Was he only mediocre as a general?
I always had a high estimation of his strategic talents, but of course I'm a professional civilian, and so really don't know.
I liked Colin, but after he left the Bush administration, he seemed to be undergoing the usual and standard mental deterioration those older people in high-stress jobs seem to have, and so wrote him off as someone who isn't what he used to be.
He had a puzzling career path...basically he was nuresmaided and put in a lot of senior staff but non-command positions throughout his post-Viet Nam career, without the normal senior command stepping stones that one normally sees in a rise to Chairman of the JCS, Army Chief of Staff, or Army Vice Chief of Staff...in other words, the quintessential Pentagon wienie. The Black general in
Mars Attacks! represents a rather close fictional counterpart of Powell. It's difficult to attribute his meteoric rise to anything but politics (No doubt where his alleged 'Republicanism' came into play) combined with the desire to select and promote some 'Clean and articulate' minorities to high office within Defense...which had much more to do with internal sociological factors in the armed forces than it did with the actual ability of the candidates for those jobs.
