Opinion

Powell, the man who acknowledged his mistake for triggering the Iraq war

photo_camera Colin Powell and George Bush

The second Gulf War would have taken place without Colin Powell at the helm of US diplomacy. President George W. Bush, with the help of his vice-president Dick Cheney, had practically decided to finish the job that his father had failed to complete in Iraq by stopping General Schwarzkopf's triumphal march towards Baghdad and allowing Saddam Hussein to continue as president of Iraq, albeit under heavy restrictions and very close supervision.

But on 5 February 2003, it was former four-star General Colin Powell's turn to explain himself before the UN rostrum, and to demonstrate unequivocally that Saddam was back on track and threatening world security with his arsenal of weapons of mass destruction. This alleged arsenal, the cause of the inferno of fire that descended on Iraq, could never be found despite multiple and exhaustive verifications by the specialists of the International Atomic Energy Agency. The reports on which Powell had based his justificatory discourse came from the CIA, which firmly assured him that the evidence was incontrovertible. President Bush's staunchest allies at the time - British Prime Minister Tony Blair, Spanish Prime Minister José María Aznar and even Portuguese Prime Minister José Manuel Durao Barroso, the host of the four-way meeting in the Azores, whose photograph would also haunt its protagonists forever.

Bush Jr. promised to reduce Iraq to the stone age and he certainly delivered, so that the Mesopotamian country has known no respite since then, shaken, as soon as the US president's "mission accomplished" was pronounced, by incessant terrorist attacks, ongoing hostility between the Sunni and Shia communities, the penetration of Iran and the rise of jihadism, embodied in the establishment of Daesh and its bloody actions. That war, moreover, caused a great rift in the Muslim world, while opening a deep chasm between it and the West. The consequences of that war are still lingering, and the chain of events that have contributed to changing the balance of power in the Middle East, and thus in global geopolitics. 

A stain for life

As the falsehood of the CIA reports used to justify the war came to light, General Colin Powell increasingly felt a growing sense of guilt, so much so that in a lengthy television interview in 2005 he admitted the "stain" that the mistake had put on his reputation. "An indelible stain, because I was the one who made that presentation on behalf of the United States to the whole world, so it will forever be an integral part of the record of my personal and professional life," the first black general to become Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff of the US Armed Forces said contritely. 

His impeccable record of service, his patriotism and the sincerity of his analysis, even in admitting that grave error, earned him the respect not only of US institutions but also of the international community. A highly influential adviser to defence secretaries such as Caspar Weinberger and Frank Carlucci, he was also national security adviser to President Ronald Reagan.

But the weight of that "stain" caused him to move away from the Republican Party and change his voting preferences to the Democratic Party, whose presidential candidates he would publicly support from 2008 onwards: Barack Obama, Hillary Clinton and Joe Biden, successively. He advised the latter to rescue another African American, Lloyd Austin, for the Department of Defence, who was caught in Tbilisi, the capital of Georgia, when the news of his mentor's death caught him by surprise. 

Powell, who was 84 and suffering from multiple myeloma, had been initiated into the Vietnam War. Since then, he had always weighed, with an equanimity appreciated by all his superiors, the great tragedies that the world has experienced and in which his country has always, in one way or another, been involved.