Chain Of Command

 This is what we in the business of writing celebrity obituaries call "a mixed bag." 

Colin Powell died over the weekend from complications connected to COVID-19. The first impulse might be to assume that the man who served as national security adviser under President Ronald Reagan, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff under President George H. W. Bush and secretary of state under President George W. Bush might have had issues about vaccination and masks. According to the General's family, he was fully vaccinated. He was eighty-four. 

It wasn't politics that caught up to him. In spite of all that service to Republicans, General Powell endorsed Barack Obama for President in 2008, and in 2012 he aligned himself with Hilary Clinton. He referred to Senator Clinton's opponent at the time as a "national disgrace and an international pariah."

So there's that.

But there's also that whole WMD thing. I carry with me those images of Colin Powell sitting in a presentation to The United Nations, insisting to anyone that would listen that Iraq had Weapons of Mass Destruction, and that we needed to move post-haste to invade this desert nation not because of its rich oil reserves or because it would fix that problem with his boss's daddy issue, but because we were all in imminent danger of being killed by the vial of anthrax that he made a point of waving around. And those aluminum tubes that could only be used for making missiles to carry nuclear warheads that were most surely being created in some bunker somewhere. 

And we needed to go after them. 

Because even if it was the Saudis who supported and financed the attacks of September 11, 2001, it was that conniving Saddam Hussein who was most certainly behind it all. The intelligence failure that brought all of this "news" to the forefront was the inciting fear that launched an eight year war/occupation of a country that now has a forever kind of grudge against the United States that makes it all but impossible to put behind us. 

So Colin Powell passed away this past weekend. It wasn't the anthrax or the WMD. It was the virus that kept him from stomping on the Terra. I wonder how he'll sleep.