WASHINGTON (AP) — Colin Powell, the barrier-breaking soldier and diplomat who served Democratic and Republican presidents in war and peace but whose sterling reputation was stained by his faulty claims to justify the United States (US) war in Iraq, died yesterday of COVID-19 complications. He was 84.

A veteran of the Vietnam War, Powell spent 35 years in the army and rose to the rank of four-star general. In 1989 he became the first black chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. In that role he oversaw the US invasion of Panama and later the US invasion of Kuwait to oust the Iraqi army in 1991. A decade later he joined President George W Bush’s Cabinet as the first black secretary of state.

His legacy was marred when, in February 2003, he went before the United Nations Security Council as secretary of state and made the case for the US war against Iraq at a moment of great international scepticism. He cited faulty information claiming Saddam Hussein had secretly stashed weapons of mass destruction. Iraq’s claims that it had no such weapons represented “a web of lies” he told the world body.

In announcing his death on social media, Powell’s family said he had been fully vaccinated against the coronavirus.

“We have lost a remarkable and loving husband, father, and grandfather and a great American,” the family said. Powell had been treated at Walter Reed National Medical Center in Bethesda, Maryland.

Peggy Cifrino, Powell’s long-time aide, said he had been treated over the past few years for multiple myeloma, a blood cancer. The Powell family’s social media post did not address whether Powell had any underlying illnesses.

Multiple myeloma impairs the body’s ability to fight infection, and studies have shown that those cancer patients don’t get as much protection from the COVID-19 vaccines as healthier people.

At the White House, President Joe Biden said Powell “embodied the highest ideals of both warrior and diplomat”.

Noting Powell’s rise from a childhood in a fraying New York City neighbourhood, Biden said, “He believed in the promise of America because he lived it — and he devoted much of his life to making that promise a reality for so many others.”

Flags were lowered at the White House and State Department.

After the 9/11 attacks in 2001, Powell was the first American official to publicly lay the blame on Osama bin Laden’s al-Qaida network. He made a lightning trip to Pakistan in October of that year to demand that then-Pakistani President Pervez Musharraf cooperate with the United States in going after the Afghanistan-based group which also had a presence in Pakistan, where bin Laden was later killed.

As George W Bush’s first secretary of state, Powell led a State Department that was dubious of the military and intelligence communities’ conviction that Saddam possessed or was developing weapons of mass destruction. And yet, despite his reservations, he presented the Administration’s case that Saddam indeed posed a major regional and global threat in a speech to the UN Security Council in February 2003.

The following month, Bush gave the go-ahead for the invasion. The UN speech, replete with Powell’s display of a vial of what he said could have been a biological weapon, was seen as a low point in his career, although he had removed some elements from the remarks that he deemed to have been based on poor intelligence assessments.

The US overthrow of Saddam ended the rule of a brutal dictator. But the power vacuum and lawlessness that followed the invasion unleashed years of deadly sectarian fighting and chaos that killed countless Iraqi civilians, sparked a years-long insurgency, and unintentionally tilted the balance of power in the Middle East toward a US rival, Iran. No Iraqi weapons of mass destruction were ever found.

Powell maintained in a 2012 interview with The Associated Press that on balance, the US succeeded in Iraq.

“I think we had a lot of successes,” he said. “Iraq’s terrible dictator is gone.”

Saddam was captured by US forces while hiding out in northern Iraq in December 2003 and was later executed by the Iraqi Government. But the war dragged on. President Barack Obama pulled US troops out of Iraq in 2011, but he sent advisers back in 2014 after the Islamic State group swept into the country from Syria and captured large swaths of Iraqi territory.

Bush said yesterday that he and former First Lady Laura Bush were “deeply saddened” by Powell’s death.

“He was a great public servant” and “widely respected at home and abroad,” Bush said. “And most important, Colin was a family man and a friend. Laura and I send Alma and their children our sincere condolences as they remember the life of a great man.”

Powell gained national prominence under Republican presidents and considered a presidential bid of his own, but ultimately moved away from the party. He endorsed Democrats in the past four presidential elections, starting with Obama. He emerged as a vocal Donald Trump critic in recent years, describing Trump as “a national disgrace” who should have been removed from office through impeachment. Following the January 6 storming of the US Capitol, Powell said he no longer considered himself a Republican.

No child of privilege, Powell rose through the military ranks and then became the nation’s chief diplomat. “Mine is the story of a black kid of no early promise from an immigrant family of limited means who was raised in the South Bronx,” he wrote in his 1995 autobiography My American Journey.

Defence Secretary Lloyd Austin, a retired army general and the first black Pentagon chief, said the news of Powell’s death left “a hole in my heart”.

“The world lost one of the greatest leaders that we have ever witnessed,” Austin said while travelling in Europe. “Alma lost a great husband and the family lost a tremendous father,and I lost a tremendous personal friend and mentor.”

Condoleezza Rice, Powell’s successor at State and the department’s first black female secretary, praised him as “a trusted colleague and a dear friend through some very challenging times”.

Powell’s appearances at the United Nations as secretary of state, including his Iraq speech, were often accompanied by fond reminiscing of his childhood in the city where he grew up the child of Jamaican immigrants and got one of his first jobs at the Pepsi-Cola bottling plant directly across the East River from the UN’s headquarters.