SECRETARY POWELL: Yes. I think it was the right thing to do, and I think history will demonstrate that. It's still a difficult environment when you see bombings of the kind we had yesterday, and we still lose the lives of brave coalition soldiers who are going in harm's way for their nation, as well as for the people of Iraq. But nevertheless, we have to, on the other side of that ledger, look at -- a terrible dictator is gone, the possibility of a democracy, which I think we will realize, and we can debate weapons of mass destruction. I'll get to that in a minute, but we don't have to worry about them any more. We won't have to worry about graves being filled. We won't have to worry about the treasure of a nation being wasted on weapons and palaces. I think we had an opportunity over time to build a more stable region, with the example of Iraq.
Let me just go right in to the, kind of the issue of the day, which is weapons of mass destruction. As you may have heard the President at the Cabinet meeting a few moments ago saying he will be announcing a Commission to look into this question; but not just look into the question of weapons of mass destruction in Iraq, but more broadly, how one goes after proliferation targets in countries around the world. Do we need to do things differently? How does one look into a closed society of this nature that is doing everything it can to keep you from finding out what they're doing? What did we learn from our experiences in Iraq, what we learned from our experiences with Libya and with Iran, with North Korea -- review of all of that. So the President will formally announce this Commission -- I can't say when. We're still doing some discussions with candidates. That's why you haven't seen it formally announced. We pretty much announced it at the Cabinet meeting this morning.
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But what was the threat that we were worried about? What was the threat that precipitated it? Not just the human rights abuses, which were certainly awful, and what he had done to his people, awful; but what was the threat that we talked about with respect to weapons of mass destruction? And to talk about a threat, you have to look at intent, and then you have to look at capabilities, and the two of them together equal a threat.
With respect to intent, Saddam Hussein and his regime clearly had the intent. They never lost it. It's an intent that manifested itself many years ago when they actually used such horrible weapons against their enemies in Iran, and against their own people. It's a fact. And that's a statement of his intent, his desire to have the capability and use the capability.
Nothing in the history of Saddam Hussein's regime, or the history of him as an individual suggested that he had ever abandoned that intent. It manifested itself by him deceiving and denying access to inspectors for information concerning his programs for years. You'll recall that from '91 to '95, he kept denying they had a bioweapons program until there was a defector who pointed it out, and then he couldn't deny it any longer. But the denial continued up until the last day of that regime, and so the intent was clear.
The intent was manifested by him keeping in place certain capabilities. Let me shift to capabilities. There are different levels of capability. One level is, do you have the intellectual ability? Do you have people who know how to develop such weapons, and do you keep training such people, and do you keep them in place, and do you keep them working together?
Do you also then keep in place the kind of technical infrastructure, labs and facilities, that will lend themselves to the production of weapons of mass destruction, and did he do that? Yes, he did that.
Do you then start to put in place, if you want to have the capability, the actual facilities that could produce such weapons in a moment in time, now, or some future moment in time? And I think there is evidence to suggest that he was keeping a warm base, that there was an intent on his part to have that capability.
The UN accepted it as something that was fact for a period of many years and had no reason to believe after the inspectors came out that there might not still be stockpiles that were within the country; and it was certainly the basis upon which the UN passed 1441, with the belief from the intelligence community that these weapons were there, that fifth level of capability, as I described it, was there. But we haven't found it. So let's keep looking. Let Charlie Duelfer do his work -- he's as good and as gifted as Dr. Kay, with respect to these matters -- and let him examine it, and let the various committees -- George Tenet has a committee working under Dick Kerr, there are two Congressional committees at work. Carnegie Endowment has written a report. The British will be launching their own commission today or tomorrow. And now the President has introduced a new commission.
Some suggestion that that analysts were under pressure, and Kay, who spent more time with analysts than I think anyone else over the last eight months, thinks that this is clearly a wrong, wrong explanation. And I think I can say from my own time spent with analysts, especially on the famous four days before last February 5, that there was no pressure. They were asked for the best advice, they gave their best advice, and it was that best advice that caused me, the President, the Vice President, Don Rumsfeld and others to act.
SECRETARY POWELL: Because I think that the international community wouldn't have kept constraining him. I think that the inspectors were being deceived. They weren't getting to the heart of the issue and our intelligence community was of the strong belief that the weapons were there, there were stockpiles there. I think what Saddam Hussein was trying to do was to break free of any sensitive sanctions.
The first task I faced when I became Secretary of State was to save the sanctions regime, which had almost fallen apart at that point because of pressure from some members of the Security Council to relieve Iraq from sanctions. And there is absolutely no doubt in my mind that if Iraq had gotten free of the constraints, and if we had gone through another year of desultory action on the part of the United Nations, and when they were free without threat, without worry about force being used against them, there is no doubt in my mind that intention and capability would be married up again and they would have gone to the next level and reproduced these weapons. Why wouldn't they? That was always his intention.
SECRETARY POWELL: The absence of a stockpile changes the political calculus. It changes the answer you get with the little formula I laid out. But the fact of the matter is that we went into this with the understanding that there was a stockpile and there were weapons. From my own personal perspective, it was -- you know, I was the Chairman for the first Gulf War when we went in expecting to be hit with chemical weapons. We weren't hit with chemical weapons, but we found chemical weapons.
And so it wasn't as if this was a figment of someone's imagination. I had to face the reality of chemical weapons on the battlefield, and after the first Gulf War we found these weapons; they existed. They were not imaginary. And so what assumption would one make some nine years later after inspectors had been moved out, had been gone for four years? I think the assumption to make, and the assumption that we came to, based on what the intelligence community gave to us, was that there were stockpiles present.
And so what the American people heard the President say was this guy had a clear intent, he demonstrated it over years, he demonstrated by action, demonstrated by his history, he has capability and it was the best judgment of our intelligence community at the time the President was analyzing this and making his decision. It was the best judgment of our intelligence community that he had weapons, that he had stockpiles. It was that judgment that I presented to the UN and that the Director of Central Intelligence presented to the Congress when he presented the NIE and briefed the Congress on what he thought.
But it was multi-sourced, and it reflected the best judgments of all of the intelligence agencies that spent that four days out there with me. There wasn't a word that was in that presentation that was put in that was not totally cleared by the intelligence community. It wasn't shaped, it wasn't added to by anyone else in the government, and it was essentially something I presented and I presented totally coordinated, reflecting the views of the intelligence community. They cleared every single word.
SECRETARY POWELL: I was provided with three working drafts: one on terrorism, one on human rights and one on weapons of mass destruction. It was far more material than I could possibly have used in my presentation. As my staff initially went through it, it was written in a way that we couldn't source statements with the sources for those statements. And as you got deeper into it, and realizing that time was going to be a factor, we essentially took what we could out of it and set it aside and started writing it fresh.
SECRETARY POWELL: When people are doing things that are condemnable in a country, and want to hide it, they will go to extreme lengths to hide it. You can't always find out what they are doing by overhead pictures or SIGINT or COMINT or even HUMINT. You can have the best of everything, and people are still able to hide or deceive or set you off on the wrong trail.
In this case, however, I think that the body of information that had been collected over the years, the intention of the Iraqi regime, and what we now know about the capabilities being retained, it was not unreasonable for the intelligence community -- in fact, it was supported by all the analysis they did -- to present to the policymakers -- and to the policymakers in Britain and Italy and elsewhere, and to the UN Security Council, which voted a resolution saying that Iraq was in material breach -- that Iraq had these weapons. 2ff7e9595c
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