General Colin Powell: Political Casualty of Iraq War

My colleagues, every statement I make today is backed by sources, solid sources. These are not assertions. What we ‘re giving you are facts and conclusions based on solid intelligence. (Colin Powell in his presentation to the United Nations)


As the subsequent events showed much of Powell’s speech to the United Nations was hot air.

It was apparent from whatever information leaked out of the White House before the invasion of Iraq that a sharp divide split the political vision of the Secretary of State General Colin Powell and the White House including the office of the Vice President Dick Cheney and the Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld. President Bush had accepted the foreign policy enunciated by Dick Cheney and Donald Rumsfeld, particularly in relation to Iraq. The secretary of state in this respect looked largely irrelevant. The decision to invade Iraq and topple Saddam Hussein had already been made. What was in the offing was the preparation of the groundwork for justifying the invasion of Iraq. The secretary of state was not willingly toeing the line which White House, Dick Cheney and Donald Rumsfeld had already delineated and “drawn in the sand,� so to say.

General Powell’s reasoning for avoiding the war and seeking a political solution had already been bypassed. In this scenario, Powell’s position was very precarious; decisions were being implemented which rightly should have belonged to him but were being formulated by Dick Cheney and Rumsfeld. Many political analysts openly discussed in the public press the advisability of Colin Powell tendering his resignation but he didn’t. He said he was a soldier and he would not let down his commander in chief. In the position of secretary of state he in fact was a politician first and anything else afterwards. His inability to assert his political role should have impelled him to resign and quit gracefully.

He couldn’t function with an administration which radically differed with his views. It was only a matter of time, it seemed. Either he should quit himself or he would be ousted. He did not resign and stuck to an untenable position. His commander in chief had already written him off. Had Powell used the political foresight and vision of a secretary of state which he was, he should have thrown in the towel and left in grace.

Right at the beginning of President Bush’s second term, the shoe fell and Powell was dropped ignominiously. It appeared that his political career was over although he is trying to retrieve it and make a comeback. I personally feel it’s too late; he didn’t try to save it when he had the chance to do so. Had he resigned, he would have stayed in the limelight as an elder statesman at the political front.

Recently he stated in an interview in response to a question: Do you feel responsible for giving the U.N. the flawed intelligence? “I didn’t know it was flawed. Everybody was using it. The CIA was saying the same thing for two years. I gave perhaps the most accurate presentation of the intelligence as we knew it – without any of the “Mushroom clouds are going to show up tomorrow morning� and all the rest of this stuff. But the fact of the matter is that a good part of it was wrong, and I am sorry that it was wrong,� (GQ ICON:COLIN POWELL). The CIA was saying exactly what the White House wanted to hear. So whatever CIA said or suggested was not necessarily correct. The secretary of state should have known better (and probably he did). He was pressured to say in the United Nations what the White House wanted him to say.

According to CNN.com (Former aide: Powell WMD speech ‘lowest point in my life,’ August 19, 2005), “Powell’s speech, delivered on February 5, 2003, made the case for the war by presenting U.S intelligence that purported to prove that Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction. (Colonel) Wilkerson (a longtime Powell adviser who served as his chief of staff from 2002 through 2005) says the information in Powell’s presentation initially came from a document he described as ‘sort of Chinese menu’ that was provided by the White House.�

Almost one year before the invasion, Joseph C. Wilson, had undertaken a trip to Niger Republic to check if the assertion that Iraq was trying to obtain uranium yellowcake from Niger was true or not. Vice President Dick Cheney had suggested to the CIA for verifying this assertion. Wilson wrote later in his article “What I Didn’t find in Africa� (The New York Times, July 6, 2003), “In February 2002, I was informed by officials at the Central Intelligence Agency that vice president Dick Cheney’s office had questions about a particular intelligence report. While I never saw the report, I was told that it referred to a memorandum of agreement that documented the sale of uranium yellowcake – a form of lightly processed ore – by Niger to Iraq in the late 1990’s. The agency officials asked if I would travel to Niger to check out the story so they could provide a response to the vice president’s office.�

Wilson had been ambassador to Niger and knew how the hierarchy worked there. He didn’t find any evidence for such an agreement between Iraq and Niger. He told CIA that there was no such deal. He also found that a similar report had already been submitted by the then ambassador (Owens-Kirkpatrick). He wrote, “Before I left Niger, I briefed the ambassador on my findings, which were consistent with her own. I also shared my conclusions with members of her staff. In early March (2002), I arrived in Washington and promptly provided a detailed briefing to the CIA. I later shared my conclusions with the State Department African Affairs Bureau. There was nothing secret or earth-shattering in my report, just as there was nothing secret about my trip.�

In view of all this, Powell’s assertion “I didn’t know it was flawed� does not seem to hold water. It is more plausible that he went along with the administration in preparing ground for the invasion of Iraq although he personally didn’t like it. He has failed to admit that he allowed himself to be manipulated by the administration. He is disingenuous about it, perhaps unintentionally. However, he cannot exonerate himself by any degree of rationalization from sharing the responsibility of launching the Iraq war. In due time, he became its notable political casualty.