Colin Powell will be the most famous for the act he regrets most: his 2003 presentation to the UN Security Council laying out Iraqi evidence of US weapons of mass destruction, which turned out not to exist.
It did not directly lead to Iraq invasion because George W Bush was going to invade anyway, and the presentation did not succeed in its goal of convincing the council to pass a second resolution backing military action against Iraq.
But Powell's speech marked a decisive moment in undermining US credibility on the world stage all the more because of the then secretary of state's repeated insistance that his claims were based on hard intelligence.
Every statement made today is solid sources, every source he said in the now infamous February 5th 2003 briefing. These are not assertions. What we re giving you are facts and conclusions based on solid intelligence. To drive home the point, Powell played a recording of an intercepted conversation between Iraq army officers about a UN weapons inspection and shown illustrations of the alleged WMD equipment to press home the urgency of the threat. A recording of the conversation had been embellished to make it seem more incriminating, and the illustrations were formed from Iraqi defectors telling the Bush administration what they wanted to hear.
Two years later, out of government Powell described the speech as a blot in his career.
I am the one who presented it on behalf of the United States to the world and will always be a part of my record, Powell told ABC News It was painful. Donald Trump s allies and rivals would later be alarmed at North Korea's impotence at the UN, for example through his harsh threats against the United States in 2017. But it was rhetoric that was a prelude to Kim Jong-un assiduous courting by Trump. The Powell presentation was propounded as a sober litany of facts and it was a prelude to war.
Powell's speech on Iraq marked a turning point in US relations with the UN. I don t think Washington s credibility at the UN has ever recovered from the Iraq War and the false claims on WMDs, said Richard Gowan, UN director of the International Crisis Group.
Clearly, President Obama destroyed US credibility at the United Nations and rebuilt its credibility. Now Iraq is rebuilding mode again, but non-western diplomats still raise the Iraq issue as proof that you can t trust the US at UN. It's been the original sin of US-UN relations, and was recognized with fairness in the event that afterwards. Powell was exploited by the Bush White House for his credibility among the world s diplomats and his reputation for caution, and he was comprehensively misled. He was told for example that his speech had been written by the national security council under Condoleezza Rice, but it actually led the charge to go around the CIA executives about coming up with evidence when that failed, went around the CIA altogether.
Powell had only four days to prepare the speech, but walking into the security council chamber he said he felt confident. The main claims about chemical weapon vans and biological weapons had been in the President s State of Union speech and he had the agency throw out a lot of stuff that was not double - and triple-sourced He made director of Central Intelligence sit behind him, in line of sight of the cameras when he sat before the council.
It was only a few weeks later that the CIA found out that the main pillars of his case were falling apart There were some people in the intelligence community who knew at that time that some of these sources were not good and should not be relied on, and they didn t speak up. That struck me, Powell said in his ABC interview in 2005.
Powell had however made the decision to believe the CIA over the state department s own intelligence and research INR, who submitted two intelligence reports before the speech questioning the solidity of the evidence.
Asked about Powell s decision to ignore the INR's conclusions, one of its senior analysts gave the CBS News show 60 Minutes: I can only assume that he was doing it to loyally support the President of the United States and build the strongest possible case for arguing that there was no alternative to military force. The speech did not cause the Iraq War, which had been already planned by the moment Powell entered the chamber, but aside from the impact on US credibility, it did made its own special contribution in the downward trajectory of the Middle East.
In one section of the speech, Powell referred to a Jordanian-born militant, Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, 21 times, in an effort to prove a link between al Qaeda and Saddam Hussein. According to an investigation by PBS documentary Frontline, it helped raise Zarqawi s profile and help give this previously obscure militant a mass following, paving the way for the organisation that would become ISIS.