TBILISI, Georgia — Secretary of State Colin Powell, who urged the United Nations to endorse a pre-emptive war to strip Iraq of its weapons of mass destruction, conceded Saturday that Saddam Hussein’s government may have no longer had such munitions.
One day after David Kay, the chief U.S. weapons inspector in Iraq, said he believes Hussein had not stockpiled unconventional weapons for years, Powell said his prominent Feb. 5 argument was based on "what our intelligence community believed was credible."
"What is the open question is how many stocks they had, if any, and if they had any, where did they go? And if they didn’t have any, then why wasn’t that known beforehand?" Powell said aboard his plane en route to today’s presidential inauguration of Mikheil Saakashvili.
Powell said in defense of the decision to go to war that the Bush administration was not simply troubled by the conviction that Iraq possessed unconventional weapons and development programs, but also that Hussein had refused to answer U.N. questions about his government’s activities on the subject.
"We were not only saying we thought they had them," Powell said, "but we had questions that needed to be answered. What was it: 500 tons, 100 tons or zero tons? Was it so many liters of anthrax, 10 times that amount, or nothing? What we demanded of Iraq was that they account for all of this and they prove the negative of our hypothesis."
In response, Powell said, "all they did was make statements without proving it to our satisfaction. This is a regime that never lost its intention to have such programs and have such weapons."
Powell’s widely watched presentation to the U.N. Security Council represented the heart of the administration case for a war that many governments then and now believe was unjustified on weapons grounds.
Months of investigation in Iraq have failed to support what Powell described Saturday as his "good, solid, comprehensive presentation" of the intelligence community’s conclusions.
President Bush, too, has backed away from his assertions about Iraq’s weapons programs, referring in Tuesday’s State of the Union address to materials hidden from the U.N. inspector and "weapons-of-mass-destruction-related program activities."
On Wednesday, Vice President Dick Cheney told National Public Radio that the administration has not given up looking for weapons of mass destruction in Iraq. "It’s going to take some additional considerable period of time in order to look in all the cubbyholes and ammo dumps and all the places in Iraq where you’d expect to find something like that," he said.
A senior administration official told reporters in Davos, Switzerland, on Saturday that the "jury is still out" on the accuracy of intelligence reports that said Hussein possessed such weapons. "We won’t know until we’ve gotten through … interviewing all of the people who were involved in those programs."
In an interview published today, but conducted before the announcement late Friday that Kay was stepping down, British Prime Minister Tony Blair said he still believed the intelligence received by his government before the war was correct.
"It is absurd to say in respect of any intelligence that it is infallible, but if you ask me what I believe, I believe the intelligence was correct, and I think in the end we will have an explanation," he said in The Observer newspaper.
The Associated Press contributed to this report.
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