On January 21, 1991, the US bombed the only factory that produced baby formula in all of Iraq. Shortly after, Colin Powell dismissed the attack: “It is not an infant formula factory…It was a biological weapons facility, of that we are sure.” A Tweet by Human Rights Watch @queeralamode Anti-imperialist producing content for @MintPressNews.

In direct refutation of this portrayal is the fact that relations between Americal soldiers and the Vietnamese people are excellent. A statement by Colin Powel on Dec. 13, 1968,  when asked about a complaint, saying that American soldiers “without provocation or justification shoot at the people themselves.”, by Specialist Fourth Class Tom Glen referring to incidents like the My Lai massacre that were taking place in, then, Major Powell’s command.

Secretary Colin Powell was an incredible American. An independent thinker and a barrier breaker, he dedicated his life to defending our nation and always showed the world the best of who we are. @SecondGentleman and I send our deepest condolences to his family. A Tweet by Vice President Kamala Harris @VPUnited States government official Vice President of the United States. Wife to the first @SecondGentleman. Momala. Auntie. Fighting for the people.

Do I contradict myself?
Very well then I contradict myself,
(I am large, I contain multitudes.) Walt Whitman

Poor Colin Powell, he seems like a decent guy that just fell in with the wrong crowd, and then, when it wasn’t quite too late, he seems to have redeemed himself. Like John McCain, he was a Republican that turned on – maybe it is more accurate to say was repulsed by – Donald Trump. Both of them became beloved by the Democrats because of that, but Powell even more so. He was a Black trailblazer and that helped, the first – and so far the only – Black Chairman of the Joint Chiefs and the first Black Secretary of State. He also fits very much into the inside the Beltway Washington mold of a thoughtful man, he was handsome, well mannered, and charismatic. He spoke in a calm, measured, voice and spread calm in chaotic situations.

He was also a big contributor to the breakdown of our faith in our government. First, in the US Army in Vietnam and then in the “They are building weapons of mass destruction.” crowd. He was often the only Black guy in a room full of powerful White guys, White guys that not only wanted their own way but, no mattered what, wanted the story told their way and he, maybe reluctantly, was willing to deceive to do that.

Everybody plays? acts? I don’t, know the right term exactly, performs, maybe, toward what is being tested. Toward the company goal, the organization’s goal because that is what is being tested. In the mid-twenty-teens, Volkswagen had the goal of becoming the biggest car manufacturer in the world (an easy metric to measure). What mattered were sales and, big surprise, people were willing to cheat to increase those sales. In Vietnam, the United States Army’s goal was to win, a much harder metric to measure. As Wikipedia put it, For search and destroy operations, as the objective was not to hold territory or secure populations, victory was assessed by having a higher enemy body count. That led to counting killed civilians as killed enemy combatants, and that led, eventually, to the United States Army doing more things it didn’t want to be public. The grunts were doing the actual war crimes but it was the leaders of those grunts that were doing the actual war crime hiding and lying about the grunts activities.

Colin Powell served two tours of duty in Vietnam in that Army, first as a Capitan advising South Vietnamese commanders then as a Major on a General’s staff, and he learned that to get ahead, it was best to go along. Whistleblowers, most especially Black whistleblowers, do not become generals, they become outcasts. I have no idea how hard it was for Powell to learn those lessons but he did learn them and took the lesson of going along to get ahead with him when he came into the elder George Bush’s Administration and then into Bush the Younger’s administration as Secretary of State. He was a man who would do as he was told and sometimes he was told to lie.

I don’t want to give the impression that lying to satisfy his bosses was all that defines Powell, it wasn’t. He was a genuine war hero having risked his life to save several people from a downed helicopter. In the chaotic battles of Vietnam he also learned that we need more than technological superiority to win wars, he learned we also need numerical superiority. It was a lesson that, as Chief of the Joint Chiefs he practiced but it was also a lesson the military and both the Bush Obama administrations soon forgot.

Poor Colin Powell, I don’t think he lived up to his own high standards. May he rest in peace.