Ricochet is the best place on the internet to discuss the issues of the day, either through commenting on posts or writing your own for our active and dynamic community in a fully moderated environment. In addition, the Ricochet Audio Network offers over 50 original podcasts with new episodes released every day.
Colin Powell, RIP
Colin Powell, former Chairman of the Joint Chiefs and Secretary of State under George W. Bush, has died from complications of Covid-19. He was 84.
Family statement:
We have lost a remarkable and loving husband, father, grandfather and a great American.
We want to thank the medical staff at Walter Reed National Medical Center for their caring treatment.
Powell had been previously diagnosed with multiple myeloma. May he rest in peace.
Published in Healthcare
Chris Christie was the Romney’s Keynote Speaker for the 2012 Convention. No, he did not vote for Obama.
Back to the issue of the post. Thank you Colin Powell for your service to our country. Rest in Peace.
You sound like Bill Kristol, and the war mongers who justified the second gulf war.. Maybe all technically true, but Iraq was contained in a box. I think that’s pretty much acknowledged now.
Yes, that was his recommendation to fail.
I won’t speak ill of the dead so soon after he has passed, so I will otherwise remain mute. Ask me what I think of him in a few weeks.
Says who?
Says the international community based on the chaos that would happen when a power vacuum is created. You would have had wars all over the place. It would have been untenable.
The international community is no authority. You know what makes a nation a leader of the “international community?” Winning wars, especially wars started by another party who happens to be a brutal dictator. We were in the right, showing our might is also good. What we showed again is the counter-legal belief that we are responsible for building up an enemy after we defeat them. And who’s to say we wouldn’t have? A properly defeated Iraq might very well have succeeded in convincing them to behave in the future. There are many, many Iraqis who wanted us to help them.
We don’t “need” the international community. They need us.
Who says it’s because of some authority? It comes down to the responsibility one has as being the leader of the free world. If you go and take down other country’s governments, you have a responsibility to create stability, especially when it came to the powder keg that is the middle east. If you don’t think we had that responsibility, then we fundamentally disagree. The only reason we were there was to maintain stability because of Iraq’s invasion of Kuwait. To leave Iraq without a government would have been even worst. Look at what happened after we took Saddam down in the second war and tried to create a government and then left. It would have been even worse.
Exactly. Powell’s Pithy Pottery Barn Rule must be the worst six words to ever infect a body politic, and certainly inappropriate for the Department of Defense, whose advice to the White House should be “You break it, you break it, you break it!”
Fair enough. I used to think so. Now I no longer do. This goes hand-in-hand with a disdain for any of that adventuresome heigh-ho do-gooderism. We should have a smaller, more lethal, less apologetic, more terrifying military, and a reputation for not taking any guff.
Our DoD should tell the rest of the world, “You break it, you bought the farm.”
Requesit in pace General Powell.
Its sad, its said that he died of covid complications. He was fully vaccinated. Had he the misfortune to die a month ago he would have died of covid. Its even sadder that someone’s obituary has to be politicized to fit the media’s narrative.
Um, you did.
Also, stability in the Middle East is some kind of fantasy so long as “radical” (yeah, yeah, whatever) Muslims main goal is to kill more Jews (and Christians). The Abraham Accords are the closest the world has come to seeing “stability,” but we’d be fools to think of any such agreements as fully reliable and permanent.
Heck, “stability” in Iraq was never going to be a thing as long as there wasn’t “stability” in Iran. They’d recently finished a war between them where half their young men of fighting age perished when we got involved (an exaggeration maybe, maybe not). One of those “too bad both sides can’t lose” situations.
I was referring to a moral authority, not some other nation or institutions. If you don’t believe it would have been immoral to leave Iraq in chaos, then what can I tell you. We have different understandings of moral obligations.
Edit: And I never used the word “authority” when referring to the international community. You made that assumption. Frankly it would have been dishonorable to leave Iraq in a state of chaos. That would have been along the lines of the dishonor of leaving Afghanistan that just happen with Biden. That will be a stain on Biden’s historical record forever.
There was stability with Saddam Hussein after the first gulf war. Not perfect but far from the chaos of after the second.
