And he devoted much of his life to making that promise come true for many others.”
Powell’s time as secretary of state was largely defined by the September 11, 2001 terror attacks. He was the first American official to publicly blame Osama bin Laden’s al-Qaida network.
He made a quick trip to Pakistan to demand that then Pakistani President Pervez Musharraf cooperate with the United States in pursuing the Afghanistan-based group, which was also present in Pakistan, where bin Laden was later assassinated.
But as the impetus for the war in Iraq deepened, Powell at times found himself at odds with other key figures in the Bush administration, including Vice President Dick Cheney and Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld. Rumsfeld also died this year.
Powell’s State Department cast doubt on the military and intelligence community’s belief that Saddam had or was developing weapons of mass destruction.
But he presented the administration’s case that Saddam posed a major regional and global threat in a powerful speech to the United Nations Security Council in February 2003. The following month, Bush gave the green light for invasion.
The UN speech, complete with Powell’s display of what he said could be a biological weapon, is seen as the lowest point of his career, although he has omitted some elements from statements he considers to be based on the poor. intelligence assessment.
The overthrow of Saddam by the US ended the brutal dictatorship. But the power vacuum and lawlessness that followed years of sectarian fighting and chaos killed many Iraqi civilians, sparked a long insurgency and inadvertently tilted the balance of power in the Middle East in the direction of US rival Iran. No Iraqi weapons of mass destruction have ever been found.
