|
Article Excerpt
As Texas Governor George W. Bush moved toward the presidency in the late 1990s, public opinion polls regularly revealed that Colin Powell not only was better known and liked than Bush but also ranked among the most admired of all Americans. When the United States invaded Iraq in March 2003, the polls again showed that Americans continued to admire and trust Powell, now their secretary of state. Twenty months later, the president forced Powell to resign. By then, November 2004, the secretary of state's gilded reputation had been badly tarnished by the terrible course of the bloody conflict in Iraq and the role he played before the war in justifying the invasion.
It is not one of the happier chapters in American biography but one of the most instructive. The story began in 1937 when Powell was born in New York City's Bronx neighborhood to parents who had left Jamaica to find opportunities in the city's teeming garment district. Colin had no desire to follow his father into the clothing industry. Resembling many immigrants' children, he went to the City College of New York (CCNY), an inexpensive but a demanding and remarkably successful institution. Powell was little more than a mediocre student, majoring for vague reasons in geology, until he discovered the Reserve Officers Training Corps (ROTC) program at CCNY. He quickly took to its order, hierarchy, and physical and mental demands. By his graduation, the six-foot-one-inch second-generation immigrant, on his way to an adult weight of 200 pounds, was an outstanding student commander of his 1,000-strong ROTC unit.
ROTC required a further three-year commitment beyond graduation. When that term was up in 1961, Powell quickly reenlisted. "I was in a profession that would allow me to go as far as my talents would take me," he recalled, "and for a black, no other avenue in American society offered so much opportunity" (1) That same year, he met (and in 1962 married) Alma Johnson, a gifted woman from an upper-class Birmingham, Alabama African American family. Shortly after the wedding, Powell went to South Vietnam. President John F. Kennedy was escalating, as secretly as possible, the U.S. war effort against the North Vietnamese communist government, which was attempting to unite the country. Powell loved the experience. He believed that only the best and brightest were being sent at this point to wage a stealth war against the North and that his assignment signaled that the army saw him, in his words, as one of the "comers, walk-on water types being groomed for bright futures." (2) He was wounded but remained through his one-year term. In 1968, he returned for a second tour. He now was one of the half million U.S. troops trying to win an unwinable, fourteen-year-long U.S. war. He received a medal for heroism when, despite a broken ankle, he dragged three soldiers, including a general, from a downed helicopter.
The U.S. retreat from Vietnam between 1973 and the communist victory in 1975 was the lowest point in modern U.S. military history to that point. Powell was one of the young officers who determined to learn from the experience. He obtained a master's degree in business, then became a commander in one of the most fabled U.S. military units, the 101st Airborne Division. By the early 1980s, his record had attracted invitations to serve in several important positions in Washington. Powell had established himself as that rare person who somehow understood both the civilian and the military sides of the Capitol. Even as a low-ranking Pentagon official, he also proved to be a quick learner when it came to moving the usually slow bureaucracies. In 1984, during the presidency of Ronald Reagan, now Major-General Powell became an assistant to Secretary of Defense Caspar Weinberger. The secretary was about to issue a declaration that proved to be historic and, for Powell, life shaping.
Since the U.S. military had been forced to leave Vietnam in the mid-1970s, its officers had conducted quiet, intensive studies to discover what had gone wrong. Powell played a small role in some of these discussions but a more important part in shaping Weinberger's thinking. A Middle East crisis that destroyed hundreds of American lives led the secretary of defense to decide it was time to announce the results of the nearly decade-long military studies. The crisis had developed in 1982 when Israel invaded neighboring Lebanon. Syria, the dominant power in Lebanon, and Syria's allies kept the war escalating brutally into 1983. Then the Reagan administration, over the strong dissent of Weinberger and the American military, decided to send in 1,800 troops to help stabilize the ever more dangerous situation. In October 1983, a truck bomb exploded in the encampment killing 241 Americans--the worst single-day U.S. military death toll since the last days of World War II.
