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 Editorials | July 2005 
The Rush to Invade Iraq - the inside story | Part 1
 AlJazeera.com
| | Former secretary of state Colin Powell and former CIA director George Tenet at the UN. |
In the run up to the invasion of Iraq, the Bush administration laid out the full works in an attempt to swing world opinion. The centerpiece of their case being the presentation that laid out the key pieces of intelligence the U.S. government had gathered about Saddam Hussein's weapons of mass destruction and his purported links to al-Qaeda members, delivered by then Secretary of State Colin Powell at the UN on February 5, 2003.
It was a historic speech, and yet it was one that Powell, who had argued against the war for months, was probably far from comfortable delivering.
Only a week earlier Powell appeared in the doorway between his seventh-floor office at the State Department and that of his chief of staff, Larry Wilkerson, and handed Wilkerson a 48-page dossier that had been sent over by the White House.
The document, which the White House intended that Powell use as the basis of his speech, was a laundry list of intelligence gathered by the government about Iraq's weapons programs. It had been cobbled together in Vice President Richard Cheney's office by a team led by Cheney's chief of staff, I. Lewis "Scooter" Libby, and John Hannah, the vice president's deputy assistant for national-security affairs. Both men were well-known administration hawks. A few days earlier, Libby had presided over a meeting in the White House Situation Room in which he laid out the case against Iraq, producing what one administration official called a "Chinese menu" of material.
"Go out to CIA," Powell instructed his staff chief, take whomever you need, and start work on the speech.
By the next night Wilkerson, along with several staffers and a revolving group of CIA analysts, was installed in a conference room down the hall from Director of Central Intelligence (DCI) George Tenet's office at CIA headquarters.
By the end of the first day, though, Wilkerson and the others did something surprising: they threw out the White House dossier. They suspected much of it had originated with the Iraqi National Congress (INC) and its chief, Ahmad Chalabi.
The INC, an exile group based in London, had been supplying U.S. intelligence with Iraqi defectors whose information had often proved suspect or fabricated. The problem with the INC was that its information came with an open agenda. As the INC's Washington adviser, Francis Brooke, admits, he urged the exile group to do what it could to make the case for war: "I told them, as their campaign manager, 'Go get me a "terrorist" and some WMD, because that's what the Bush administration is interested in.'"
As for Iraq's links to al-Qaeda, Powell's staff was convinced that much of that material had been funneled directly to Cheney by a tiny, separate intelligence unit set up by Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld. "We were so appalled at what had arrived from the White House," says one official.
Instead, the group turned to the CIA analysts and started from scratch. For the next several days, Powell went to Langley to oversee the process. Joined by the DCI and at times by National-Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice, Scooter Libby, and CIA deputy director John McLaughlin, Powell demanded to know the sources and reliability of the information he had been given. For everyone involved, it was a tense and frustrating process. At one point, according to several witnesses, Powell tossed several documents in the air and snapped, "This is bull****!"
The meetings stretched on for four more days and nights with Cheney's staff constantly pushing for certain intelligence on Iraq's alleged ties to "terrorists" be included - intel which Powell and his people angrily insisted was not reliable. Powell was keenly aware he was staking his credibility on the speech, and he wanted to include only solid information that could be verified. Cheney and his staff had insisted that their intelligence was, in fact, well documented. They told Powell not to worry. One morning a few days before the speech, Powell encountered Cheney in the hallway outside the Oval Office. "Your poll numbers are in the 70s," Cheney told him. "You can afford to lose a few points."
Just hours before Powell gave his speech, a call came from the CIA to the operations center of Powell's hotel suite, and Wilkerson picked up the phone. The message was clear enough: George Tenet, who was staying at another hotel, wanted one last look at the text of the speech.
Tenet, the caller made plain, was worried that Powell's staff had cut too much about Saddam's supposed links to "terrorists". Wilkerson was annoyed and baffled. Only a few hours before, Phil Mudd, the CIA's terrorism specialist, had come to Powell's hotel where Barry Lowenkron, a senior Powell aide, had informed Mudd that they had tightened the terrorism part. Mudd read the section. "Looks fine," he said, and he left around midnight.
Now the director of central intelligence was fretting and asking to see the speech in the middle of the night. It should not have been a complete surprise; Tenet served at the pleasure of President Bush, and for days the White House, and in particular Cheney's staff, had been trying to persuade Powell to link Iraq directly to the 9/11 attacks.
They had pressed him repeatedly to include a widely discredited Czech intelligence report that Mohamed Atta had met in Prague with an Iraqi intelligence officer. At the last rehearsal of the speech at CIA headquarters, Powell had thrown out the Prague material as suspect and unverified.
Lowenkron tracked Mudd down, woke him up, and asked what the hell was going on. Mudd acknowledged he had reported to Tenet that Powell's staff had tightened the terrorism section. Now it was clear why the CIA chief was demanding to see the speech in the pre-dawn hours, and it was dispatched to his hotel.
The next morning at the UN, Powell insisted that Tenet sit to his right and just behind him. It was theater; a signal to the world that Powell was relying on the CIA to make his case that Iraq had WMDs.
Cheney's office made one last-ditch effort to persuade Powell to link Saddam and al-Qaeda, and to slip the Prague story back into the speech. Only moments before Powell began speaking, Scooter Libby tried unsuccessfully to reach Wilkerson by phone. Powell's staff chief, by then inside the SC chamber, declined to take the call. "Scooter," said one State Department aide, "wasn't happy."
Powell delivered a speech that was close to what the White House wanted, describing mobile biological-weapons labs, ties to al-Qaeda, and stockpiles of anthrax. Much of it later proved to be untrue. His legacy and the Bush administration's will be forever tarnished as a result. Yet the speech was only one of many low points in a series of historic blunders the U.S. made on its path to war.
In 18 short months, from the morning after the 9/11 attacks to the dropping of the first bombs on Baghdad, George W. Bush presided over one of the most startling turnabouts in the history of world opinion.
His administration took the unprecedented goodwill America enjoyed in September 2001 and squandered it by invading a country to replace a leader who today seems not to have represented an imminent threat to the United States.
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