Authors: Colin Powell
It Worked For Me (19 page)
The United Nations
A
lthough it has been many years since I gave my famous—or infamous—Iraq WMD speech to the UN and the world, I am asked about it or read about it almost every day. February 5, 2003, the day of the speech, is as burned into my memory as my own birthday. The event will earn a prominent paragraph in my obituary.
“Is it a blot on your record?” Barbara Walters asked in my first major interview after leaving the State Department.
“Yes,” I answered, “and there is nothing I can do about it.”
What’s done is done. It’s over. I live with it.
Most people in public life have passed through a defining experience they’d prefer to forget, and to be forgotten, but won’t be. So what can you do about it? How do you carry the burden?
In January 2003, as war with Iraq was approaching, President Bush felt we needed to present our case against Iraq to the public and the international community. By then, the President did not think war could be avoided. He had crossed the line in his own mind, even though the NSC had never met—and never would meet—to discuss the decision. On January 30, 2003, in the Oval Office, President Bush told me it was now time to present our case against Iraq to the United Nations.
The date he selected for the presentation was February 5, just a few days away.
The speech would cover several areas, from the Hussein regime’s abysmal human rights record, to its violations of UN resolutions, to its support of terrorists. But its chief focus was to be its weapons of mass destruction. Though Saddam did not use WMDs during Desert Storm, he had them. He had used chemical weapons against his own people years earlier, and he had used them against the Iranians in the 1980–88 Iran-Iraq War. The intelligence community believed he not only still had WMD stockpiles, but also had continued to produce them. In the post-9/11 atmosphere there was deep concern that these weapons could get into the hands of terrorists.
Although the intelligence community differed about aspects of the Iraqi WMD program, there was no disagreement over the fact that the Iraqis had one. They were certain that Saddam had WMDs and was producing more. (UN weapons inspectors were always skeptical about these conclusions.)
Three months before my UN speech, the Director of Central Intelligence, at the request of Congress, had delivered to Congress a National Intelligence Estimate (NIE) that supported the intelligence community’s judgment. Based on that NIE, Congress passed a resolution giving the President authority to take military action if the problem could not be solved peacefully through the UN.
The NIE contained a number of strong, definitive statements, including one claiming that Iraq was reconstituting its nuclear weapons program. In another: “Saddam probably has stocked at least 100 metric tons (MT) and possibly as much as 500 MT of CW [chemical warfare] agents—
much of it added in the last year
[my emphasis].” And in still another, the NIE claimed that the Iraqis had constructed mobile biological warfare production vans.
Though mostly circumstantial and inferential, the NIE’s evidence was persuasive. It was accepted by our military commanders, the majority of Congress, the national security team, and the President, as well as by a number of our friends and allies. In the aftermath of 9/11, the President did not believe the nation could accept the risk of leaving a WMD capability in Saddam’s hands.
Recognizing that we would eventually have to make our case to the international community, the President had directed the NSC staff to prepare that case.
Sometime later in the day of my January 30 meeting with the President, my staff received the WMD case the NSC staff had been working on. It was a disaster. It was incoherent. Assertions were made that either had no sourcing or no connection to the NIE. I asked George Tenet, Director of Central Intelligence (DCI), what had happened. He had nothing to do with it, he told me. He had provided the NIE and raw material to National Security Advisor Condoleezza Rice’s office. He had no idea what happened to it after that.
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.
An intelligence assessment presents the evidence and the conclusions drawn from the evidence. A lawyer’s brief argues guilt or innocence. Our biggest problem with the Libby presentation was that we couldn’t track the facts and assertions with the NIE or other intelligence. The DCI could not stand behind it, and it was therefore worthless to us.
There was no way we could use the presentation as it came to us, and we had roughly four days to redo it. I asked for a delay, but the President had already publicly announced the date for my speech, and the UN had put it on the calendar.
“Okay,” I thought. “we can handle that.” I was disturbed, but not deeply troubled. We weren’t working from scratch; we had the NIE and the CIA’s raw material to draw from. On the other hand, our case had to be airtight. We were facing a moment like Adlai Stevenson’s UN speech during the 1962 Cuban Missile Crisis, when he demonstrated to the world that the Soviets were beyond doubt installing nuclear-capable missiles in Cuba.
