Revisiting Colin Powell's UN address that led to war in Iraq

Late secretary of state's chief of staff believes he was exploited by Bush administration

Colin Powell holds up a vial to illustrate Saddam Hussein’s alleged use of anthrax. AFP

Twenty years ago, Colin Powell caught the world’s attention during an emergency session of the UN Security Council.

As George W Bush's secretary of state, he delivered an address that would go down in history as a prelude to the US invasion of Iraq in 2003.

The war ultimately lasted nine years, claiming hundreds of thousands lives, leaving the country lawless and opening the way for Iran to aggressively pursue regional hegemony.

Congress had already authorised Mr Bush to “use any means necessary” against Iraq.

Taking his seat on the horseshoe table in front of his UN counterparts, he assured the council chamber that “every statement” he would make was “backed up by solid sources”.

“Iraq had already been found guilty of material breach of its obligations, stretching back over 16 previous resolutions and 12 years,” said Mr Powell, a retired four-star general, as he laid out “evidence” of Baghdad's failures to comply with several UN resolutions demanding co-operation with weapons inspectors.

Satellite images, audio recordings and illustrations of supposed weapons of mass destruction (WMDs) were displayed to prove that Iraqi officials were purposely evading their obligations and hiding arms.

Mr Powell even held up a tiny vial of white powder to illustrate Saddam Hussein’s alleged use of anthrax.

He argued that Washington believed, without a doubt that Hussein, a grave and imminent security threat to the US and the world, was developing nuclear, biological and chemical weapons.

Mr Powell died in 2020 due to complications from Covid-19 after cancer treatment.

After the First Gulf War, which broke out in April 1991, the Security Council passed Resolution 687, which banned Iraq from possessing WMDs. In accordance with that resolution, International Atomic Energy Agency inspectors destroyed Iraq’s nuclear, chemical and biological weapons programme.

UN weapons inspectors repeatedly checked suspected plants in Iraq and had cameras installed to monitor activity at those sites.

Despite widespread scepticism, the US and its allies were able to use Mr Powell's arguments to secure the support of key Security Council members, including Britain.

Mr Powell's former chief of staff, Lawrence Wilkerson, told The National that he had been selected to address the UN because he was the “only member of the [Bush] administration the American people would believe” and that the general “had poll ratings … barely a point or two below Mother Teresa”.

In the lead-up to the now infamous speech, Mr Powell was “sceptical”.

“They exploited him,” said Mr Wilkerson.

Mr Powell would tell his chief of staff that the October 2002 National Intelligence Estimate — the highest-level document produced by intelligence agencies — had informed his UN speech, which officials had assured him was “solid”.

On the eve of the US-led attack in 2003 ordered by Mr Bush, UN inspectors had still not found any chemical or biological weapons by the time they were forced to leave the country.

Evidence of any active WMD programmes were nowhere to be found.

“We didn't think he [Saddam Hussein] was ever going to shed himself of the effort to build WMD. We just didn't know that he didn't have any at that present time,” said Mr Wilkerson.

The “solid intelligence” that Mr Powell had cited proved illusory and was allegedly based on unsubstantiated reports from Iraqi exiles, such as the Iraqi National Congress, a secular opposition group led by Ahmad Chalabi.

Mr Chalabi had gained the trust of senior officials in the Bush administration and convinced them of the necessity of destroying Hussein's Baathist regime.

“We [the US State Department] wanted the United States government to get rid of him but president Bush wouldn't allow it. [Vice president Dick] Cheney wouldn't allow it. They were feeding the Bush administration what they wanted to be fed. Intelligence shaped the policy that took us into war with Iraq,” said Mr Wilkerson.

The invasion of Iraq in 2003 marked a significant shift in the way the international community viewed the use of force and set a dangerous moral precedent that continues to affect global politics to this day.

The UN Charter, which was signed in 1945, established the principle of non-interference in the internal affairs of sovereign states, and explicitly prohibited the use of force except in self-defence or with the authorisation of the Security Council.

“They did enormous damage to US credibility at the UN and that legacy still lingers on 20 years later,” Richard Gowan, UN Director at the International Crisis Group, told The National.

“The Bush administration's decision to go to war with Iraq without explicit UN authorisation demonstrated the inability of the Security Council to constrain the major powers,” said Mr Gowan. “And the council has never entirely recovered from this display of weakness.”

It was “the greatest strategic disaster created by America in the 21st century”, Mr Wilkerson said.

“We should have never been a part of it,” he added.

Mr Powell would later regret making the case for the 2003 invasion.

The UN speech, he wrote in his 2012 memoir It Worked for Me, “was by no means my first, but it was one of my most momentous failures, the one with the widest-ranging impact”.

“The event will earn a prominent paragraph in my obituary,” he added.

“To this day, Iran's influence outside its own borders is vastly more than it would have been had Saddam Hussein been still in Iraq. So that's the first huge error and repercussion of the war,” said Mr Wilkerson.

Hussein encouraged the perception that Iraq had WMDs because he was afraid of appearing weak in Iran's eyes and wanted to maintain his ability to suppress large-scale domestic opposition to the regime, noted Mr Wilkerson.

