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Powell May Not Have Supported Invasion If He Knew Iraq Had No WMDs

HeadlineFeb 03, 2004

In an interview with the Washington Post, Secretary of State Colin L. Powell said that he does not know whether he would have recommended an invasion of Iraq if he had been told it had no stockpiles of banned weapons.

Powell conceded that the administration’s conviction that Hussein already had such weapons had made the case for war more urgent. Asked if he would have recommended an invasion knowing Iraq had no prohibited weapons, Powell replied, “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 said the “absence of a stockpile changes the political calculus; it changes the answer you get.”

Powell said, history will ultimately judge that the war “was the right thing to do.”

Powell is widely perceived to have placed his credibility on the line last Feb. 5 when he appeared before the United Nations Security Council and offered a forceful and detailed description of the U.S. case that Hussein possessed weapons of mass destruction. In that appearance, Powell told the council: “What we are giving you are facts and conclusions based on solid intelligence.”

Asked yesterday whether “the country is owed an explanation about the Iraq intelligence failures,” President Bush responded, “Well, first of all, I want to know all the facts.... 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.”

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