The following is an excerpt from Colin Powell’s book It Worked For Me: In Life and Leadership
Although it has been many years since I gave my famous—or infamous—Iraq WMD speech to the UN and the world, I am asked about it or read about it almost every day. February 5, 2003, the day of the speech, is as burned into my memory as my own birthday. The event will earn a prominent paragraph in my obituary.
“Is it a blot on your record?” Barbara Walters asked in my first major interview after leaving the State Department.
“Yes,” I answered, “and there is nothing I can do about it.”
What’s done is done. It’s over. I live with it.
Most people in public life have passed through a defining experience they’d prefer to forget, and to be forgotten, but won’t be. So what can you do about it? How do you carry the burden?
In January 2003, as war with Iraq was approaching, President Bush felt we needed to present our case against Iraq to the public and the international community. By then, the President did not think war could be avoided. He had crossed the line in his own mind, even though the NSC had never met—and never would meet—to discuss the decision. On January 30, 2003, in the Oval Office, President Bush told me it was now time to present our case against Iraq to the United Nations.
The date he selected for the presentation was February 5, just a few days away.
The speech would cover several areas, from the Hussein regime’s abysmal human rights record, to its violations of UN resolutions, to its support of terrorists. But its chief focus was to be its weapons of mass destruction. Though Saddam did not use WMDs during Desert Storm, he had them. He had used chemical weapons against his own people years earlier, and he had used them against the Iranians in the 1980–88 Iran-Iraq War. The intelligence community believed he not only still had WMD stockpiles, but also had continued to produce them. In the post-9/11 atmosphere there was deep concern that these weapons could get into the hands of terrorists.
Although the intelligence community differed about aspects of the Iraqi WMD program, there was no disagreement over the fact that the Iraqis had one. They were certain that Saddam had WMDs and was producing more. (UN weapons inspectors were always skeptical about these conclusions.)
Three months before my UN speech, the Director of Central Intelligence, at the request of Congress, had delivered to Congress a National Intelligence Estimate (NIE) that supported the intelligence community’s judgment. Based on that NIE, Congress passed resolution giving the President authority to take military action if the problem could not be solved peacefully through the UN.
The NIE contained a number of strong, definitive statements, including one claiming that Iraq was reconstituting its nuclear weapons program. In another: “Saddam probably has stocked at least 100 metric tons (MT) and possibly as much as 500 MT of CW [chemical warfare] agents—much of it added in the last year [my emphasis].” And in still another, the NIE claimed that the Iraqis had constructed mobile biological warfare production vans.
Though mostly circumstantial and inferential, the NIE’s evidence was persuasive. It was accepted by our military commanders, the majority of Congress, the national security team, and the President, as well as by a number of our friends and allies. In the aftermath of 9/11, the President did not believe the nation could accept the risk of leaving a WMD capability in Saddam’s hands.
Recognizing that we would eventually have to make our case to the international community, the President had directed the NSC staff to prepare that case.
Sometime later in the day of my January 30 meeting with the President, my staff received the WMD case the NSC staff had been working on. It was a disaster. It was incoherent. Assertions were made that either had no sourcing or no connection to the NIE. I asked George Tenet, Director of Central Intelligence (DCI), what had happened. He had nothing to do with it, he told me. He had provided the NIE and raw material to National Security Advisor Condoleezza Rice’s office. He had no idea what happened to it after that.
I learned later that Scooter Libby, Vice President Cheney’s chief of staff, had authored the unusable presentation, not the NSC staff. And several years after that, I learned from Dr. Rice that the idea of using Libby had come from the Vice President, who had persuaded the President to have Libby, a lawyer, write the “case” as a lawyer’s brief and not as an intelligence assessment.
An intelligence assessment presents the evidence and the conclusions drawn from the evidence. A lawyer’s brief argues guilt or innocence. Our biggest problem with the Libby presentation was that we couldn’t track the facts and assertions with the NIE or other intelligence. The DCI could not stand behind it, and it was therefore worthless to us.
There was no way we could use the presentation as it came to us, and we had roughly four days to redo it. I asked for a delay, but the President had already publicly announced the date for my speech, and the UN had put it on the calendar.
“Okay,” I thought. “we can handle that.” I was disturbed, but not deeply troubled. We weren’t working from scratch; we had the NIE and the CIA’s raw material to draw from. On the other hand, our case had to be airtight. We were facing a moment like Adlai Stevenson’s UN speech during the 1962 Cuban Missile Crisis, when he demonstrated to the world that the Soviets were beyond doubt installing nuclear-capable missiles in Cuba.