Colin Powell: even I was misled on Iraq intelligence

Many politicians who voted for the Iraq war are now having serious doubts about both the way it’s been implemented and about the intelligence they were shown before the invasion. Defenders of the aggression angrily insist that Congressmen and Senators were shown the same information the president used to make his decision: nothing more, nothing less.

That assertion was implausible for the longest time. But now it’s been rendered almost inconceivable in the light recent statements by Colin Powell.

You haven’t heard about those statements? Hmm… there was nothing about it in The Washington Post. Nothing in hawkish The Chicago Tribune. And only a little wire story (about which Powell’s claims were only an incidental part) buried in The New York Times and Los Angeles Times… each paragons of the so-called ‘liberal media.’ Thank goodness I listen to the BBC so I can know what’s going on not only in the world, but in my country. This is why I’ve always said that if you want to informed, you can not rely on a single media source and you need have at least one source outside the mainstream US newspaper and TV press.

The former secretary of state told the BBC that even he wasn’t made aware of doubts in the intelligence community about the reliability of information used to make the case to invade Iraq.

''What really upset me more than anything else was that there were people in the intelligence community that had doubts about some of this sourcing, but those doubts never surfaced up to us,'' Powell said.

"I was deeply disappointed in what the intelligence community had presented to me and to the rest of us, and what really upset me more than anything else was that there were people in the intelligence community that had doubts about some of this sourcing, but those doubts never surfaced up to us," he added.

He also claims that the State Department staff drew up detailed plans for the post-war period and that those plans were ignored by the War Department.

It’s easy to say Powell should’ve known better, and I’ve said exactly that. And maybe this is a case of buyer’s remorse, of him being rightly embarassed about that with which he was complicit. But nevertheless it’s telling: if the most important cabinet member of international issues, handpicked for the job by the president, was kept in the dark about the intelligence’s unreliability, then it’s impossible to believe that ordinary Congressmen and Senators were properly informed.

I’ve often said that the biggest flaw in the Bush administration is not its ideology, but it’s closed-minded decision-making process. Though I suppose it’s that extreme ideology that makes the decision-making process closed-minded in the first place. I’ve often said that the administration decides what it wants to do and then finds the information to justify those decisions. It plays up the information that supports its pre-conceived notions and suppresses the rest. It lets the decisions drive the facts, instead of vice versa. The way it misled Powell is a perfect example. For an administration that values personal loyalty over all else, including competence, it’s ironic that the archetypal good soldier was treated so badly. If he’d known that this was going to be his reward for loyalty, I wonder if he would’ve done it.