“That was a shrewd but really deep error by Saddam because I think he really didn't want to come clean in a way that would have kept us from entering the country with the military, because if he came totally clean, he would be admitting to Iran and to his own people that he didn't have these vicious weapons. And he didn't want to do that.”

Hans Blix, the chief UN weapons inspector in the lead-up to the 2003 invasion, wrote that after the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, the Bush administration felt a “need to let the weight and wrath of the world’s only superpower fall on more evil actors than just Afghanistan’s Taliban regime”.

“No target could have seemed more worthy of being crushed than Iraq’s brutal dictator, Saddam Hussein,” he said. “Sadly, however, the elimination of this tyrant was perhaps the only positive result of the war.”

America invaded Iraq in large part because of the Security Council’s attention, Benny Avni, an American journalist who covered the Security Council’s debate at the time for The New York Sun, told The National.

“The Bush administration's view was that America needed to project power to prevent a repeat of 9/11,” Avni said. “There were already numerous council resolutions on Iraq, which Saddam kept violating.

“That was why the Bush administration focused on WMDs.”

January 29, 2002: US President George Bush identifies Iraq, Iran and North Korea as part of an 'axis of evil' in his State of the Union address. 'States like these, and their terrorist allies, constitute an axis of evil, arming to threaten the peace of the world. By seeking weapons of mass destruction, these regimes pose a grave and growing danger,' he says. Getty

February 15, 2002: Thousands of people gather in Hyde Park in London after finishing a protest against war in Iraq. The march is believed to be the UK's biggest ever peace protest. Getty

March 18, 2003: US and British forces move into position before a possible military strike near the Kuwait-Iraq border. A day prior, Mr Bush gave Iraqi President Saddam Hussein and his sons 48 hours to leave the country or face war. Getty

March 21, 2003: Fires burn in and around Saddam's Council of Ministers during the first wave of US-led coalition airstrikes on Iraq in Baghdad. 'These are the opening stages of what will be a broad and concerted campaign,' he says in an address. The attack begins with a massive air strike campaign named 'shock and awe'. Getty

March 29, 2003: A man and child walk on a road near the entrance of the besieged city of Basra as oil fires burn in the distance. Baath Party loyalists take up positions in Basra, Iraq's second largest city, making it a target of the US-led war on Iraq. Getty

April 9, 2003: Iraq’s capital, Baghdad, falls to US forces. Saddam’s regime loses control as American troops enter the city centre. On May 1, US President George W Bush prematurely declares the end of major combat in Iraq. Reuters

August 30, 2003: A burnt-out car is removed from outside Najaf’s Imam Ali Mosque, the holiest Shiite shrine in Iraq, a day after 87 people were killed in a car bomb attack. The attack raises sectarian tension as thousands of Iraqi Shiites, some of them backed by Iran, demand the right to form militias. Reuters

December 13, 2003: Ousted president Saddam Hussein is found by US troops in a cellar south of Tikrit, near his hometown. 'Ladies and gentlemen, we got him,' says US ambassador Paul Bremer, who was appointed to lead the Coalition Provisional Authority. AFP

March 31, 2004: A car burns in the aftermath of an insurgent attack on Fallujah, in which four Blackwater private security contractors were killed and their mutilated, burnt bodies were left hanging from a bridge. Reuters

May 3, 2004: Coffins of US military personnel killed in Iraq are prepared to be offloaded at Dover Air Force Base in Delaware. Days later, Al Qaeda beheaded US businessman Nicholas Berg and recorded his killing. Reuters

June 28, 2004: US administrator in Iraq Paul Bremer (R), Iraqi Prime Minister Ayad Allawi (C) and the country's most senior judge Midhat Mahmoud (L) smile as the US transfers sovereignty to Iraq in Baghdad. Mr Allawi calls the event 'a historic day' and says that Iraq was 'capable of controlling the security situation'. Reuters

January 30, 2005: Iraqis vote in the first parliamentary elections of the post-Saddam era. Sunnis largely boycott the vote, while most Shiite parties coalesce into a sectarian bloc, cementing divisions within the country. Getty

April 7, 2005: Veteran Kurdish leader Jalal Talabani raises his hands after being sworn in as Iraq's first democratically elected president. Later that month, Shiite Islamist Ibrahim Al Jaafari takes office as prime minister, hailing from the exiled Dawa Party. Getty

July 24, 2005: Burnt-out vehicles at the scene of a lorry bombing outside a police station that killed 22 people in south-east Baghdad. The explosion also injured 25 people, destroyed 22 cars and 10 shops. AFP

October 19, 2005: Saddam’s trial begins. Prosecutors focus on a massacre in the village of Dujail, 100 kilometres north of Baghdad, where about 150 people, including children, were killed following an assassination attempt against the former dictator. Many other charges relate to a genocidal campaign against Kurds during the 1980s, during which Saddam ordered a chemical attack on the town of Halabja, killing up to 5,000 people. Getty

February 23, 2006: Iraqis clean up debris after an Al Qaeda bombing at Al Askariya holy Shiite shrine in Samarra, Iraq. Shiite police and militia members — in many cases indistinguishable — responded by rampaging through Sunni-majority areas, in an onslaught that coalition forces appeared powerless to halt. Getty

