Former US Secretary of State Colin Powell dies
COLIN Powell, who served Democratic and Republican presidents in war and peace but whose sterling reputation was forever stained when he went before the UN and made faulty claims to justify the US war in Iraq, has died of Covid-19 complications aged 84.
A veteran of the Vietnam War, Mr Powell rose to the rank of four-star 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.
But his legacy was forever marred when, in 2003, he went before the UN Security Council as secretary of state and made the case for US war against Iraq.
He cited faulty information claiming Saddam Hussein had secretly stashed away weapons of mass destruction.
Iraq’s claims that it had no such weapons represented “a web of lies”, he told the world body.
In an announcement on social media, Mr Powell’s family said he had been fully vaccinated.
“We have lost a remarkable and loving husband, father and grandfather and a great American,” the family said.
Mr Powell had been treated at Walter Reed National Medical Centre in Bethesda, Maryland.
Mr Powell was the first US 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 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.
As then president George W. Bush’s first secretary of state, Mr Powell led a State Department that was dubious of the military and intelligence communities’ conviction that Saddam Hussein possessed or was developing weapons of mass destruction.
And yet, despite his reservations, he 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 Mr Powell’s career, although he had removed some elements that he deemed to have been based on poor intelligence assessments.
Mr Bush said on Monday that he and former first lady Laura Bush were “deeply saddened” by Mr Powell’s death.
“He was a great public servant” and “widely respected at home and abroad,” Mr Bush said.
“And most important, Colin was a family man and a friend.
“Laura and I send Alma and their children our sincere condolences as they remember the life of a great man.”