Now Powell Tells Us

Colin Powell has revealed that he and his department never believed that Iraq represented an imminent nuclear threat but that the President was following the advice of Dick Cheney and and the CIA.

I can't help feeling it would have been useful for us all to have found this out slightly sooner than now.

He goes on:

"The CIA was pushing the aluminum tube argument heavily and Cheney went with that instead of what our guys wrote," Powell said. And the Niger reference in Bush's State of the Union speech? "That was a big mistake," he said. "It should never have been in the speech. I didn't need Wilson to tell me that there wasn't a Niger connection. He didn't tell us anything we didn't already know. I never believed it."

When I pressed further as to why the President played up the Iraq nuclear threat, Powell said it wasn't the President: "That was all Cheney." A convenient response for a Bush family loyalist, perhaps, but it begs the question of how the President came to be a captive of his Vice President's fantasies.

More important: Why was this doubt, on the part of the secretary of state and others, about the salient facts justifying the invasion of Iraq kept from the public until we heard the truth from whistleblower Wilson, whose credibility the President then sought to destroy?

Cheney's hands are all over this now. It's been said a thousand times, but he's unfit to hold his present office. The Plamegate scandal alone should force him to step down.

However, this story - and the revelation that Powell never believed Iraq had a nuclear capability - further damages Powell's already tarnished reputation. It does raise the question of why he did not do the honourable and thing and resign.

Had he had the courage of his convictions, and gone public with his misgivings, it seems unlikely that Joe Wilson would have had to make the principled stance he adopted; and that the White House, in the absence of Wilson's op-ed piece, wouldn't have taken such concerted steps to "out" Valerie Plame.

The fact that Powell didn't, and the events that grew out of that, might ulimately be what brings this White House crashing down.

Oh well, it's an ill wind.... etc,.

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Tags: Powell, Iraq, Iraq war, Cheney, Bush, nuclear, threat, Saddam, Joe, Wilson, Plamegate, valerie, Plame,