Colin Powell: Iran Pact a ‘Pretty Good Deal’

(Retired General Colin Powell now) 


(Captain Colin Powell then)

oped: Alrighty then let's examine Gen Colin Powell's rise through the ranks..as a young Captain Colin Powell supported Lt Calley's My Lai massacre allegations...Once promoted to field grade officer as Major he then was against Lt Calley...the old I was for before I was against syndrome (Ring a Bell Lt John Kerry ?)...news flash had we been PC during WWII we would now be under Nazi control and speaking German...sorry folks but war is hell and things are done that most people cringe from...but until you have faced combat and saw what goes on on both sides you have no proverbial say in the matter. Just a Fact Jack.  

Side note: 

On Jan. 17, 1963, in South Vietnam's monsoon season, U.S. Army Capt. Colin Powell jumped from a military helicopter into a densely forested combat zone of the A Shau Valley, not far from the Laotian border.

Carrying an M-2 carbine, Capt. Powell was starting his first -- and only -- combat assignment. He was the new adviser to a 400-man unit of the Army of the Republic of Vietnam (ARVN). Across jungle terrain, these South Vietnamese government troops were arrayed against a combined force of North Vietnamese regulars and local anti-government guerrillas known as the Viet Cong.

The 25-year-old Powell was arriving at a pivotal moment in the Vietnam War. To forestall a communist victory, President John F. Kennedy had dispatched teams of Green Beret advisers to assist the ARVN, a force suffering from poor discipline, ineffective tactics and bad morale.

Already, many U.S. advisers, most notably the legendary Col. John Paul Vann, were voicing concerns about the ARVN's brutality toward civilians. Vann feared that the dominant counterinsurgency strategy of destroying rural villages and forcibly relocating inhabitants while hunting down enemy forces was driving the people into the arms of the Viet Cong.

But as Colin Powell arrived, he was untainted by these worries. He was a gung-ho young Army officer with visions of glory. He brimmed with trust in the wisdom of his superiors. Capt. Powell also felt the deepest sympathy for the ARVN troops under his command, but only a cold contempt for the enemy. 

Soon after his arrival, Powell and his ARVN unit left for a protracted patrol that fought leeches as well as Viet Cong ambushes. From the soggy jungle brush, the Viet Cong would strike suddenly against the advancing government soldiers. Often invisible to Powell and his men, the VC would inflict a few casualties and slip back into the jungles.

In My American Journey, Powell recounted his reaction when he spotted his first dead Viet Cong. "He lay on his back, gazing up at us with sightless eyes," Powell wrote. "I felt nothing, certainly not sympathy. I had seen too much death and suffering on our side to care anything about what happened on theirs."

While success against the armed enemy was rare, Powell's ARVN unit punished the civilian population systematically. As the soldiers marched through mountainous jungle, they destroyed the food and the homes of the region's Montagnards, who were suspected of sympathizing with the Viet Cong. Old women would cry hysterically as their ancestral homes and worldly possessions were consumed by fire.

MAM Hunts
Powell did include, however, a troubling recollection that belied his 1968 official denial of Glen’s allegation that American soldiers “without provocation or justification shoot at the people themselves.” After mentioning the My Lai massacre in My American Journey, Powell penned a partial justification of the Americal’s brutality. In a chilling passage, Powell explained the routine practice of murdering unarmed male Vietnamese.

“I recall a phrase we used in the field, MAM, for military-age male,” Powell wrote. “If a helo spotted a peasant in black pajamas who looked remotely suspicious, a possible MAM, the pilot would circle and fire in front of him. If he moved, his movement was judged evidence of hostile intent, and the next burst was not in front, but at him. Brutal? Maybe so. But an able battalion commander with whom I had served at Gelnhausen (West Germany), Lt. Col. Walter Pritchard, was killed by enemy sniper fire while observing MAMs from a helicopter. And Pritchard was only one of many. The kill-or-be-killed nature of combat tends to dull fine perceptions of right and wrong.”

While it’s certainly true that combat is brutal, mowing down unarmed civilians is not combat.(Hello how about ISIS and the radical Islamist caliphate movement? #FightFirewithFire) It is, in fact, a war crime. (Hello WWII the fire bombing of Germany and two A-Bombs dispatched on Japan's civilian populations.. cruel yes but ended the war started by those who started it)
But returning home from Vietnam a second time in 1969, Powell had proved himself the consummate team player and continues today #TeamObama player!
Source: http://www.consortiumnews.com/  
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Now on to the article... 

Former Secretary of State Colin Powell came out in support of President Obama’s agreement to curb Iran’s nuclear program, calling it a “pretty good deal.”
Powell, a retired general who led the State Department under GOP President George W. Bush, said he had vigorously studied the deal and listened to arguments from both supporters and opponents.
“My judgment after balancing those two sets of information is that it’s a pretty good deal,” Powell declared on NBC’s “Meet the Press.”
“The great concern from the opposition is that we’re leaving open a lane for Iran to create a nuclear weapon in 10 to 15 years,” he added. “The reality is that they have been on a super highway for the last 10 years to create a nuclear weapon … with no speed limit.”
Powell’s position drew praise from Obama.
Read More:  http://thehill.com/