June 8, 2006: Maj Gen Bill Caldwell speaks during a press conference as satellite images are shown of a US air strike that killed the leader of Al Qaeda in Iraq, Abu Musab Al Zarqawi, in a joint US-Iraqi raid. Getty

December 30, 2006: Saddam is executed by hanging. The execution and taunting of Saddam before his death is secretly filmed by a witness, stirring further tension within Iraq. Getty

January 11, 2007: US officers watch Mr Bush's speech announcing that another 20,000 soldiers will be sent to Iraq, at Camp Ramadi in Iraq's violent Anbar province. The approach becomes known as the 'Surge,' and envisages a closer partnership between US and Iraqi forces and tribes, as well as American forces being stationed closer to Iraqi communities. Getty

July 12, 2007: Two Reuters photographers and five civilians are killed by a US Apache helicopter in Baghdad. US video footage of the incident would later be released by Wikileaks. EPA

December 14, 2008: Mr Bush makes his final visit to Iraq to sign a co-operation agreement between Iraq and the US known as the Strategic Framework Agreement. At a press conference with Nouri Al Maliki, Munthadar Al Zaidi, a journalist, throws his shoes at Mr Bush. Mr Al Zaidi is severely beaten and jailed for six months. Reuters

February 27, 2009: US President Barack Obama announces Washington’s decision to withdraw most American troops by August 31, 2010. Mr Obama says 50,000 troops will remain for smaller missions and to train Iraqi soldiers. EPA

April 23: At least 80 people are killed in three suicide bombings in Baghdad, making it the biggest daily death toll since early 2008. A woman standing in a group of other women and children receiving aid reportedly set off one of the bombs. EPA

December 21, 2010: Iraqi Prime Minister Mr Al Maliki (L) and members of his newly formed cabinet attend a voting session at the Iraqi Parliament in Baghdad, Iraq. The new government was unanimously approved, ending nine months of deadlock. Getty

JANUARY 8, 2011: Populist Shiite cleric Moqtada Sadr returns to Iraq after four years of self-imposed exile in Iran. In his first public statement, he urges his followers to resist the 'occupiers' of Iraq. EPA

February 25, 2011: A 'day of rage' is declared as tens of thousands of Iraqis protest against Mr Al Maliki’s government. At least 23 people are killed and hundreds injured in a sign of Mr Al Maliki’s growing authoritarianism. Getty

December 17, 2011: The last of the US Troop Brigade board a plane to depart Iraq at Camp Adder, now known as Imam Ali Base, near Nasiriyah, Iraq. Two days prior, the US military formally declared the end of the Iraq War in a ceremony in Baghdad. Getty

December 23, 2012: Protests against harsh security crackdowns break out in Fallujah, Ramadi and Tikrit. Sunni protesters say men are being arbitrarily jailed without evidence while the government holds back pensions for former army officers. The demonstrations last until December 2013 when the Iraqi army tries to break up protest camps. EPA

July 22, 2013: Mourners pray at the coffin of a victim killed during an attack on a prison in Taji, during a funeral at the Imam Ali shrine in Najaf. Reuters

December 22, 2013: Funeral proceedings for a major general of the Iraqi army’s 7th division in Anbar. The division's leadership were killed when a house they are raiding explodes after being rigged with bombs. The mixed Sunni-Shiite group is seen as one of the last non-sectarian units in the Iraqi army. Reuters

June 11, 2014: ISIS fighters stand guard at a checkpoint in the northern Iraqi city of Mosul. Days prior, the militants seized Iraq's second biggest city of Mosul as well as Tikrit, hometown of former dictator Saddam Hussein, and other towns and cities north of Baghdad. Reuters

July 9, 2014: Al Nuri Mosque in Mosul before it was destroyed by ISIS militants during their retreat three years later. On June 29, Abu Bakr Al Baghdadi, leader of ISIS, appeared for the first time in public at the mosque to declare the caliphate. EPA

October 18, 2014: Smoke rises over Syrian town of Kobani after an air strike. Three days prior, Washington launched a campaign called Operation Inherent Resolve. Over the next year, the US military conducts more than 8,000 air strikes in Iraq and Syria. Reuters

November 13, 2015: Kurdish forces seized Sinjar from ISIS after a prolonged siege, in the largest urban battle undertaken by the Kurdish Peshmerga. Getty

October 16, 2006: Iraq launches US-backed campaign to liberate Mosul from ISIS. EPA

October 21, 2016: Fire at an oil field that was set on fire by retreating ISIS fighters before the Mosul offensive in Qayyarah, Iraq. Getty

July 2, 2017: While retreating from Mosul, ISIS destroys Al Nuri mosque. Iraqi forces encounter stiff resistance from ISIS with improvised explosive devices, car bombs, suicide bombers, heavy mortar fire and snipers hampering their advance. Getty

July 9, 2017: Iraqi Prime Minister Haider Al Abadi declares victory over ISIS in Mosul. In December, he declares full victory over ISIS. AFP