I cannot think of Colin Powell without thinking of my own father, who, like Powell, served in the US military. My dad was only a generation older than Powell, but that gap was the difference between serving in a segregated or integrated military. A second world war veteran, my midwestern father was stationed at a southern military base in a segregated marine corps.
In those days, a Black man could be demoted for failing to show “proper deference” to white officers, a fate that befell my father, who I never saw defer to anyone. My father never spoke of his time in the military, seemingly indifferent to it, not ashamed exactly, but not proud either. I suspect that he, like many Jim Crow era Black men, enlisted because of the GI Bill, which paid for college and then law school, degrees that would have otherwise been out of reach for my father.
Yes, the federal government paid for my father’s education, but at the same time, it enforced restrictive covenants that barred him and other Black people from federally subsidized suburban housing. Nonetheless, my father’s enlistment was a ticket into the middle class, even as it was a Faustian bargain my father made to get a tiny sliver of the American pie. But he never forgot, was never allowed to forget, that the benefits he reaped derived from and reinforced the racist apartheid system in which he lived. He knew as do many Black people that serving in the military meant becoming disposable fodder, useful to the military as cooks, janitors or human shields. It meant fighting for a country that does not value Black life.
Powell, too, made his own Faustian bargains, and in the end, he also served as fodder for US imperial ambitions destined to fail. He did this, most famously, in his 2003 speech to the UN security council in which he claimed that Iraq’s leader, Saddam Hussein, had weapons of mass destruction.
Powell’s televised testimony is widely credited with turning US public opinion in favor of invading Iraq, though when polled at the time, a majority of Black people continued to question the war’s necessity and morality. Powell’s position, the result of a civil rights movement in which he did not participate, lent cover to the Bush administration, as it was intended to do, a fact Powell would later lament. He squandered his political capital and popularity to shroud a pointless, endless war in the cloak of moral certitude.
However, 2003 was not the first time that Powell justified US imperial ambitions. In fact, he rose to prominence in 1968 when, as a young major, he investigated the My Lai massacre, a mass murder of hundreds of unarmed South Vietnamese suspected of aiding the Vietcong. As his superiors no doubt hoped, Powell could not substantiate eyewitness accounts, concluding in his report that relations between the US military and the South Vietnamese people were “excellent”.
Later, as he would with his US testimony, Powell would regret his part in covering up My Lai, which was widely condemned as a war crime. In 1989, Powell was again at the center of an imperial adventure. This time the setting was Panama, and the pretext was deposing that country’s leader, Manuel Noriega, who was wanted in the US on drug trafficking charges. Powell, then chairman of the joint chiefs of staff, used the invasion, which he named “Just Cause”, as a laboratory for developing the Powell Doctrine, which dictated that the US only go to war to protect strategic interests and once engaged, must have a decisive plan for winning and a clear exit strategy. Ironically, the second Iraq war, the war for which Powell will long be remembered, followed none of these principles.
By the time the first Iraq war occurred, Powell had perfected his doctrine. As the war’s chief military strategist, Powell spoke at a televised press conference before the war began to explain how US military would prosecute the war swiftly and decisively, avoiding a bloody and extended defeat like the one in Vietnam.
As he would 12 years later at the UN, Powell explained in his calm, authoritative tone why the war was both necessary and ethical. Like the invasion of Panama, US involvement in the first Iraq war lasted less than two months. Bombarding Iraq from the air and on the ground, the US military killed thousands of Iraqis while suffering only 300 casualties. This was the fulfillment of Powell’s boast: “First, we’re going to cut [the Iraqi army] off, and then we’re going to kill it.” The war’s swift and successful conclusion made Powell so popular with both Democrats and Republicans that he briefly considered a run for the 1996 presidency.
Again and again throughout his storied rise, Powell made Faustian bargains, publicly endorsing military excursions, including both Iraq wars, that he privately admitted were risky enterprises. Whether Powell knew the falseness of the intel on which his security council testimony rested, whether he genuinely failed to find evidence of the My Lai massacre or whether he regretted the first Iraq war’s toll in blood and treasure, Powell, like the military man he was, never broke ranks.
The price for inclusion and advancement in the military and the country it represents required of Powell that he follow orders, even when they were illegal, unethical, or simply strategically wrongheaded. Unlike many Black military men before him who resisted in big and small ways, Powell behaved just as the white leaders before him had, waging war when and where he was told to do so.
Though his trajectory made him a man of many firsts, his Blackness never seemed to influence the military or professional decisions Powell made. The price of admission to the “American dream” was conformity and obedience. It was deference to a country and a white supremacist society that made of him an exception, if not the rule of racial equality.
Cynthia A Young is associate professor of African American studies, English and women’s, gender and sexuality studies at Pennsylvania State University