Colin Powell, the former Secretary of State of the United States, died on Monday as a result of COVID-19 complications, according to his family’s Facebook post. Powell, 84, was being treated at Walter Reed National Medical Center and had received full coronavirus vaccination, according to his family. Powell was diagnosed with multiple myeloma, a kind of blood cancer that significantly reduces the body’s immunological response, according to NBC News and CNN. His family remarked, “We have lost a magnificent and loving husband, father, grandfather, and a great American.” When President George W. Bush appointed Powell as Secretary of State in 2001, he became the country’s first Black secretary of state.
He helped justify Bush’s invasion of Iraq in 2003 by making bogus assertions about Saddam Hussein’s weapons of mass destruction. Former Secretary of State Colin Powell, who was seen at the Democratic National Convention in 2020, died on Monday as a result of COVID-19 problems, according to his family. via APPowell served in the Army for two tours in Vietnam. He served as the deputy national security adviser and then the national security adviser to President Ronald Reagan. In 1989, he was appointed to general and served as chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff under President George H.W. Bush. According to the State Department, Powell presided over 28 crises as chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff.
Operation Desert Storm, a military reaction to Iraq’s invasion of Kuwait in 1991, was one of them. It was the United States’ first serious foreign crisis since the end of the Cold War. Powell was hailed as “a good friend,” a trailblazer in breaking racial barriers, and someone who represented “the finest principles of both warrior and diplomat” by President Joe Biden on Monday. “He believed in America’s promise because he had experienced it. And he dedicated much of his life to make that promise a reality for so many people,” said Biden, a former senator who worked with Powell. “Throughout our many years of working together, Colin was always someone who gave you his all and treated you with respect, even when we disagreed.”
Powell was praised by George W. Bush as a “great public servant” and a “favorite of presidents.” “He was well-liked both at home and abroad. “Most importantly, Colin was a husband, father, and friend,” Bush said in a statement to Powell’s wife Alma and their children. When then-Secretary of State Colin Powell presented proof of Iraq’s claimed weapons programs to the United Nations Security Council in 2003, he held up a vial he believed could contain anthrax. Elise Amendola of the Associated Press contributed to this report. Powell, like others in the George W. Bush administration, lied to justify the 2003 invasion of Iraq, falsely alleging that Saddam Hussein, the country’s president, possessed weapons of mass devastation. Powell infamously warned the United Nations Security Council that, if unstopped, Hussein intended to develop nuclear weapons and was already capable of biological attacks on other countries, including the U.S.Powell said in a 2006 interview that he felt “terrible” about his role in supporting the invasion and blamed the intelligence system.