My staff moved to the CIA to work with Director Tenet, his deputy John McLaughlin, and their analysts. They worked for four days and four nights. Every night Dr. Rice, other White House officials, and I joined the group. The conference room was packed. We spent hours going over every detail, trying to come up with solid evidence, discarding any item that seemed a stretch or wasn’t multisourced. Some items that I had to reject came from the Vice President, who urged us to tilt our presentation back toward Scooter Libby’s by adding assertions that had been rejected months earlier to links between Iraq and 9/11 and other terrorist acts. These assertions weren’t backed by what the intelligence community believed and stood behind.
The presentation was finalized at our mission in New York the night before I was to present it to the Security Council. My staff worked on it well into the night, and Tenet and McLaughlin stood by every word.
The next morning at the Security Council, I spoke for an hour and a half, broadcast live throughout the world. George sat right behind me. Though I wouldn’t call it an Adlai Stevenson moment, my feeling was that the presentation went well. The British and Spanish foreign ministers supported us; the French foreign minister opposed us . . . about what we expected. On balance, we seemed to have made a powerful case.
The war began six weeks later, and Baghdad fell to our forces on April 9. In the first weeks no WMDs were found. In the weeks to come, hundreds of inspectors scoured Iraq. Scattered pieces of WMD-related debris were discovered, but no working WMDs were found. As the world knows, no WMDs were ever found. There were none.
Although he retained the capability to start up again, Hussein had no existing WMD capability. (Predictably, conspiracy theories claimed that he had had his WMDs buried or sent to Syria. Those theories were baseless.)
Example: the biological vans reported by the CIA. At one point a van was discovered and photographed that seemed to fit the description of the biological vans the CIA had reported. President Bush quickly claimed the photos proved our case. But when my State Department intelligence staff examined them, they concluded that the vans were not bio labs. I agreed. The van that was photographed was crude, open, and poorly constructed; it only vaguely resembled a sophisticated facility for producing biological weapons. This was the closest anybody in Iraq came to finding WMDs.
Even though it was obvious to me and my staff that there was no way the vans could have produced biological weapons, a month after we got the photos, the CIA published a twenty-eight-page pamphlet insisting that was what they were for.
Over the following weeks, snippets of information from the CIA were briefed to the President and then to me that totally destroyed the credibility of other sources the CIA had claimed were solid. I was bewildered. How could we have been so far off the mark? How could our seemingly solid case have so devastatingly unraveled? Where could the NIE judgment have come from that the Iraqis had hundreds of tons of chemical warfare agents, “
much of it added in the last year
”?
In August, four months after the fall of Baghdad, even as their sources collapsed and no WMDs had been found, the CIA continued to formally report that based on what they knew and believed at the time they were made, they stood by their original judgments. In its findings the Iraq Intelligence Commission, created by presidential executive order and led by former senator Chuck Robb and Judge Laurence Silberman, detailed the intelligence community’s failures in analysis and judgment. It was one of the worst intelligence failures in U.S. history.
Everyone remembers my UN presentation. It had enormous impact and influence in this country and worldwide. It convinced many people that we were on the right course. Members of Congress told me that I had persuaded them to vote for a resolution supporting the President—even though they had voted for that resolution three months before I spoke to the UN. My presentation became
the
case against Iraq. Who remembers any other?
Yet seldom is it mentioned that every senior U.S. official would have made the exact same case, or that many of them were in fact making that case on television and in other public appearances. We had all been convinced by the same evidence. None of us knew that much of the evidence was wrong.
If we had known there were no WMDs, there would have been no war.
Because the case against Iraq has become identified in so many minds with my UN speech, I still get asked about it frequently, and it’s a target for regular attacks on the Internet. Were we lying? Did we know the evidence was false?
The answer to these questions is no.
There are other questions: Why did so many senior people fall for such shaky sources? Why and how did the CIA fail so massively? Did analysts decide to tell us what they thought we wanted to hear? It was even possible that we had been tricked by Iraqi disinformation. If Saddam wanted us to believe he had WMDs, then he convinced us.
I have no answers to those questions. I wish I did.
My questions don’t stop there. I’ve asked myself again and again: “Should I have seen the NIE’s weaknesses? Should I have sniffed them out? Did my critical instincts fail me?”
And then I read articles and books by former CIA officials describing their shock at the unsupported claims in my UN speech. Where were they when the NIE was being prepared months earlier, or when these same claims were being written into the President’s January 2003 State of the Union address?
Yes, I was annoyed, and I’m still annoyed. And yes, I wish there weren’t so many unanswered questions. And yes, I get mad when bloggers accuse me of lying—of knowing the information was false. I didn’t. And yes, a blot, a failure, will always be attached to me and my UN presentation. But I am mad mostly at myself for not having smelled the problem. My instincts failed me.
