High Ideals “Many of my generation, the career captains, majors, and lieutenant colonels seasoned in [Vietnam], vowed that when our turn came to call the shots, we would not quietly acquiesce in halfhearted warfare for half-baked reasons that the American people could not understand," he wrote in “My American Journey," published in 1995.
Such idealism proved elusive, however, in the 2003 Iraq War to oust Hussein. As secretary of state, Powell was given the task of justifying an allied invasion.
In a speech to the United Nations that included pictures he said were of mobile arms laboratories, he asserted there was “no doubt" that Hussein had hidden chemical and biological weapons.