Then-U.S. Secretary of State Colin Powell holds up a vial that he stated was the scale that may very well be used to carry anthrax as he addresses the United Nations Safety Council in February 2003 on the U.N. in New York.

Timothy A. Clary/AFP through Getty Photos

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Timothy A. Clary/AFP through Getty Photos

Then-U.S. Secretary of State Colin Powell holds up a vial that he stated was the scale that may very well be used to carry anthrax as he addresses the United Nations Safety Council in February 2003 on the U.N. in New York.

Timothy A. Clary/AFP through Getty Photos

That is a part of a particular collection the place NPR appears again at our protection of main information tales prior to now. Take heed to the complete audio story to listen to excerpts from Colin Powell’s U.N. speech and extra of NPR’s archival audio.

There wasn’t only one second that led to the Iraq Conflict. However one speech, delivered 20 years in the past on the United Nations, would come to outline and undermine the battle.

On Feb. 5, 2003, U.S. Secretary of State Colin Powell sat in entrance of members of the U.N. Safety Council. He’d been a staunch critic of U.S. intervention towards Iraq’s authoritarian chief, Saddam Hussein.

However with the world watching, Powell made a case for struggle.

“My colleagues, each assertion I make at this time is backed up by sources — stable sources,” he stated. “These usually are not assertions. What we’re giving you might be info and conclusions primarily based on stable intelligence.”

Powell used data that intelligence officers assured him was credible. There have been reconnaissance pictures, elaborate maps and charts, and even taped cellphone conversations between senior members of Iraq’s army.

“Saddam Hussein has chemical weapons,” Powell stated. “Saddam Hussein has used such weapons. And Saddam Hussein has no compunction about utilizing them once more — towards his neighbors, and towards his personal individuals.”

Powell repeatedly used one phrase throughout his hour-long speech: “weapons of mass destruction.” He stated these phrases a complete of 17 occasions. It was the phrase the Bush administration saved publicly utilizing to assist justify invading Iraq.

A month and a half after the U.N. speech, President Bush ordered air strikes over Baghdad. It marked the start of a army operation “to disarm Iraq, to free its individuals, and to defend the world from grave hazard,” Bush stated in a televised deal with to the nation.

U.S. forces toppled Hussein’s regime in a matter of weeks, and the search intensified for proof of Iraq’s so-called “weapons of mass destruction.” However the weapons had been nowhere to be discovered.

Individuals began asking questions.

“It is type of embarrassing they have not discovered something,” stated Allen Hunley, a Tennessee dentist who spoke to NPR in July 2003 whereas attending the Smithsonian Folklife Competition. “It is virtually like they had been salesmen and so they had a factor to promote.”

Nationwide safety analyst Joseph Cirincione additionally criticized Powell’s speech in feedback to NPR. Notably, Powell’s assurances that there was stable proof behind his claims of refined and illicit Iraqi weapons applications.

“Now we all know that that simply wasn’t true,” stated Cirincione, then the director for non-proliferation on the Carnegie Endowment for Worldwide Peace.

California Rep. Jane Harman served because the rating Democrat on the Home Intelligence Committee, and voted in help of the 2002 measure OK’ing using army drive towards Iraq. Studies of a “very lengthy and scary record of lively weapons of mass destruction” influenced that call, Harman informed NPR.

“I believed what I used to be informed,” Harman stated on All Issues Thought of in January 2004. “And I am as shocked as you that it seems that there are not any stockpiles of weapons.”

Journalists and members of Congress began digging into the rationale for struggle specified by Powell’s U.N. speech. They found defective and exaggerated studies from an intelligence neighborhood underneath political stress from high White Home officers.

There have been additionally claims Bush took benefit of Powell’s status by dispatching him to the U.N.

“As Bush stated to him on the time, ‘Possibly they will consider you. Possibly the viewers will consider you,’ ” journalist and Powell biographer Karen DeYoung informed NPR in 2006. “As a result of it was at all times clear within the Bush administration that Powell was extra in style than anybody else.”

To at the present time, the Iraq Conflict is extensively seen as a overseas coverage and humanitarian catastrophe. The battle dragged on for nearly 9 years and claimed practically 4,500 American lives. Over 185,000 Iraqi civilians had been killed, in keeping with Brown College’s Watson Institute for Worldwide and Public Affairs. Some 2 million Iraqis had been displaced from their houses by the point U.S. forces pulled out in 2011.

Three years later, President Obama ordered troops again to Iraq to assist fight the militant group Islamic State of Iraq and Syria, or ISIS — assuring Individuals he wouldn’t decide to “one other floor struggle.” U.S. forces formally withdrew in December 2021 after virtually seven years of preventing.

Powell later known as his U.N. speech a “nice intelligence failure” and a “blot” on his report, telling NBC Information’ Meet the Press in 2004 he trusted the data he’d gotten.

“But it surely turned out that the sourcing was inaccurate and unsuitable and in some instances intentionally deceptive,” Powell stated. “And for that, I’m dissatisfied. And I remorse it.”