Former Sec. of State Colin Powell dies
WASHINGTON — Colin Powell, the trailblazing soldier and diplomat whose sterling reputation of service to Republican and Democratic presidents was stained by his faulty claims to justify the 2003 U.S. war in Iraq, died Monday of COVID-19 complications. He was 84.
A veteran of the Vietnam War, Powell spent 35 years in the Army and rose to the rank of four-star general before becoming the first Black chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. His oversight of the U.S. invasion of Kuwait to oust the Iraqi army in 1991 made him a household name, prompting speculation for nearly a decade that he might run for president, a course he ultimately decided against.
Powell instead joined George W. Bush's administration in 2001 as secretary of state, the first Black person to represent the U.S. government on the world stage. His tenure, however, was marred by his 2003 address to the U.N. Security Council in which he cited faulty information to claim that Saddam Hussein had secretly stashed weapons of mass destruction. Such weapons never materialized, and though the Iraqi leader was removed, the war devolved into years of military and humanitarian losses.
In announcing Powell's death, his family said he had been fully vaccinated against the coronavirus. Peggy Cifrino, Powell's longtime aide, said he had also been treated over the past few years for multiple myeloma, a blood cancer that impairs the body's ability to fight infection. Studies have shown that those cancer patients don't get as much protection from the COVID-19 vaccines as healthier people.Flags were ordered lowered at government buildings, including the White House, Pentagon and State Department.Powell's time as secretary of state was largely defined by the aftermath of the Sept. 11, 2001, terror attacks. He was the first American official to publicly blame Osama bin Laden's al-Qaida network. He made a lightning trip to Pakistan to demand that then-Pakistani President Pervez Musharraf cooperate with the United States in going after the Afghanistan-based group, which also had a presence in Pakistan, where bin Laden was later killed.But as Washington's push for war in Iraq deepened, Powell sometimes found himself at odds with other key figures in the Bush administration, including Vice President Dick Cheney and Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld.Powell's State Department was dubious of the military and intelligence communities' conviction that Saddam possessed or was developing weapons of mass destruction. But he presented the administration's case that Saddam posed a major regional and global threat in a strong speech to the U.N. Security Council in February 2003. The following month, Bush gave the go-ahead for the invasion.No child of privilege, Powell often framed his biography as an American success story.“Mine is the story of a black kid of no early promise from an immigrant family of limited means who was raised in the South Bronx,” he wrote in his 1995 autobiography “My American Journey.”When he appeared at the United Nations, even during his Iraq speech, he often reminisced on his childhood in New York City, where he grew up the child of Jamaican immigrants and got one of his first jobs at a Pepsi-Cola bottling plant.
