On Colin Powell

 Powell's death has led to the usual paeans to a prominent life lived largely in the public eye. He was a groundbreaking figure in many ways. However, those hosannas and tributes have been balanced by harsh criticisms for his behavior as a "good soldier." Powell was at least tangentially involved with the My Lai Massacre cover-up. The lessons he said he learned in Vietnam colored his strategy in the First Gulf War, when he strenuously argued against a campaign to Baghdad.

Yet, a little over a decade later, Powell was shilling for the Second Gulf War and giving his tacit approval to the same assault on Baghdad that he had resisted in 1991. Powell's service to the thin gruel of "intelligence" linking Saddam Hussein to WMD is rightly fronted in news stories about his legacy. For all the terrible damage that Donald Trump has done to the civic fabric of this country, George W. Bush's - and by extension Colin Powell's - decision to wage war in Iraq remains so much more damaging in terms of human, financial and moral costs. In fact, the Iraq War was such an unmitigated disaster that even Donald Trump could look at it and describe it thusly. 

Colin Powell represents the same sort of institutional thinking that kept us in Afghanistan long after the mission there had obviously failed. He managed his spectacular rise to Chairman of the JCS to Secretary of State precisely because he was not the sort of guy who rocked the boat.

I don't think Colin Powell was a monster, the way some of the left have characterized him. He was, however, a man who lost his way serving a morally neutral vision of American leadership that in fact abetted a profoundly immoral war. 

Powell said he learned important lessons from Vietnam, but Iraq apparently unlearned those lessons. Hopefully the next generation of military leaders will learn those important lessons and have them stick.