‘Meet the Press’ transcript for June 10, 2007

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.  What makes it so terrible now, in the aftermath of 9/11, is that they had demonstrated that they will use these weapons.  They’ve used them against their own people, they’ve used them against the enemy.  They had them at the time of the first Gulf war when I was chairman.  And the intelligence community said and had every reason to believe that they not only had the capability of having them again, but they have stockpiles.  And that was the precipitating cause.  Now, some in the administration have subsequently been saying, “Well, yeah, but maybe the weapons aren’t there, but they’re bad guys anyway.  I’m glad the regime is gone.” I’m glad the regime is gone.  I’m glad Saddam Hussein is gone.  But 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.

MR. RUSSERT:  If that was the case, and you were the commander in chief, wouldn’t you demand to know what happened, what went wrong and why?

GEN. POWELL:  There have been a number of investigations.  I mean, Mr. Silverman—Judge Silverman did an investigation.  We have different congressional investigations under way.  But, you know, the responsibility for looking into all that rests with the president of the United States, the national intelligence community, and, and the Congress.  And I don’t know if Congress has been using all the oversight power that it has to look into these kinds of matters.

MR. RUSSERT:  Let me ask you about a quote from your former chief of staff, Lawrence Wilkerson.  He say I—he said, “I recall vividly the secretary of state walking into my office.  He said, ‘I wonder what will happen if we put half a million troops on the ground in Iraq and comb the country from one end to the other and don’t find a single weapon of mass destruction?’”

GEN. POWELL:  Larry has a better recollection of that than I do, but I wouldn’t—I’m not going to dispute Larry.  I wish we had put a half million troops on the ground.  We would be in an entirely different situation whether there were weapons of mass destruction or not.  We didn’t put a half million troops on the ground.  But there was always a possibility that we were wrong. We believed we were right, and the basis of fact that the CIA was using, the intelligence community was using, was consistent throughout 2001, throughout 2002, and all the way throughout 2003, long after the war.  The agency was still looking for these weapons of mass destruction stockpiles.  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.

MR. RUSSERT:  But you might of—it seems like you had some doubts.

GEN. POWELL:  Well, we—you know, until somebody could show me something, you have to always keep, in the back of your mind, some element of questioning. I’m a soldier.  I’m trained to consider all possibilities.  But when we prepared for this presentation at the UN, and, of course, it was the most vivid demonstration of our intelligence, but it was not something that was made up just for that presentation.  It reflected the consistent view of the intelligence community over time to 2001, 2002, 2003, and also reflected the kind of intelligence that President Clinton was being given in 1998 when he operated—executed Operation Desert Fox, which bombed Iraq for a period of four days.  Same reason.  They had this capability and they had these stockpiles, and something had to be done about it.

The thing about it, Tim, is when we decided to take it to the UN, I worked for seven weeks to get a UN resolution, a unanimous resolution.  as it turned out, 1441, and that resolution had a get out of jail card for Saddam Hussein.  It gave him, I think it was 30 or 60 days, to come forward and answer all the questions that are outstanding about your capability and your stockpiles and what you’ve done with it.  And, instead of seriously trying to answer that question, he just dumped a whole bunch of stuff on us that really wasn’t credible or believable.  And it was at that point that he set us on the road to war.  He had a chance to stop this.  And when I briefed the president in August of 2002 about the potential consequences of the war, and he said, “What do we do?” I said, “I recommend we go to the UN.” He accepted that recommendation, we went to the UN.  But I said to the president at that time, you know, “He could satisfy us, and if he satisfies us, if he makes it clear that here is it—here it all is, then you have to be prepared to accept that, and there may not be a war, and we may have a changed regime but not a regime change.”

MR. RUSSERT:  What did the president say?

GEN. POWELL:  He said yes, he understood that.

MR. RUSSERT:  Karen DeYoung wrote a book called “Soldier:  The Life of Colin Powell,” and she quotes someone very close and near and dear to you, your wife of almost 45 years, Alma Powell, and this what she says:  “Powell’s wife Alma thought Colin had been callously used to promote a war she wished had never happened.  ‘They needed him to do it,’ Alma said, ‘because they knew people would believe him.’” Do you feel used?

