Colin Powell's New Book: War With Iraq Never Debated

[Karolina Dean...Big money weave a mighty web]

WASHINGTON -- 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 president’s foremost advisory body for
national security and foreign policy.

The book, “It Worked For Me: In Life and Leadership,” which will be
released May 22, is largely a series of leadership parables from
Powell, who now spends a lot of time on the lecture circuit. The
Huffington Post obtained an advance copy.

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 Powell’s
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.

The first concrete evidence was the Downing Street Memos first
published in 2005, which documented the conclusions of British
officials after high-level talks in Washington in July 2002 that
“[m]ilitary action was now seen as inevitable. Bush wanted to remove
Saddam, through military action, justified by the conjunction of
terrorism and WMD. But the intelligence and facts were being fixed
around the policy.”

An analysis of the historical record by the National Security Archives
in 2010 concluded that, “In contrast to an extensive record of
planning for actual military operations, there is no record that
President George W. Bush ever made a considered decision for war. All
of the numerous White House and Pentagon meetings concerned moving the
project forward, not whether a march into conflict was a proper course
for the United States and its allies. Deliberations were instrumental
to furthering the war project, not considerations of the basic
course.”

The war, which President Barack Obama officially brought to an end
Dec. 31, cost the U.S. government around $3 trilllion, left 4,487 U.S.
servicemembers dead and killed more than 100,000 Iraqis. The Pentagon
counts 32,226 U.S. servicemembers wounded, but the toll, including
cumulative psychological and physiological damage, may be as high as
half a million.

In Powell’s explanation of how he came to provide the misleading and
inaccurate account of Iraq’s WMD capability at the UN, the former
secretary of state points an incriminating finger at Vice President
Dick Cheney’s 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 didn’t.”

The lesson of all this, Powell writes, is to follow these guidelines:
“Always try to get over failure quickly. Learn from it. Study how you
contributed to it. If you are responsible for it, own up to it.”

But Powell didn’t exactly own up to this for years. His former chief
of staff, Col. Larry Wilkerson, first went public in 2005 with details
of a secret cabal led by the vice president which hijacked U.S.
foreign policy and hoodwinked the president. Wilkerson also argued for
years that there was never a formal decision to go to war. Powell
conspicuously failed to back him up at the time.

So what does Wilkerson make of Powell’s conclusory lessons? “Powell’s
rules are for everyone else,” he told HuffPost on Wednesday.