Colin Powell, Secretary of PR, and His Halabja Hypocrisy

US Secretary of State Colin Powell was a military PR man in Vietnam. One of his assignments was to help manage the image crisis created by the massacre of civilians by US troops at My Lai. Now, as the Bush government increasingly uses Saddam Hussein's brutality as its primary rationalization for the war, Powell is revising and spinning history by traveling to Halabja, the site of Saddam's gassing of Iraqi Kurds. Powell dedicated a memorial and declared that the world should have acted sooner against Saddam after the 1988 massacre. However, as we point out in our book Weapons of Mass Deception, when the 1988 gassings took place at Halabja Colin Powell was the National Security Advisor for the Reagan/Bush administration and Saddam was the Reagan and then Bush administration's strategic ally. Saddam's chemicals, now called WMDs, came from the US and other western countries. When the US Congress attempted to act against Saddam, Colin Powell and the rest of the Reagan/Bush administration made sure that the Prevention of Genocide Act died in Congress.