PROFILE OF A ‘RELUCTANT WARRIOR’

A veteran of the Vietnam War, Powell rose to the rank of fourstar general and in 1989 became the first Black chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. In that role he oversaw the US invasion of Panama and later the US invasion of Kuwait to oust the Iraqi army in 1991.

In the allied effort to help Saudi Arabia and Kuwait defend against Iraq, he developed the so-called Powell Doctrine. It called for using overwhelming force, such as “shock-and-awe” battle tactics, to assure victory and minimize casualties once diplomatic solutions prove unworkable. He styled himself the “reluctant warrior.”

Powell was the first American official to publicly lay the blame for the 9/11 terrorist attacks on Osama bin Laden’s Al Qaida network and made a lightning trip to Pakistan in October, 2001 to demand that then-Pakistani President Pervez Musharraf cooperate with the US in going after the Afghanistan-based group, which also had a presence in Pakistan, where bin Laden was later killed. But his legacy was marred when, in 2003, he went before the UN Security Council as secretary of state and made the case for US war against Iraq at a moment of great international scepticism. He cited faulty information claiming Saddam Hussain had secretly stashed away weapons of mass destruction. As President George W. Bush’s first secretary of state, Powell presented the administration’s case that Saddam indeed posed a major regional and global threat in a speech to the UN Security Council in the run-up to the war. That speech, replete with his display of a vial of what he said could have been a biological weapon, was later derided as a low-point in Powell’s career, although he had removed some elements that he deemed to have been based on poor intelligence assessments. Powell had two other blots on an otherwise lauded record. In the first, he was assigned to investigate the 1968 US massacre at My Lai and found no wrongdoing. And as President Ronald Reagan’s national security adviser, he was part of an administration that illegally traded arms for hostages in what became known as the Iran-Contra scandal. He was not personally implicated in either case.