The United States Secretary of State, Colin Powell, on Tuesday revealed the first cracks of doubt from within President George Bush’s administration about the decision to go to war against Iraq, acknowledging he might not have supported an invasion had he known Saddam Hussein had no weapons of mass destruction.
Powell’s admission that the ”absence of a stockpile changes the political calculus” was the first public sign that the Bush administration may be having second thoughts on its decision to wage war.
However, the comments, made to the Washington Post on Tuesday, seem to be a momentary lapse from Powell’s enduring belief that it was right to go to war. He maintained that Saddam had continued to pose a danger to the world — even without an active arsenal.
He tried to minimise the political fallout from his comments by telling reporters on Tuesday: ”There should be no doubt that we have done the right thing and history certainly will be the test of that.”
But Powell’s protestations are unlikely to distract attention from a most astonishing admission, especially during an election year.
As secretary of state, it was Powell’s role to convince the international community to support Bush’s decision to go to war.
Nearly a year ago he made a forceful presentation to the United Nations, using satellite maps and radio intercepts, to argue that Iraq had an active weapons programme. It was based on ”facts and conclusions based on solid evidence”, he said then.
That certainty has vanished following last week’s testimony by the chief US weapons inspector, David Kay. He told Congress that the US’s prewar intelligence was simply wrong, and Saddam had no weapons of mass destruction.
Asked whether he would have helped build the case for war had he known at the time, Powell told the Washington Post: ”I don’t know, because it was the stockpile that presented the final little piece that made it more of a real and present danger and threat to the region and to the world.”
He went on: ”The absence of a stockpile changes the political calculus. It changes the answer you get.”
The comments were a deviation from the Bush administration’s response to the news that Saddam was no longer a nuclear, biological or chemical weapons power at the time of the war. Although officials have been retreating from the prewar certainties for months, the White House has avoided direct comment on Kay’s report.
On Monday, three days after Kay admitted there was no arsenal, Bush told reporters it was too soon to comment.
”First of all, I want to know all the facts,” he said. ”What we don’t know yet is what we thought and what the Iraqi survey group has found, and we want to look at that.”
Powell was more forthright. After expressing his own doubts, he told the newspaper that the US’s prewar assertions about Saddam’s arsenal were in line with thinking in Britain and other intelligence services.
He also maintained that Kay’s report supported White House contention that Saddam without his weapons remained a threat to the world because he had never lost the desire to reconstitute the arsenal.
”With respect to stockpiles, we were wrong, terribly wrong,” Powell said. ”But he also came to other conclusions that deal, I think, with intent and capability, which resulted in a threat the president felt he had to respond to.”
The secretary of state also defended his speech to the UN.
”There wasn’t a word that was in the presentation that was put in that was not totally cleared by the intelligence community,” he said.
‘This is one for the FO’
How British institutions reacted to the Powell question:
- Ministry of Defence: ”I do not think this is an issue for us. I think it is one for the FO [Foreign Office].”
- Foreign Office: ”We have not got any comment.”
- Downing Street: ”We may not have found stockpiles of WMD [weapons of mass destruction]. Nevertheless, there were systematic breaches of [UN resolution] 1441.”
— Guardian Unlimited Â