WASHINGTON, Nov 16: Colin Powell, the first black US secretary of state and top military officer, saw his sterling reputation tarnished by a United Nations appearance at which he presented erroneous intelligence used to justify the invasion of Iraq.
Born of Jamaican immigrant parents in Harlem, Mr Powell rose through the US Army to the highest levels of government, serving as national security adviser, chairman of the military's Joint Chiefs of Staff and top US diplomat during the Sept 11, 2001, attacks and subsequent invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq.
A veteran of Washington's bureaucratic warfare with a silken touch with foreign leaders, US lawmakers and the media, Mr Powell found himself on the losing side of a number of Bush administration battles - notably the decision to invade Iraq without the U.N. Security Council's blessing.
Mr Powell's most memorable public moment may have been his dramatic Feb 5, 2003, Security Council presentation of the administration's case that Iraq constituted a threat because it possessed stockpiles of chemical and biological weapons.
At one point Mr Powell held up a vial of simulated biological agent - an image broadcast around the world - but, after US investigators failed to find such weapons, 19 months later he said: "I think it's unlikely that we will find any stockpiles."
Often seen as a dove in an administration that became ever more hawkish after the Sept 11 attacks, Mr Powell's efforts to find a diplomatic solution to avert an invasion of Iraq collapsed in March 2003.
According to Washington Post editor Bob Woodward's insider account, Mr Powell bluntly told President Bush before the invasion if he sent US troops to Iraq "you're going to be owning this place" and he and his deputy, Richard Armitage, borrowed a store policy slogan as a warning about Iraq: "You break it, you own it."
The prediction rang true as nations who opposed the invasion failed to commit troops to cope with a resistance in which dozens of foreigners have been kidnapped and sometimes decapitated and the US military's death toll has risen to about 1,200.
MANY VICTORIES: Mr Powell's advocates argue he won many victories, pushing Mr Bush to take Iraq to the United Nations in Sept 2002 and leading diplomatic efforts to persuade North Korea and Iran to abandon their suspected nuclear weapons programs.
But, among other policy defeats, his State Department was marginalized in the initial planning for post-invasion Iraq and his early desire to engage with North Korea was rejected by Mr Bush.
His four-year stint as secretary of state capped a career that included widespread speculation in 1995, after his retirement from the Army, that he was the only Republican capable of beating Democrat US President Bill Clinton.
After Hamlet-like deliberation, he finally put a stop to the presidential talk by saying he would not run.
During his long military career Mr Powell coined the "Powell doctrine", whose elements include the belief that war should be a last resort; that force, when used, should be overwhelming; that there must be strong public support for it as well as a clear exit strategy.
Mr Powell was born on April 5, 1937, in New York's tough South Bronx district, the son of a seamstress and a shipping clerk, who, he likes to recall, arrived in America aboard a "banana boat"in 1920.
Mr Powell's own ticket to success was the Reserve Officer Training Corps, a program for university students that engaged his energies when he was, by his own admission, an uninspired student at the City College of New York.-Reuters