I am not a neo-conservative in any meaningful fashion. Allowing Saddam Hussien’s regime to exist and corrupt the international community for twelve years from 1991 until 2003 was an imprudent disaster that produced the permanent crisis in the Levant to this day. Every point that produced 9/11, Afghanistan and the necessity of the second invasion of Iraq was Powell’s responsibility. My rule of the use of the US Military is the opposite of the Neo-Conservative. War by America must be an exercise of overwhelming violence of a short duration (under 90 days) with a specific definition of victory and immediate withdrawal of military assets once victory is achieved. Needless to say, but maintaining a garrison anywhere to prop up a friendly regime, nation build or to project American power and influence is completely out of question.
p.s. This has been my opinion since 1991.
I’d rather he promoted the Golden Corral Rule.
Well, we’re going to have to disagree. The second Iraq war produced the destabilized region, not the first, and it was unnecessary. What would you have done, created an Iraqi democracy in 1991? The same destabilized events would have followed.
By the way, that was my “neoconservative” opinion since 1991 too, but the facts of the disaster from the second gulf war changed my mind and my support of neoconservatism.
?
There was stability with Saddam Hussein after the first gulf war. Not perfect but far from the chaos of after the second.
Tell it, Bro- . . . er, Sister!
That’s a positively sick thought.
I don’t know what your background or experience entails, but Iraq is not like Afghanistan. Iraqis were, by and large, educated and had a recent history of living civilized. Had we removed Saddam and and then faced off with Iran and kept them out of Iraq, there is no doubt in my mind that Iraq wouldn’t have thrived on their own. They were on their way until Iran got the nerve to be involved, and then Bush blinked.
Yes I remember Iraq was not the typical Muslim country that had the potential to take democracy. That’s why I bought into the second gulf war. I supported all that. It turned out to be a failure. I was at the position you are a few years ago. I would have been with you in 2002 to go all the way to Iran. But we have botched Iraq and now muffed Afghanistan. What makes you think we had the will to take on that much war? Yeah, militarily we could do it if the country, not just me or you, had the will of a WWII mentality. And it doesn’t. That’s what it would take. Not only that, once we took it over militarily we would have had to establish stability. You can’t just destroy and run. And establishing stability in the Middle East is a fool’s errand. In retrospect with all that has transpired since, I’ve come to the conclusion we did it just right in the first gulf war.
The first gulf war caused 9/11. Our failure to be decisive when we had every reason and ability was flat out wrong. It cleared the way for the disaster in Somalia and convinced Islamic radicals that we are push overs.
Why did we fail in Iraq? Because the Bush dynasty knows very well how to start wars but doesn’t know how to fight them or win them. The American people were behind the war but as soon as they sniffed out that Bush wasn’t going all out to win, their support flagged. Then we institutionalized the military deployments and no one had an incentive to win. We descended into stalemate and that was that.
There has never been a war with better justification and the Bush dynasty screwed it up.
I thought that Iraq was majority Shia and without Saddam to repress them, were bent on controlling the country. The Sunni’s were just 25% of the population and without a strongman would be destroyed by the majority. Remember, the Iraq-Iran war ended in 1988. A peaceful happy ending was not an option for the Sunni’s and Shia’s in an Iraq free-for-all.
Perhaps a bit, but even more, the Shia were controlled by Iran. Had we also destroyed Iran’s ability to interfere (and preferably attacked from both Afghanistan and Iraq), the Iraqi Shia would have been content to remain in peace.
My nephew the astronomer had a graphic on his blog back in the day that showed tanks rolling into Iran from Afghanistan and Iraq. We were positioned to do it. But, in typical Republican timidity, we “forfeited the high ground.” Terrible strategic waste. You didn’t have to be a military expert to see the possibilities.
You’re missing the point there was no Second Gulf War because a cease fire stopped the Gulf War short of the objective. September 11th and the “GWOT” came out of the failure of the United States’ expensive, coddled and protected Military Establishment to destroy our enemies in Somalia and Iraq. The US maintained the goal of regime change and a state of war with Iraq in the region from 1991 until the destruction of the Iraqi regime.
*A ceasefire is a temporary stoppage of a war in which each side agrees with the other to suspend aggressive actions. Historically, the concept existed at least by the time of the Middle Ages when it was known as a ‘truce of God’.
America was at war from 1991 until 2021. Like the intermittent nature of the Hundred Years War, it was thirty years of war because it was not resolved. That failure was due to the leadership of Colin Powell and his ilk as Head of the Joint Chiefs and Secretary of State. He was a failure at every point in the process.