WASHINGTON, 10 January 2004 — Nearly a year after his pivotal speech to the United Nations, US Secretary of State Colin L. Powell Thursday staunchly defended his arguments that Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction that justified a war against Iraq.
Fielding questions on a variety of topics at a State Department news conference, Powell insisted that though post-war investigations have yet to find stockpiles of unconventional weapons, the ousted Iraqi regime for years possessed both the arms and the intention to use them.
“I am confident of what I presented last year; the intelligence community is confident of the material they gave me,” he said. “And this game is still unfolding.”
Powell, recently recovered from surgery for prostate cancer, defended his Feb. 2, 2003 UN speech, which laid out the administration’s case for invading Iraq. As he did so, a Washington think tank issued a report concluding that although Iraq posed a threat, the Bush administration had exaggerated it.
The report, by Joseph Cirincione, Jessica T. Mathews and George Perkovich, of the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, said the administration “systematically misrepresented the threat from Iraq’s WMD and ballistic missile programs.”
Officials exaggerated the threat by minimizing uncertainties and caveats, and insisting, without evidence, that Saddam “would give whatever WMD he possessed to terrorists,” the report said.
Powell noted that the report did acknowledge that Iraq had possessed the capability to produce weapons of mass destruction. He said that while “I have not seen smoking gun, concrete evidence” about connections between Saddam Hussein and Al-Qaeda, “I think the possibility of such connections did exist. And it was prudent to consider them at the time that we did.”
He acknowledged that some weapons specialists have left the continuing search for weapons of mass destruction in Iraq, a development that some outside analysts have taken as a signal that the administration is losing interest in the hunt. But Powell said, “I presume that their particular job is finished.”
Powell’s news conference came just three weeks after surgery.
Powell sought to rebut charges that the Bush administration prefers to avoid multilateral diplomacy, and argued that there have been a number of positive developments in world affairs, in such countries as Afghanistan, Libya, Sudan, Iran. He noted the long delayed resumption of talks between Pakistan and India, rival nuclear powers.
