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Colin Powell recently addressed a banquet in his honor in Kansas City.
At a downtown hotel in Kansas City, Powell mixed easily with other retired Army officers and their wives, as if he were just one of the gang.
The former secretary of state and chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff was in town recently to inaugurate a lecture series in his name at Fort Leavenworth’s Command and General Staff College, from which he had graduated 40 years earlier.
The CGSC Foundation, which supports the school, had prepared a banquet in his honor. Beforehand, he met with three members of the local media.
We filed into a surprisingly frigid room filled with oval tables draped in black linen. Powell sat at one end of the designated table.
His wide face was craggier than it appears on TV. I tried to reconcile this genial man with the uniformed figure of 1991. During the Gulf War, that earlier Gen. Powell stood before a map in the Pentagon and famously described what the coalition planned to do to Saddam Hussein’s army.
“First we’re going to cut it off,” he said, “and then we’re going to kill it.”
The now-retired Gen. Powell settled into his chair at the oval table. He began by saying how honored he was about the lecture series, etc. Then it was on to business.
I asked him who he was backing for president, an obvious and almost obligatory question. You never know. He might actually make some news. We had to be sure. But he was too practiced to stray into that minefield.
He said he admired and liked all three candidates. But his job as a citizen was solely to decide which would bring the most to the table, for our country and the 21st century.
Later, he said that the question regarding Barack Obama (“He’s a bright guy”) was whether “he had the experience you’re looking for.”
We quickly ran through a litany of current topics.
He disagreed with those who say we shouldn’t be talking with our enemies, including Iran and Syria.
He said the ground-force component of our military is severely stretched. If a crisis breaks out, the troops we might need are already deployed in Afghanistan and Iraq.
I asked him if he thought we would win in Iraq.
He acknowledged that the troop surge had shown great progress, but he said that ultimately the Iraqis have to do the heavy lifting themselves. He elaborated:
“If they can create a stable country that’s not being threatened from the outside, that is multi-ethnic in the sense that all the parties have access to the political system and are participating in it, and is on the way to economic recovery, and does not become connected to its neighbors in a way that is not helpful, and does not become the source of terrorism in the region or the world, I think that would be a great success.”
As for our troop strength in Iraq, that can only decrease.
The debate isn’t whether there will be a drawdown. The issue is how rapidly it will occur.
An AP man asked him whether as a young boy in Harlem he had any inkling he might grow up to be chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff.
Powell said he gets that question a lot. The answer he gave was tongue-in-cheek, with a dash of dialect.
“Yeah, there I was,” he said in a lampooning tone. “I believe I was about 10 years old, standing on a corner at 153rd Street … and I said to myself, ‘Self, I believe you gon’ grow up to become chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff.’ ”
Laughter.
The world has changed rapidly, he said. He noted that he first arrived at Fort Leavenworth only three years after passage of the Civil Rights bill that would allow him to eat in any restaurant he might choose. It was only five years after the last all-black Army unit had been disbanded.
“In those days, to think that a black kid from New York City, a non-West Pointer with a C average, could have risen in this manner was not only a dream, but was almost unthinkable.”
The “press availability” broke up, and Powell headed for the banquet.
Only later, after transcribing my tape, did I realize that the crafty old general had never answered my question about whether we’d win in Iraq.
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