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Iraq War : Powell: “Blot on my career”! In 2003, former U.S. Secretary of State Powell addressed the U.N. Security Council about alleged Iraqi weapons of mass destruction. Now he has regretted that appearance, saying, “There were people in intelligence who knew at the time that some of the sources were not reliable.”
U.S. Secretary of State Colin Powell has expressed regret for his February 2003 appearance at the U.N. Security Council
In a television interview, former U.S. Secretary of State Colin Powell has expressed regret for his February 2003 appearance at the U.N. Security Council in the run-up to the Iraq war.
Powell told the ABC network that he felt “terrible” about his argument, which later turned out to be untenable. At the time, Powell had briefed the United Nations on Iraq’s alleged weapons of mass destruction and the resulting threat to the world from Saddam Hussein’s regime.
“It was painful. It is painful now.”
This was a “stain” on his career, Powell said. After all, he said, it was he who presented this argument to the world on behalf of the United States. It will always be part of his resume, he said. “It was painful. It’s painful now,” Powell said in the interview, which is scheduled to air Friday evening.
Among other things, the then U.S. secretary of state had presented satellite photos of trucks with alleged mobile bioweapons labs before the U.N. Security Council. He also held up a small test tube to demonstrate what a small amount of bacteria is sufficient for a devastating bioweapons attack.
“I was enormously disappointed”
In the run-up to his speech, Powell had spent five days at the headquarters of the U.S. intelligence agency, the CIA, studying intelligence reports. Many of them later turned out to be false. After the invasion, American weapons inspectors had found no evidence of the existence of nuclear, biological or chemical weapons in Iraq.
However, the CIA director at the time, George Tenet, was not to blame; he himself had been convinced of the correctness of the information. “There were people in intelligence who knew at the time that some of the sources were not reliable, and they didn’t say anything. That devastated me,” Powell said, “I was enormously disappointed.”
Powell: Should have done “some things differently”
He had seen no evidence to suggest a possible link between Iraq under then-ruler Saddam Hussein and the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks in the United States, the former secretary of state said. On developments after the fall of Saddam Hussein, Powell expressed skepticism.
He said the United States failed to send enough soldiers immediately after the fall and to quickly rebuild Iraqi forces. “It might not have been such a mess if we had done some things differently,” he acknowledged. Powell has always been considered an opponent of U.S. Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld.
Powell expressed concern about the possibility of civil war in Iraq. He said the United States had an obligation to preserve Iraq as an overall state. For this, the Sunnis would have to be included in the political reconstruction. It must not happen that “a mini-state in the north, a larger mini-state in the south and a kind of nothing in the middle” emerges.