"I was never kinder to the old man than during the whole week before I killed him"

~~ Edgar Allen Poe, "The Tell-Tale Heart"

 

 

The Good Soldier

 

Colin Luther Powell is a good soldier.  Few know just how good, because Powell is a walking dichotomy -- very adept at showing only his illuminated side to moonstruck supporters.  Americans who so generously bestow political capital upon Powell are either unaware of, or do not believe, the deadly murkiness of his dark side.  They see Powell striding confidently across the international landscape -- compassionate, moderate, diplomatic -- issuing gentle, tongue-clucking "warnings" to those who resist the gift of U.S. hegemony.  They fail to note the chaos and the tangle of bodies that inevitably pile up behind Powell in whatever country he approaches with outstretched hand...

 

Americans are not only blind, they appear to be deaf to those who chronicle Powell's evolution from a cunning eager-to-please young officer on a military fast track to a cold-blooded unrepentant shock-and-awe executioner.  What Powell has done -- is doing -- for those he serves is public record.   Why he would do these things was put into powerful perspective last year by singer Harry Belafonte, who pointed out that Powell, whose initial stance on policies is to be admired, always "sells out" when pressured.

 

"There's an old saying," Belafonte said, "In the days of slavery, there were those slaves who lived on the plantation and there were those slaves that lived in the house.  You got the privilege of living in the house if you served the master...exactly the way the master intended to have you serve him."

 

In the ensuing media furor, Belafonte, an avid United Nations supporter, refused to back down. In fact, he was eager to put his remarks into perspective -- "The idea that you work in the house of the master is almost in itself its own opportunity to do some mischief and make a difference, but when you are in that place and you help perpetuate the master's policy that perpetuates oppression and pain for many others, then something has to be said about it," Belafonte said.  "And the master in this instance, of course, was the president of the United States."

 

Powell harrumphed that Belafonte's slave reference was an "unfortunate" throwback to another place and another time and he was proud to be serving his nation and his president.   Unfortunately for the nation, George W. Bush is president, and it appears that Powell is increasingly unable to separate the two, making "honor" as well as "truth"  an early casualty of war...

 

Other Places, Other Times

 

In 1996, investigative journalists Robert Parry and Norman Solomon teamed up to produce a penetrating and meticulously researched account of Powell's sometimes frenzied activity in the corridors and tunnels of his master's house for most of his military life.  Even in a tight, "just the facts, ma'am" format, the finished product, published in Consortium News, was so voluminous it comprised a five-part series. 

 
That critical series was republished in December 2000 after Powell -- once compelled by a straight-shootin' sense of integrity to defy the Uniform Code of Military Justice and publicly blast his commander-in-chief about gays in the military -- stood by silently at the Bush ranch in Crawford, Texas, while 90-percent of Florida's African-American "Gore" voters were disenfranchised.  A scant four days later, Powell was rewarded for his silence with the coveted Secretary of State slot.

Read the Parry/Solomon series.  Slog through the steaming fetid excrement that comprises Powell's smarmy sense of honor as he makes easy choices in covering up Vietnam atrocities, including the hundreds of unarmed civilians slaughtered in the My Lai massacre.  Recoil at his involvement in funding Nicaraguan contra terrorists by illegally routing missiles through Israel to Iran.  Chuckle at how he covers his own ass by first setting up Oliver North to take the fall for the Iran-Contra mess, and even his boss and mentor, Secretary of Defense Caspar Weinberger, if it came to that.  Count the lies with which this soldier padded his career -- in letters, reports, interviews and testimony before Congress.  How many, you ask?  Well, it depends upon how many times he opened his mouth -- and he isn't through talking yet.

Our descent into Vietnam more than three decades ago left an indelible mark on this country, and the mere mention of the "V" word even today evokes a kaleidoscope of emotions about the brutal, needless slaughter of 57,000 U.S. soldiers and 2,000,000 Vietnamese soldiers and civilians.  I cannot speak to Powell's emotions, but as a minimum, it appears that his experiences in Vietnam allowed him to dehumanize his enemy and to use overwhelming force to destroy anything in his path -- civilians and combatants alike.  His experiences allowed him to adopt the murderous Weinberger Doctrine; his ego compelled him to co-opt it and to refine it into what is widely touted today as the "Powell Doctrine."

In his autobiography, My American Journey, Powell coldly describes the deliberate destruction of "the enemy," or villagers who might sympathize with the Viet Cong: "We burned the thatched huts, starting the blaze with Ronson and Zippo lighters… Why were we torching houses and destroying crops? Ho Chi Minh had said people were like the sea in which his guerillas swam. We tried to solve the problem by making the whole sea uninhabitable. In the hard logic of war, what difference does it make if you shot your enemy or starved him to death?"

In April 2002, shortly after the Jenin refugee camp massacre  in Palestine's West Bank, Powell took a turn around the site and returned to testify to Congress -- "I've seen no evidence of mass graves...no evidence that would suggest a massacre took place...Clearly people died in Jenin -- people who were terrorists (emphasis added)died in Jenin - and in the prosecution of that battle innocent lives may well have been lost."  

Powell was not asked why not one single home in Jenin was left standing; he did not address the problems he must have had maneuvering through the rubble, nor did he give any indication that the pungent, stifling smell of rotting corpses bothered him at all.  Anyway, that was then and this is now.

Although Powell says Vietnam is "another place, another time," his unrepentant callous disregard for the lives of innocent civilians is legend, and continues in this place and in this time.   When a reporter asked him in April 1991 about Iraqi military and civilian deaths -- Powell shrugged with stunning indifference -- "That's not really a number I'm terribly interested in..."  Now, 12 years later, we are back in Iraq where bodies of the dehumanized stack up on city streets -- litter the desert landscape.  But their number is not too terribly interesting because -- as you know -- we don't do body counts.