GEN. POWELL:  No.  I feel that when—I was part of an administration that, over a period of years, had created a body of evidence and intelligence that said this is a dangerous regime.  And I had no love for Saddam Hussein, as you can appreciate.  For 12 years I’d been listening to, “Well, why didn’t you take him out back in 1991?” So I had no truck with this regime, and we had a steady stream of intelligence reports that suggested he was a danger.  And he became more of a danger after 9/11 when the possibility emerges that some of these terrible weapons he was working on—and let there be no doubt that he was continuing to work on these.  He was continuing to hope that he could escape the boundaries of the UN sanctions and get back to making these kinds of weapons.  And if you believe otherwise, I think that would be a naive belief.  And so, throughout that time, we had this consistent body of evidence.  And when the president called me in and said, “I want you to go to the United Nations and make the presentation,” I didn’t blink in the slightest because I had been using that intelligence all along in my presentations and had every reason to believe it.  The problem we had in the next five days was that a product was being worked on in the White House and the NSC which was unusable.  It was more a legal brief than it was an analysis.

MR. RUSSERT:  But did you think at that time a pre-emptive war was the best course for the US, or did you think that Saddam was already boxed because of the sanctions?

GEN. POWELL:  I would’ve preferred no war because I couldn’t see clearly the unintended consequences.  But we tried to avoid that war with the UN sanctions and putting increasing diplomatic and international pressure on Saddam Hussein.  But when I took it to the president and said, “This is a war we ought to see if we can avoid,” I also said and made it clear to him, “If, at the end of the day, it is a war that we cannot avoid, I’ll be with you all the way.” That’s, that’s part of being part of a team.  And therefore I couldn’t have any other outcome, and I had no reservations about supporting the president in war.  And I think things could’ve turned out differently after the middle of April if we had responded in a different way.

MR. RUSSERT:  After your presentation to the United Nations and you realized the information that you’d been given was faulty, did you ever thing of resigning?

GEN. POWELL:  The information was faulty, but it wasn’t faulty because people in the intelligence community were lying or trying to deceive.  It was faulty because intelligence sometimes can be faulty, and it wasn’t managed properly, it wasn’t processed properly and we should have realized the inadequacy of some of our sourcing earlier.  But it wasn’t venal behavior on the part of the intelligence community.

MR. RUSSERT:  Four years later, are we safer now with the situation in Iraq the way it is?

GEN. POWELL:  I think in terms of another 9/11 attack, we are safer, not because of Iraq necessarily.  We are safer because we’ve done a better job of integrating our intelligence and law enforcement activities.  We have done a better job of protecting the nation and also protecting the traveling public. So in 9/11 terms, I think we are safer.

With respect to Iraq, we have a very dangerous situation.  You know, most of the world is moving in a positive way in many, many ways, whether it’s the trans-Atlantic relationship or our relationship with China, but in this arc, which is centered now in Iraq, we have serious difficulties, serious difficulties that have to be resolved, one, by getting this civil war resolved.  And it’s going to take the Iraqis to do that.  Two, I believe we should be talking to all of Iraq’s neighbors.  I think we should be talking to Iran, we should be talking to Syria.  Not to solve a particular problem or crisis of the moment or the day, but just to have dialogue with people who are involved in this region in so many ways.  And so I think it is shortsighted not to talk to Syria and Iran and everybody else in the region, and not just for the purpose of making a demand on them “and I’ll only talk to you if you meet the demand that I want to talk to you about.” That’s not the way to have a dialogue in my judgement.

MR. RUSSERT:  Guantanamo, the torture.  When John McCain was seeking ways to deal with the issue of torture, you wrote him a letter and you said this: “The world is beginning to doubt the moral basis of our fight against terrorism.”

GEN. POWELL:  Right.

MR. RUSSERT:  What do you mean?

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