Powell, the first secretary of state in the administration of George W. Bush, the former US president, which declared war on Iraq in 2003, told Al Jazeera on the 10th anniversary of the worst terror attacks on US soil that the information was a “blot on my record”.
“It turned out, as we discovered later, that a lot of sources that had been attested to by the intelligence community were wrong,” Powell said in Washington, DC.
“I understood the consequences of that failure and, as I said, I deeply regret that the information – some of the information, not all of it – was wrong,” said the former chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff.
“It has blotted my record, but – you know – there’s nothing I can do to change that blot. All I can say is that I gave it the best analysis that I could.”
Powell, who was secretary of state from 2002 to 2005, gave an elaborate description of Iraq’s weapons programme in the run-up to the war, saying “ambition and hatred” were enough to bring Iraq and al-Qaeda together and build more sophisticated bombs.
“I gave that speech on a four days’ notice based on an intelligence estimate that had been done months before and provided to Congress, and every word in that speech was gone over by the director of the Central intelligence Agency (CIA) and his deputy director and all experts,” he said.
In the United Kingdom, a traditional ally of the US which backed the military campaign, Tony Blair, who was prime minister at the time of the invasion, said Iraq had the capacity to deploy weapons of mass destruction in 45 minutes.
Blair has since been criticised for allegedly exaggerating that claim and for presenting intelligence that overstated the case for going to war. But Powell said he did not exaggerate the information he presented to Congress.
“There is nothing that I made up; there’s nothing that I stuck in there,” he said.
“Some people tried to stick extra things in there that the intelligence community wouldn’t verify and I said ‘no’.
“And so when I presented that information, it was information that the president believed in; information that my colleagues in government believed in.”
Powell said he “presented the best evidence that we had” and that the United Kingdom and other nations believed it.
I never understood why Iraq was invaded first they were sanctioned for 10 years , you would hear lack of medicine in hospitals and supplies and , economy tanked , then there was a disruptive war
