The death of former secretary of state Colin Powell yesterday recalls an old debate about the nature of duty: is it a matter of blind loyalty to one’s leaders, no matter how foolish or destructive their actions are? Or is it about fidelity to a higher principle than merely following orders — about having the courage and integrity to stand by fundamental principles?

While it may be unfair for any one person’s life to be boiled down to a single event, the Iraq War was such a world-historic disaster — having killed hundreds of thousands and destabilized an already volatile region, that Powell’s crucial role in its making deserves to be the headline in any account of his legacy.

Yes, Powell did play his much-ballyhooed role as the voice of moderation within the extremist George W. Bush administration. That’s a little like being the cleverest of the Three Stooges, but let’s give Powell his due: he warned Bush that Iraq could be a disaster (“You break it, you own it,” as he famously said), and in the run-up to war, he was one of a few lonely voices trying to engineer some sort of non-military solution to the course Bush and the rest of his flunkies had already decided on, no matter how clearly doomed those efforts were. Unfortunately for Powell (and the people of Iraq), he was constantly out-maneuvered and undermined by those very flunkies, rendering his campaign of gentle persuasion useless to halt the march to war.