, when practically everything the US government said was a lie.
But Congress, regardless of party, and despite the serious questions, rolled over right away and gave the Bush administration everything they asked for.
The problem is that military action has always been pretty popular in the US without regard for whatever justification is brought — or for whether there is any strategic objective.