It was Enoch Powell, Colin Powell’s great namesake, who famously observed that all political careers end in failure. To be sure, the late British politician from the West Midlands who became a professor at the age of twenty five did all his best to undo himself in politics.
He courted and cultivated failure with a cruel assiduity that suggested a pact with political suicide. He took extreme positions in a country whose politics is calibrated on moderation and permanent fudge. In the temperate climate of liberality and order, the likely lads and the gentleman who will succeed in politics must wear their hats and opinions lightly.
But last week as Colin Powell succumbed to Covid-19 complications, it would appear that the maxim of his British namesake has come to stand the test of time. The tributes came in equal measures as the diatribes.
Many were so offended by Colin Powell’s complicity in America’s military debacle that they became downright offensive themselves. Some dismissed him as a typical house nigger, lacking in character and cujones when and where it mattered most. It was as if the old wizard from the British Midlands and Birmingham backyard was up to stir things up a bit. Call no political career glorious until the day it ends in glittering obituaries.
Born to Jamaican immigrant parents, Colin Powell was a shining example and classic manifestation of the American dream. The essence of that dream is for talent, hard work and gritty determination to take a person to the highest position in the land without having to cringe or beg his way to stardom. Being of lowly station in origin should not debar or prevent a person from aspiring to the highest office in the land.
Colin Powell was an African American of many firsts. He was the first person of colour to serve as the chairman of the Joint Service Chiefs, the first to serve as National Security Adviser, the first to be appointed Secretary of State and only the second to reach the hallowed rank of a four-star general. He was by all accounts an outstanding military officer and a gifted administrator.
There was a lot about Colin Powell which recall Dwight Eisenhower, another much decorated war time four-star general who went on to become the president of America. Powell’s open genial features spoke to a genuine kindness and compassion which appealed to juniors and subordinates alike while his calm discipline, unaffected sense of gratitude and unalloyed loyalty would have warmed the hearts of his seniors and military superiors.
He was made for the army while the army seemed to have been made for him. He had no hesitations or reservations whatsoever in joining the army in 1958 upon graduating at the age of twenty one having served as a student cadet with distinction. As he himself was to put it, it was military uniform that gave a distinctive feature and form to what would have been an indistinctive mild-mannered personality.
The military institution swallows up such individuals just as they deeply imbibe and internalize its dominant ethos and worldview. Colin Powell was the quintessential system man. He was not a great disruptor or innovator of genius. Neither was he a military philosopher nor a thinker of note. If he was he could not have risen very far. It is able and competent middlers who stabilize the system and give it its backbone.
In many respects, Colin Powell’s career mirrors the trajectory of his beloved nation in all its outstanding strengths and tragic failings. They have led to the current debacle of the greatest military power the world has seen since the Roman Empire. America was not founded as a warrior-nation but it browbeat itself into becoming one with dire repercussions.
American founding fathers were intellectual mandarins and visionary idealists who thought they were creating a new type of nation-state away from the ashes of feudal Europe. But the intellectual hubris which saw to the creation of this unique nation mutated very soon into a political hubris which made military hubris almost inevitable.
Powered by messianic self-belief and notions of American Exceptionalism which liberated the native genius of people experiencing the exhilarating tonic of untrammelled freedom for the first time, this land of boundless possibilities and immense natural resources carried everything before it in a seemingly unstoppable momentum.
After defeating Great Britain in a revolutionary war of independence, America browbeat the French into relinquishing their North American holding and then expelled the Mexicans from Texas before delivering the sucker punch by overrunning Mexico itself. Meanwhile the Spaniards were humiliated out of Cuba and the Philippines seized from them in a one-sided encounter.
Commodore Perry’s submarine fleet bobbed up on Japanese shores all the way from the west coast of America forcing the outraged oriental islanders into compulsory trading. The Japanese were later to retaliate by obliterating the American naval base in Pearl Harbour at the onset of the Second World War.
America’s rampart and relentless militarism carried everything before it from the nineteenth century up till the middle of the last century. After the Second World War, America emerged as the undisputed master of the world and the greatest military power that has been thrown up in the crucible of western hegemony and domination of the world for almost five centuries.
