America will miss the wise counsel of General Colin Powell

News Letter editorial of Tuesday October 19 2021:
News Letter editorialNews Letter editorial
News Letter editorial

Colin Powell was, just as Tony Blair says, a “towering figure” in public life.

The American military and political leader symbolised the rise of African Americans to positions of prominence in the US, after three centuries from the mid 1600s when they mostly had difficult lives at the lowest tiers of society.

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Born in the late 1930s, Mr Powell was a Vietnam veteran who became a general and the first black chair of the joint chiefs of staff.

His political moderation earned him much respect and admiration in the white conservative classes of America, whose support is generally key to political success. For much of the 1990s he was talked of enthusiastically as the likely first African American president, but for various reasons, including concern for his personal safety, he never ran for office.

Meanwhile, Mr Powell was an inspiration to young black Americans, giving talks to them on how they too could achieve success in the States.

His career however was tainted by the 2003 Iraq war, about which he was privately unenthusiastic, but with which he was inextricably linked after his pivotal but inaccurate evidence to the UN about Saddam Hussein’s weapon stashes.

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Mr Powell had been promoted to US secretary of state, America’s foreign affairs minister, in the peacetime of early 2001 by the then newly (and controversially) elected Republican Party president, George W Bush. But every aspect of American domestic and overseas policy was thrown into turmoil by the terror attacks on US soil of September 11 that year.

From that point he often seemed a loyal, but unhappy, member of the Bush administration.

In these times of bitter social division in the States, and support for extremist groups such as Black Lives Matter, the US will miss the wise counsel of the pragmatic Mr Powell, a thoughtful and hard-working man who knew so much about the successes and hardships of American life.

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