Colin Powell: American Power and Intervention from Vietnam to Iraq.

• Author: Handley, John M.
• Position: Book review

Christopher D. O'Sullivan, Colin Powell: American Power and Intervention from Vietnam to Iraq, Lanham, Maryland: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, 2009; 219 pages, ISBN 978-0-7425-5186-2, hardback, $34.95.

Christopher D. O'Sullivan teaches history at the University of San Francisco. He authored Sumner Welles, Postwar Planning, and the Quest for a New World Order, which won the American Historical Association's Gutenberg Prize in 2003. He also authored The United Nations: A Concise History. He served as the keynote speaker at the United Nations' sixtieth anniversary celebrations in 2005. Although a fellow at the Center for International Studies at the London School of Economics, he also recently taught as a Fulbright visiting professor of American foreign policy at the University of Jordan, Amman.

In this reasonably short biography of Colin Powell, Dr. O'Sullivan presents an interesting and thought-provoking account of Powell's life and times, starting in the first chapter with his birth in 1937, his ROTC commissioning in 1958, his two tours of service in Vietnam, and his rise within the military establishment to 1980. The second chapter addresses his noteworthy White House activities between 1980 and 1987, followed by a chapter on his service as national security advisor at the end of the Cold War, 1987-1989, in which the author evaluates Powell as perhaps the best NSC advisor since Henry Kissinger.

Chapter 4 covers his remarkable tenure as chairman of the Joint Chiefs, 1989-1993, while the following chapter addresses the military and diplomacy after the Cold War. Dr. O'Sullivan then evaluates Powell's minimal accomplishments as secretary of state, 2001-2005, with a follow-up chapter on Powell, Iraq, and the "fog of war," in which Powell is either unable or unwilling to convince the George Bush government to adhere to his own principles known generally as the Powell Doctrine. The book then ends with a short conclusion or a very long abstract, depending upon one's point of view.

Lessons of Vietnam

Of considerable interest to the author is the development and entwining throughout the book of the lessons Powell learned in Vietnam, which many refer to today as the Powell Doctrine, and the influence Casper Weinberger and the Weinberger Doctrine had on Powell's enunciating his own basically similar pronouncements.

Weinberger offered six criteria necessary to prevent another Vietnam. These axioms include:

(1) The United States should commit forces...