Colin Powell: Remarks to the United Nations Security Council

Explanation and Analysis of the Document

Through most of his four-year tenure as U.S. secretary of state, Powell was one of the most highly regarded officials in the administration of President George W. Bush. Following the terror attacks of September 11, 2001, pressure mounted within the administration to target Iraq and its dictator, Saddam Hussein, whom Bush viewed as a supporter of terrorists and a cause of instability in the Middle East. Saddam's repeated defiance of UN weapons inspectors, coupled with intelligence reports suggesting that he was amassing weapons of mass destruction (biological, chemical, and nuclear weapons that kill indiscriminately) for use against the United States and its allies, led the administration to call for a preemptive war—a new form of war not tested in American history.

In December 2002, the National Security Council (the president's council of security advisers, including the vice president, the secretaries of defense, state, and the treasury, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, and others) instructed the Central Intelligence Agency to prepare a public response to Iraq's declaration that it had no banned weapons. In late January 2003, intelligence officials learned that their work would form the basis for a speech Powell would give to the United Nations. Powell's high level of public credibility led him to be chosen to make the case for war in a climate where many of the world's leaders opposed the war and were skeptical of U.S. intentions. As Powell prepared to speak, he was aware of internal disagreements about the reliability of some intelligence reports he would use in the speech. He ordered aides to purge the speech of much of the evidence deemed questionable, but he never questioned the speech's basic premises.

Powell's speech outlined reasons the administration believed Saddam's regime was harboring weapons of mass destruction, relying on audiotapes, satellite images, and summaries of eyewitness accounts, all of which he shared with his listeners. In the excerpt reproduced here, he begins with reference to UN Resolution 1441, passed unanimously by the Security Council on November 8, 2002. This resolution gave Saddam Hussein “a final opportunity to comply with its disarmament obligations” under previous UN resolutions. Powell notes that in the months prior to the invasion of Iraq, the United Nations had dispatched weapons inspectors to Iraq either to find Hussein's weapons of mass destruction or to discover what he had done with them. American officials, and indeed the United Nations itself, had grown increasingly impatient with what was perceived as Saddam Hussein's lack of cooperation with the weapons inspectors.

Powell goes on to present evidence, first, that Saddam Hussein had biological weapons such as anthrax. He makes reference to the findings of UNSCOM—the United Nations Special Commission, the agency the United Nations had created to ensure Iraq's compliance with its disarmament obligations after the 1991 Gulf War. On the basis of this and other evidence, he paints a vivid picture of Iraq's biological weapons capabilities. He then turns to chemical weapons, pointing out that Saddam Hussein had used such weapons against his neighbors (principally Iran during the 1980s) and his own people. Finally, he takes up the issue of nuclear weapons, again putting forward evidence that the Iraqi dictator maintained a program to develop a nuclear capability.

Powell then remarks on the links between the Iraqi regime and terrorism. In particular, he traces alleged links between Iraq and al Qaeda, the terrorist organization led by Osama bin Laden that was responsible for the terrorist attacks against the United States on September 11, 2001. He notes that al Qaeda operated out of Afghanistan under the protection of the repressive Islamic Taliban regime in that country and that when al Qaeda was shopping for weapons of mass destruction, it turned to Iraq. Powell repeatedly asserts that the findings in the speech were based on “solid sources,” which he had been convinced were true. Based on the intelligence accounts he had received, Powell was persuaded that one aspect of his own doctrine had been met: The use of diplomatic and economic sanctions had not been sufficient, and Saddam's defiance had escalated to a point where military force was justified. “Leaving Saddam Hussein in possession of weapons of mass destruction for a few more months or years is not an option, not in a post–September 11th world,” he says in the speech's concluding paragraphs.