Perhaps if we had more than four days, the weaknesses would have been uncovered. Maybe not; the intelligence community was telling me what they believed was known.
But I knew that I had to put aside my annoyance, distress, and disappointment. I knew that I had to live with the blot.
I was still the Secretary of State with a full plate. I had to shake this burden off, get on with my work, and learn from the experience. I learned to be more demanding of intelligence analysts. I learned to sharpen my natural skepticism toward apparently all-knowing experts.
I have never before written my account of the events surrounding my 2003 UN speech. I’ll probably never write another.
It was by no means my first, but it was one of my most momentous failures, the one with the widest-ranging impact. And yet it was like all the others in this one respect. I try to deal with them all the same way. I try 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. Though others may have greater responsibility for it than you do, don’t look for that as an escape hatch. Once you have analyzed what went wrong and what you did wrong, internalize the lessons and then move on. As always, drive through life looking through the front windshield and not the rearview mirror. Don’t become one of those pests who can’t stop talking about their by now ancient slights, betrayals, hurts, or disasters. Don’t wallow with your sympathetic friends. Learn and move on.
I am glad Saddam Hussein was removed from power. If he had escaped judgment in 2003 and got free of UN sanctions, I have no doubt he would have gone back to developing and producing weapons of mass destruction. That threat is gone. I admire the dedication of our troops and those of our coalition partners who fought the battles and are now home. I share a soldier’s grief and sympathy for those who made the supreme sacrifice and for those who were wounded and scarred. And for their families.
As we move on, we must make sure the lessons learned are never forgotten or ignored.
L
eaders must be problem solvers. If you are not solving problems, you are no longer leading. Hopefully the problems you are solving relate to you, your organization, or your own interests. That is not always the case. Sometimes a problem comes totally out of the blue. It is of no interest to you, you have no skin in the game, you don’t know the first thing about it, and yet you have to take it on.
Out-of-the-blue problem solving can grow even more complex if your organization happens to be the United States government, which—for better or worse—has long been the world’s go-to problem solver.
On a quiet Thursday afternoon in July 2002, I received a phone call from the new Spanish foreign minister, Ana Palacio, in office for just a few days. I managed only a couple of congratulatory words before she got to the reason for her call. “We have a crisis in the Mediterranean,” she said excitedly, “and you need to do something about it.”
I had no idea what she was talking about, but rather than look like an idiot, I bought time. “I’ve been getting updated on the situation; let me call you back in a few minutes.”
I put down the phone and screamed at the staff in the outer office, “What crisis in the Mediterranean? Haven’t I told you about ‘telling me early’ and ‘no surprises’? Is there a war going on that I don’t know about?”
The staff called our resident European and African experts, who came charging into my office. “Mr. Secretary, here’s what’s going on. There’s an island two hundred meters off the coast of Morocco named Perejil—‘parsley’ in Spanish. In English we usually just call it ‘Parsley Island.’ Perejil belongs to Spain, and has for four hundred years. Morocco disputes that, as well as Spain’s ownership of two other enclaves on the coast of Morocco, Ceuta and Melilla.”
“I never heard of the place,” I replied. “I thought I knew the Mediterranean.”
“Well, sir, it’s a tiny, rocky outcropping about the size of a football field. Nothing much grows there except parsley, and there are no inhabitants other than feral goats. Sunbathers and drug runners occasionally stay overnight.”
“Yeah, yeah, okay, so why do I have a crisis?”
“Well, sir, we have just had the first invasion of Europe from Africa since World War II. For reasons that aren’t clear, the Moroccans decided to seize the island, perhaps to celebrate the king’s recent wedding. The invading force consisted of a dozen Moroccan frontier guards who paddled across and put up a tent and two Moroccan flags. And they had a radio.”
“All right, then what happened?”
“Well, a couple of days later, the Spaniards noticed they had lost their island, and all hell broke loose. It became a political crisis in Spain. The Spanish government notified NATO and the European Union. NATO punted; told them it was a bilateral problem. But the EU condemned the invasion. ‘This is clearly a regrettable incident,’ they announced. ‘It constitutes a violation of Spanish territory.’ The Moroccans took the issue to the Organization of the Islamic Conference (OIC) and got their support. No surprises there.”
My guys continued: “Well, then the Spaniards attacked with naval forces, retook the island, and put the Moroccans back on their own beach. There are now seventy-five Spanish Legionnaires on the rock.”
