Colin Powell in Vietnam: "I had no qualms"

The Guardian

Jeffrey St. Clair in Counterpunch:

....The first, maybe only prerequisite, for a conman is the ability to win people’s confidence. Powell had this gift to such an elevated degree that he was able to retain public confidence even after his tricks had been exposed as lethal frauds, over and over again. 

It’s hard to isolate why: That he was black, that he spoke calmly, that he seemed to take responsibility, even when he actually deflected the blame onto others, who’d given him bad orders he’d been duty-bound to follow.

A good conman remains elusive–hard to pin down. After lying the US into one of the most disastrous wars in history, Powell was back eight years later as if nothing had happened playing the role of kingmaker to the accolades of the elites.

From covering up My Lai to fabricating a case for war against Iraq to defending Obama’s drone strikes was there ever a more useful frontman to shield or rationalize the crimes of the modern American empire than Colin Powell? 

He was the Teflon General. Nothing stuck him. He continued to be courted, especially by liberals, as a voice of restraint, honesty and rationality, when he had the rare distinction of having committed war crimes in at least five different wars: Vietnam, Central America, Iraq War I, Afghanistan, Iraq War 2.

In 1963, Powell, then a captain, went to Vietnam as a “military advisor” to a South Vietnamese army unit, which torched villages up and down the A Shau Valley, war crimes which he coldly described in his memoir as a “drain-the-sea” tactic.

We tried to solve the problem by making the whole sea uninhabitable. In the hard logic of war what difference did it make if you shot your enemy or starved him to death? As for the poor Montagnards, caught in the middle, with their crops and huts ruined, they were forced to rely on the South Vietnamese for food. 

That explained why these nomadic people were living on the dole at base camp. The whole strategy was to win their hearts and minds by making them dependent on the government. I am sure these mountain people wished they’d never heard of the ARVN, the Viet Cong, or the Americans.

However chilling this destruction of homes and crops reads in cold print today, as a young officer, I had been conditioned to believe in the wisdom of my superiors, and to obey. I had no qualms about what we were doing. 

This was counterinsurgency at the cutting edge. Hack down the peasants’ crop, thus denying food to the Viet Song, who were supported by the North Vietnamese, who, in turn, were backed by Moscow and Beijing, who were our mortal enemies.

Although he’s known for articulating the so-called “Powell Doctrine” of using “overwhelming force,” he spent most of his career supervising these kinds of “third way” operations, where US-financed and trained paramilitaries and death squads chopped and burned their way through hamlets and villages, terrorizing the local population and killing suspected dissidents and anyone who was near them....