Even in death, Colin Powell could not shake the biggest mistake of his life

Opinion: Colin Powell made an unqualified mistake when he argued to invade Iraq. But there are still lessons to learn from his decision, even now.

Phil Boas
Arizona Republic

For a son of Jamaican immigrants who became one of the most powerful men in the world – U.S. secretary of state, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, national security adviser – Colin Powell could not shake the biggest mistake of his life.

On the week of his passing, his mistake, his argument for the 2003 invasion of Iraq, was a key part of virtually every global and U.S. story. In many national newspapers it was an entire sidebar to the obituary.

World leaders reacted to his death tactfully, referring to his mistake even as they expressed sorrow at his passing. Their judgement of the Iraq War had cemented years ago.

Invading Iraq was an unqualified disaster

The invasion of Iraq has been called “one of the great crimes of this or any age” (Matt Taibbi, Rolling Stone) and America’s “greatest foreign policy blunder in a generation,” (Reid Smith & Danny Sjursen, Real Clear Politics).

David Frum, then a White House speechwriter who famously described Iraq as part of an “Axis of Evil,” would look back in 2019 and write in The Atlantic, “We were ignorant, arrogant, and unprepared, and we unleashed human suffering that did no good for anyone: not for Americans, not for Iraqis, not for the region.”

To this day, the key architects of that war, former U.S. President George W. Bush and former British Prime Minister Tony Blair, say they stand by their decision to invade. But no one believes them.

Given what we know now, they would not dare do it again. They would not and could not. Their people would never let them.

So the verdict on the Iraq War is airtight. It was an unqualified disaster, the mistake that Colin Powell would carry to his grave.

I supported the invasion of Iraq. I feel no shame in admitting it. Saddam Hussein was defying UN weapons inspectors, who then believed – as did virtually every major intelligence agency in the world – that Saddam was concealing weapons of mass destruction and was brazen enough to use them.

The Israelis who live in the region and would feel the consequences of any war there, supported invasion. The Mossad, their CIA, assured that the intelligence was sound. Saddam had WMD.

I, too, was on the wrong side of history

The advanced world had a decision to make. Do we start enforcing the rules of international order after the Sept. 11 attacks or do we continue the status quo?

That was an important question, and there were many people ducking it, hedging their bets. Still there were others, and I remember best my former colleague Kathleen Ingley, then an Arizona Republic editorial writer, who precisely argued that the United States cannot begin to understand what it was getting into – the Middle East and its sectarian rivalries.

History would prove her right. The invasion opened a Pandora’s box of bloody hell, the post-invasion violence of mostly Sunni and Shia slaughtering one another. Some 5,000 American troops would die as would hundreds of thousands of Iraqis.

I think it is important to acknowledge I was on the wrong side of history, because it is essential to admit our mistakes. When the evidence is abundant that we erred, follow the evidence.

Most of all, learn from it.

Powell failed to foresee the problems with war

Colin Powell's big mistake was his inability to foresee the problems invasion and occupation would unleash.

Colin Powell’s big mistake was his inability to foresee the problems invasion and occupation would unleash. The Middle East was a cauldron of tribal and religious rivalries held in check the same way Josip Broz Tito held together the Balkans in the former Yugoslavia. With an iron first.

When you remove a strongman, be it through war or the arteriosclerosis that eventually claimed Tito, a violent aftermath is almost inevitable.

Americans were foolish to believe we could manage that.

It’s easy enough to call the decision-makers of the time idiots and be done with it, but that is to learn nothing. Future generations need to understand why we invaded and occupied Iraq so we don't repeat the blunder.

One of the big lessons is an old one, one humankind never seems to grasp: That war, itself, is a failure. When you enter a war, any war, you have already failed. You’ve surrendered control. And you’ve put many innocent lives at risk.

America is most proud of its victory in World War II, what Chicago writer and broadcaster Studs Terkel called “The Good War,” while conveniently forgetting we ended that war killing more than a hundred-thousand Japanese men, women and children with atomic bombs in Hiroshima and Nagasaki, condemning tens of thousands of survivors to a lifetime of horrors from radiation sickness.