This was the extant global balance of power by the mid-twentieth century despite the growling and rumbling of a Soviet bear that had smashed its way to the gates of Berlin to terminate Adolf Hitler’s genocidal hallucinations about a so called Aryan racial superiority over the rest of humanity.
But soon thereafter, the wheels began to come off the American locomotive. Other nations and people with alternative histories, alternative cultures and emerging alternative paradigms of war began to tug at the beard of the American lion in a global duel unto death which was to reshape the contours of human history.
First were the Chinese and their notion of human waves assault which almost steamrolled the Americans out of the Korean Peninsula. With their surplus production of men, if not of munitions at that point in their history, the Chinese launched themselves against the American troops with a suicidal ferocity which stunned everybody.
It was to lead to a hastily negotiated armistice and the partitioning of Korea into North and South Korea. It also led to a famous tiff between America’s most decorated combatant general and the American president which led to an inglorious recall of the old warhorse. General Douglas MacArthur never forgave President Harry Truman.
But that was small beer. The tiff signposted the beginning of the fierce struggle between the right wing hegemonic military industrial complex and an emerging left of centre coagulation to rein in America’s macho militarism and warmongering bellicosity.
Yet a little over a decade after escaping what could have been a major military disaster, America found itself embroiled in Vietnam and Indochina again in an ideological offensive against rampart communism. It was to end in another catastrophe in 1975 with American troops escaping the Vietcong insurgents by the skin of their teeth.
This was what set the stage and template for what a notable American political scientist was to characterize as a clash of civilization in which America found itself confronted by a virulent version of Islam which is as uncompromising as it is unforgiving. All this, it must be said, in addition to residual communism and the regnant hyper-Slavic nationalism in Russia.
This was the dominant rubric that prepared the ground for America’s humiliating exit from Afghanistan. Along the way was the Bay of Pigs fiasco, the botched attempt to rescue American hostages in Teheran, the mayhem in Mogadishu and the infamous 9/11 2001 attack on American soil which left a scene of apocalyptic destruction.
Colin Powell was an all-time American hero. But he is seen by many of his compatriots and elsewhere else as being complicit in the historic setup which lured America to wage futile and senseless wars against enemies with a countervailing civilization, an organic culture all of their own and a storied history which does not brook interference from hostile foreign entities.
His eloquent testimony at the UN backing the spurious claims of non-existent weapons of mass destruction is known to have tilted scale in favour of serial wars which have ended in defeat and demystification for his beloved country.
Powell was found wanting when and where it mattered most and when he could have used his massive prestige and universal adoration to prevent his country from sliding into self-destructive wars. Famously, Dick Cheney, just before Powell’s testimony, was known to have told the son of Jamaican immigrants that since his approval ratings were very high, he could afford to come down a few notches.
A generous and gracious man, Powell was known to have later rued his involvement in the whole disaster calling it a blot on his record. Yet in retrospect, there was little a systems man could do to effect fundamental changes in the same system that made him and that became the leitmotif and rationale of his whole existence. You cannot give what you don’t have.
With internal upheavals fuelled by centuries of institutionalized inequities coupling with an external military fiasco, what America needs now are visionary statesmen and out of the box thinkers at par with their founding fathers who will reset and recalibrate the country.
Not only that, they will have to align it with modern realities and in particular the place of the America nation in a post-imperial global order. It is hard to take but the harder fact is that the world is a-changing. You cannot demobilize a new day. Colin Powell has given his best to his country. Let him now depart in peace.
And still on the American debacle….
Dear readers, it is curious how history sometimes endorses or mocks the efforts of humanity. Twelve years ago as the Obama ascendancy took hold of the entire American landscape, yours sincerely penned a piece while watching the Obama inauguration from the ringside.
Titled A Day in the life of America, it was an attempt to examine the prospects of genuine changes in America brought about by the Obama presidency in all its grim possibilities. This morning we bring you an excerpt from the essay as a companion to the above piece. It is quite intriguing that twelve years after a version of the concluding sentence found its way into President Joe Biden’s inaugural address. But that is a minor matter compared to the problems facing a great country.