Since those 1945 days, Washington officials had largely fixed their attention on the Cold War against the Soviet Union. But beginning in the late 1970s and early 1980s, the Middle East was moving to the forefront of U.S. diplomacy. The region had become the center of the world's oil production. The area had also been the center of ongoing conflicts between newly founded (in 1948) Israel and its neighboring Islamic nations. And since the 1950s, it was a region into which U.S. presidents sent their military forces, perhaps all too easily, until 241 of them had been slaughtered in a moment of 1983. In late November 1984, Weinberger responded to this tragedy as well as to the destructive effects of the Vietnam experience on the U.S. military in a Washington speech.
It became known as the Weinberger Doctrine and, later and more famously, as the Powell Doctrine. The secretary of defense began by declaring that the military must no longer be placed in killing fields when there seemed to be no overriding national interest at stake and no intention of fighting to win a complete victory. Weinberger announced that six major tests should be applied before civilian officials blithely deployed men and women into battle.
First, the "engagement" must be "deemed vital to our national interest or that of our allies." Second, U.S. forces should only be sent "with the clear intention of winning." Third, in putting American lives at stake, "we should have clearly defined political and military obligations." Fourth, the size and purpose of the force sent out to fight should be "continually reassessed and adjusted if necessary"--as had clearly not occurred when the situations in Vietnam and Lebanon rapidly changed. Fifth, troops should be assured, before they go abroad to fight and possibly die, that they have "the support of the American people and ... Congress." Finally, and what would become of special importance to Powell over the next twenty years, Weinberger declared that "the commitment of U.S. forces to combat should be a last resort." (3)
American military officials quickly put this doctrine to work in the mid-1980s to counter civilian demands that troops be sent into the maelstrom of Central American revolutions. In 1987, Powell became involved in this struggle--and continued successfully to insist that the troops not be sent--when he became the top deputy in the National Security Council (NSC). Stationed in the White House, the NSC had been created in 1947 so that the president could better coordinate and ensure the carrying out of foreign policy decisions. It was a job for which Powell had immense talent, and later in 1987 he became the first African American to hold the top post, NSC adviser. When George H. W. Bush became president in 1989 and appointed his own NSC staff, Powell notably chose to stay in the military rather than possibly make a small fortune as a civilian. Later that year, the newly promoted four-star general was chosen by Bush over dozens of older generals to the most exalted and powerful military position, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. He now became the first African American to head the U.S. military.
Powell's initial major crisis erupted when President Bush moved to overthrow the Panamanian regime of Manuel Noriega. As a result of a 1977 U.S.-Panama treaty, the great U.S.-built canal linking the Atlantic and Pacific oceans was slowly coming under Panama's control. Bush, however, increasingly condemned Noriega's drug running, violent acts against Americans, and threats against the canal. As the president determined to intervene, it became a test of the Weinberger Doctrine. Powell insisted that the overthrow of Noriega be a quick, overwhelming strike carried out by a force of 20,000 Americans, accompanied by the U.S. Air Force, against a handful of Panamanians who had no air force. In December 1989, the American operation quickly forced Noriega to flee, finally captured him after a series of almost comic failures, and installed a friendlier government. Powell became widely known as the highly articulate general who often explained on television why the operation was going so well.
Along with this not surprising success of the Weinberger Doctrine, the months of 1989-1990 marked another milestone of much greater importance: the collapse of the Soviet Union's East European empire and the rapid ending of the nearly half-century-long Cold War. The Soviet Union itself was enduring sometimes bloody internal division as it headed for its death, finally, on Christmas Day 1991. The United States emerged as the world's unchallenged, supreme power. Indeed, some overly imaginative American observers claimed their nation was nothing less than the most powerful force in world affairs since the Roman Empire of 1900 years before. Despite the ending of the Cold War, moreover, U.S. military budgets remained around the $300 billion mark, or more than the combined military spending of the next twenty most powerful nations.
Powell headed this juggernaut. In 1990, he spectacularly put it to work. The general did so by carefully following the six points of the Weinberger Doctrine as the United States went to war against a most surprising enemy: Saddam Hussein, the unquestioned, brutal ruler of Iraq since 1978. Saddam was a surprising enemy in 1990 because during the previous decade he had been an ally of President Ronald Reagan. Both men and their people had one strong tie: they feared and despised the religious rulers of Iran who had overthrown the U.S.-supported government in 1979 and taken more than 50 Americans hostage. Saddam, an ambitious secular Sunni Muslim, had quickly declared war in 1980 on neighboring Iran, now a fervently religious Shiia...
|