Was it worth it?

History tells us yes. We believed the Axis powers left us no choice with their visions of regional and world dominance. But if we could know in 1935 that German and Japanese belligerence would lead to the greatest cataclysm in history, the destruction of an estimated 40 million to 80 million souls and the destruction of many of the biggest cities in Western Europe and Asia, would we have found a way to stop it?

It was a mistake born of the trauma of Sept. 11

The Iraq War was born of the trauma of Sept. 11. Americans were shaken to their core by shadowy enemies who proved they could bring down the twin citadels of the American financial system in New York, plant a plane in the Pentagon and nearly fly another into either the White House or the U.S. Capitol.

A massive intelligence failure, one that failed to detect the signals that al-Qaida was planning a mega-strike on the American homeland, would lead to an even greater intelligence failure – the certainty that Saddam Hussein was harboring terror weapons that could kill on a more grand scale.

After 9/11 the Bush White House concluded that the Sept. 11 attacks were a failure of the American imagination, a failure to appreciate that our enemies in the Middle East could strike with maximum pain in our own backyard.

Having learned that lesson, the Bush White House decided we had grown too comfortable enriching petrostates in the Arab World as we looked away from atrocities committed against their peoples. Continue to ignore that oppression and we would court more furies from the Middle East, more 9/11s.

That came to be called the Bush Doctrine, and it’s why we went to war. We knew Saddam had no serious connection to 9/11, but we did not want to fail to imagine that an enemy such as Saddam could turn the world’s worst weapons on us.

Some good things have happened since then

In judging history, journalists and historians have long pointed to one of its anecdotes that almost certainly never happened. In 1971, then-U.S. Secretary of State Henry Kissinger supposedly asked Chinese Premier Zhou Enlai what he believed was the impact of the 1789 French Revolution. Zhou is said to have responded, “It’s too early to say.”

In fact, Zhou was likely referring to the 1968 Paris riots.

The development of the Middle East into advanced societies is a long game. We may be looking at centuries before the region establishes the same human rights enjoyed in Europe and in many parts of Asia and the Americas.

In the late 20th century and early 21st century the United States and its allies violently shook the table in the Middle East and Subcontinent, first driving Iraq out of Kuwait in the Gulf War, the Taliban out of Afghanistan and then through regime change in Saddam’s Iraq.

Will that ultimately lead to good? It’s too early to say. But amid the carnage of the last three decades some good things have happened.

There have been no more large-scale terror strikes on the United States.

What Powell's biggest mistake may have been

“After decades of conflict, Iraq today has a relatively stable government, and the car bombings, suicide attacks and death squads have subsided,” the Associated Press reported last month.

Al-Qaida has disintegrated into a bunch of militias in disparate places with no central command or ideology,” writes Fareed Zakaria in the Washington Post.

“Something has changed over the past several years,” writes The New York Times’ David Brooks. “The magnetic ideas at the heart of so many of these (radical) movements have lost their luster. If extremists thought they could mobilize Muslim opinion through acts of clarifying violence, they have failed. Across 11 lands in which Pew surveyed Muslims in 2013, a median of only 13% had a favorable opinion of Al Qaida.”

Do these welcome developments vindicate the Iraq War?

No.

That war was predicated on weapons of mass destruction. We found virtually none. Without that pretext that war has no logic.

It may be that Colin Powell’s biggest mistake was not appreciating that the first war he prosecuted against Saddam Hussein, the 1991 Gulf War, so crushed his enemy that it could no longer menace the world.

By 2003, Saddam had reverted to lying that he had WMD, hoping to hold his historic enemy Iran at bay. In so doing, he convinced the world's only superpower to invade him.

Some mistakes are worse than others. 

Saddam hanged for his.

Phil Boas is editorial page editor of The Arizona Republic. He can be reached at 602-444-8292 or phil.boas@arizonarepublic.com.