I had to smile. “Are you all pulling my leg? Isn’t this a scene from
The Mouse that Roared
”?—alluding to the classic Peter Sellers comedy about a minuscule European country that gets hold of a superweapon by mistake and makes the great powers tremble.
“No sir, it has become a serious international issue.”
I wondered, Why is Ana calling me? I was afraid to answer, but I had to call her back.
When I got Ana on the phone, I explained that I was now fully up to date on the crisis. “How could I be of help?” I asked reluctantly.
“Well,” she replied, “we’ve got our island back; now our Legionnaires want to come home. But the Moroccans are waiting on the beach and might try to retake the island. The OIC supports them; the EU supports us; and so you have to solve it.”
Bingo, I’ve got the brass ring.
Fortunately, no one was hurt in the invasion or the counterattack. When the Legionnaires arrived, only six Moroccans actually remained to garrison the island. The Legionnaires escorted them back to Morocco.
The solution was obvious: go back to the status quo ante bellum, the way it had been for four hundred years. It sounded simple to do.
Over the next forty-eight hours I made multiple calls to Ana Palacio and to the Moroccan foreign minister, Mohamed Benaissa, a distinguished diplomat I had known for years. All kinds of arguments surfaced, but we successfully buried them. Finally, on Saturday morning we had a deal (I was now making all these arrangements from my home by telephone). We agreed that the Legionnaires would leave the island by 11:30 my time, a few hours hence. I was congratulating the two foreign ministers when they suddenly demanded that the deal had to have a written agreement.
“Go write one,” I suggested.
Nope, I had to do it.
“Me? But who will sign it?”
“Easy, we want you to sign it.”
They expected me to write and sign an international binding agreement between two foreign countries? It’s a good thing I was home and my lawyers weren’t around.
I went to work on my home computer. About ten minutes later, I had knocked out a one-page agreement. I faxed it to them, and more arguments broke out. The biggest was over the name of the island. Morocco objected to the Spanish name, Perejil, and the Spaniards wouldn’t accept Leila, the preferred Moroccan name.
Hmmm. I called down to the State Department operations center. “Find our cartographers and get me the latitude and longitude of the crummy rock down to the minute and second.”
They couldn’t argue over that, and the two foreign ministers agreed to the document about a place with no name.
The Spaniards took the agreement to Prime Minister José María Aznar, and they briefed King Juan Carlos. They both okayed it.
But there was a hang-up at the other end. According to Minister Benaissa, King Mohammed VI was in a car in the desert and couldn’t be reached. They couldn’t approve the document until he had seen it.
It was now getting dark over the island. We only had thirty minutes to safely execute the departure of the Legionnaires. If they couldn’t leave on time, the entire agreement I had cobbled together might fall apart.
“Time is of the essence,” I told Benaissa. “I have other things to do,” such as playing in our pool with my grandsons, Jeffrey and Bryan, who were about to arrive. “Don’t know how you are going to do it, but I need to speak to the king in the next ten minutes.” I had known the king for a number of years and had been close to his late father. I could take a few liberties.
Five minutes later the phone rang; His Majesty was on the line. I explained the essence of the document and made clear the urgent need for his approval.
“I can’t approve it without studying it,” he told me. “And I don’t have a copy.”
“Time doesn’t permit that,” I countered respectfully. “Your Majesty,” I continued, “the United States and Morocco have been friends for over two hundred years. We would never knowingly do anything against your interest, nor would we do that to our other friend and ally, Spain. Sir, just trust us.”
He paused for a moment, then announced, “Mr. Secretary, I approve. We trust America.”
I thanked him, hung up, printed the document, signed it, and faxed it to Madrid and Rabat. The Legionnaires left shortly thereafter, and the Moroccans stayed on the beach. Ana went to Rabat a few weeks later for a lunch and conference with Benaissa, and all has been well ever since, at least with respect to Parsley Island.
The United States is the necessary nation. Despite our own problems, mistakes, and malfunctions, the world continues to look to us to solve or help with problems and crises, big and not so big, whether we have an equity in them or not. We are trusted. We are trusted to fight aggression, to relieve suffering, to serve as an inspiration to freedom-seeking people, to stand alongside our friends, and to welcome the tired, the poor, the huddled masses of other lands yearning to breathe free. That is who we have been, now are, and always must be.
After it was all over, Prime Minister Aznar called to thank me. “I’m thinking of vacationing next weekend with my family on Perejil.”
I reminded him that the United States Navy still had ships in the western Mediterranean. We had a good laugh. On Monday, my lawyers were not too happy.
Ana and I became the best of friends.
