POWELL ON IRAQ

I'm sure the wngnuts still won't get it, but here's what Powell had to say about the Iraq War on Meet the Press, 6/10/2007:

MR. RUSSERT: In light of the fact that we did not find the weapons of mass destruction, the president still describes the war as a war of choice—war of necessity, rather than choice. Vice President Cheney said we would do the same thing all over again. Knowing what you know today, would you do the same thing all over again?

GEN. POWELL: If we knew today—or knew then what we know today, that there were no weapons of mass destruction, I would’ve had nothing to take to the United Nations. The national intelligence estimate, which was the basis of my presentation and, by the way, was the basis of the intimation that was given to the Congress that caused them to vote a resolution of support four months before my UN presentation, we rested our case on the existence of weapons of mass destruction that were a threat to us and could be given to terrorists, making it another kind of threat to us. I think without that weapons of mass destruction case, the justification would not have been there, even though Hussein was a terrible person, human rights abuses abounded, he was cheating on the UN food, Oil for Food program. But I think it is doubtful that without the weapons of mass destruction case, the president and Congress and the United Nations and those who joined us in the conflict—the British, the Italians, the Spanish, the Australians—would’ve found a persuasive enough case to support a decision to go to war.

Powell joins Wolfowitz in sayng that without the WMD, there was no case for war. On post-war Iraq, Powell gives us the consensus reality-based postion:

GEN. POWELL: ... But let’s go back to around 10 April of 2003. Saddam Hussein’s statue fell on the 9th, and from the 10th of April, for a month or two, everybody in the United States thought this was a terrific outcome. And it looked like it was going to work, just as the administration has said it was going to work. We were liberators for a moment, and then we simply did not handle the aftermath. We didn’t realize we were in an insurgency when we were in an insurgency, and we watched as the ministries that we were counting on, the government ministries we were counting on to help us take over, were being burned and looted. And we didn’t respond. And we didn’t have enough troops in the ground. That’s my judgment, not the judgment of military commanders at the time, but it’s certainly my judgment, and we didn’t have enough troops on the ground.

[SNIP]

Once the government in Baghdad came down, everything came down. And it was our responsibility then, under international law as the occupying authority as well as the liberators, to be responsible for restoring order, and we didn’t have enough troops there to restore that order nor did we have the political understanding of our obligation to restore that order.


It looks like the Cheney-Rumsfeld Cabal aren't the only ones responsble for the bad intelligence:

GEN. POWELL:... I cannot tell you why, within the intelligence community, the people who had put out burn notices—meaning don’t trust this source—those burn notices never rose to the right level. And one of the things I’m most irate about is that I have reason to believe in, in, in the CIA, the nights we were out there till midnight every night putting this presentation together, trying to make it airtight, there were people in the room who knew that burn notices had gone out on some of these sources, and that was not raised to me or to Mr. Tenet.

MR. RUSSERT: Why not?

GEN. POWELL: I can’t answer that question. This is, this is for others. You know, I’m not, I’m not the investigator of the intelligence community. But if I was, we, we would be having very long meetings about this. But I do not know why the information did not surface. I don’t know why it came—did not come to the proper analysts, I don’t know why it went—did not go to Jami Miscik, it did not go to John McLaughlin. And Mr. Tenet says he has no recollection of these conversations, nor does Mr. McLaughlin.


Here's where Powell LIES:

MR. RUSSERT: But, general, we went to war on this rationale. Why hasn’t there been accountability?

GEN. POWELL: Wait a minute. We, we didn’t go to war on the sole rationale of the biological labs.

MR. RUSSERT: Of weapons of mass destruction.

GEN. POWELL: We went to war on the basis that we have a terrible regime and what makes—it’s been terrible forever.


Strangely, Powell contradicts himself almost immediately:

...the case that we took to the world and the case that we took to the American people rested not just in his human rights abuses or his cheating on the Oil for Food program, it rested on the real and present danger of weapons of mass destruction that he could use against his neighbors, or terrorists could use against us. That was the precipitating issue in my judgment, and it turned out those weapons were not there.


Powell does slay another favorite wingnut delusion:

GEN. POWELL:... Dr. Kay went over and spent a long time, thousands of people went over to, to work with him. And then Charlie Duelfer took it over, and he looked for a long time. And they all came to the conclusion there are none, and they’re not buried in the ground, they weren’t shipped to Syria. We got it wrong.