Powell’s Obama endorsement puts spotlight on his legacy

His remarks further stirred the brewing debate about the nature of the post-Bush Republican Party.

“I have some concerns about the direction that the party has taken in recent years,” Powell told Tom Brokaw on NBC. In recent weeks, Powell added, “the approach of the Republican Party and McCain has become narrower and narrower.”

In saying he would vote for Obama, Powell aligned himself squarely against Bush, who has been counting on a Republican victory next month to see through his strategy of avoiding a rigid timetable for withdrawals in Iraq .

Powell’s role in selling the invasion, has also come to dominate his own place in history. In siding with Obama, he seemed to be making a clear break with the more hawkish elements of the Republican Party and signaling an effort to reshape how he is judged on the war. Like Obama, Powell has long represented to millions of people around the world the possibilities of the American dream. The son of immigrants from Jamaica who was born in Harlem and reared in the South Bronx, Powell earned a degree from the City University of New York and then embarked on a rapid rise through the military, perhaps the most integrated institution in American life.

He became a military assistant to Secretary of Defence Caspar W Weinberger in 1983, national security adviser under President Ronald Reagan in 1986 and chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff under the first President Bush during the 1991 Gulf War.

Powell had a tumultuous tenure as Bush’s first-term secretary of state, when he was frequently undercut by Vice-President Dick Cheney and Donald H Rumsfeld, the secretary of defence, in the period before the Iraq war. Although Powell had major misgivings about the war and what he considered the inadequate number of troops, he not only agreed to the invasion but also made the administration’s case for war in a presentation to the UNSC in February 2003.

In many ways, Powell’s endorsement reflected the rift between the so-called pragmatists, many of whom have come to view the Iraq war or its execution as a mistake, and the neoconservatives, a competing camp whose thinking played a pivotal role in building the case for war.