10 May 2012 2:55 pm
Colin Powell's New Book: War With Iraq Was Never Debated In his new book, former Secretary of State Colin Powell provides what may be the most authoritative confirmation yet that there was never a considered debate in the George W. Bush White House about whether going to war in Iraq was really a good idea.In a chapter discussing what he calls his infamous February 2003 speech to the United Nations where he authoritatively presented what was later exposed as gross misinformation about Iraqi weapons of mass destruction, Powell notes that by that time, war was approaching.By then, the President did not think war could be avoided, Powell writes. He had crossed the line in his own mind, even though the NSC [National Security Council] had never met -- and never would meet -- to discuss the decision.The National Security Council, which was at the time led by Condoleezza Rice, is the presidents foremost advisory body for national security and foreign policy. Bush insisted in his own 2010 memoir, "Decision Points," that the invasion was something he came to support only reluctantly and after a long period of reflection. During his book tour, he even cast himself as a dissenting voice in the run-up to war. I didn't wanna use force, he said. But Powell supports the increasingly well-documented conclusion that there was actually no decision-making point -- or decision-making process -- during the events between the 9/11 terrorist attacks and the March 2003 invasion of Iraq, which had nothing to do with those attacks. Former CIA Director George Tenet made an admission similar to Powells in his own 2007 memoir. "There was never a serious debate that I know of within the administration about the imminence of the Iraqi threat," he wrote. Nor "was there ever a significant discussion" about the possibility of containing Iraq without an invasion.Indeed, history shows that Bush had long wanted to strike out at Saddam Hussein and was trying to link Iraq to 9/11 within a day of the terrorist attacks.[...]In Powells explanation of how he came to provide the misleading and inaccurate account of Iraqs WMD capability at the UN, the former secretary of state points an incriminating finger at Vice President Dick Cheneys office -- confirming previous reports such as the one by Karen DeYoung, in her Powell biography. In the new book, Powell describes his reaction to the initial WMD case from the White House. It was a disaster. It was incoherent, he writes. 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.Powell gives himself credit for rejecting continued appeals from Cheney to add assertions that had been rejected months earlier to links between Iraq and 9/11 and other terrorist acts. All in all, Powell acknowledges that the speech was one of my most momentous failures, the one with the widest-ranging impact. But he also concludes that every senior U.S. official would have made the exact same case, He adds: I get mad when bloggers accuse me of lying -- of knowing the information was false. I didnt.Read More....Maybe if Powell had the courage to speak up at the time or resign, we could have avoided that debacle. Edited by MistyBlue, 10 May 2012 - 02:57 PM.