|
|
HOME | CONTENTS | SEARCH | POST
from: Powell said he was "furious and angry"
cache-mtc-ab08.proxy.aol.com
05-03-30
09:08:52
Powell Says U.S. Was 'Too Loud' Over Iraq - The United States made errors in presenting its case for war against Iraq, former Secretary of State Colin Powell told a German magazine. "We were sometimes too loud, too direct, perhaps we made too much noise," Powell told Stern magazine in an interview released on Wednesday. "That certainly shocked the Europeans sometimes." He said terms like "Old Europe," the expression coined by Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld to describe countries such as France and Germany that opposed the war, had not helped ease European concerns about Washington's policies.. "Yes, the insurgency is much bigger than we anticipated. Powell said he had argued for a diplomatic solution against cabinet colleagues such as Vice President Dick Cheney, who did not believe that diplomacy would work. "I'm sure that the Vice President's view from the very beginning was: we'll never solve this through diplomatic means." Powell said he was "furious and angry" that he had been misinformed about Iraq's stockpiles of weapons of mass destruction when he laid out the case for war before the United Nations Security Council in February, 2003. "It was information from our security services and from some Europeans, including Germans. Some of this information was wrong. I did not know this at the time," he told the magazine. "Hundreds of millions followed it on television. I will always be the one who presented it. I have to live with that." He said he had considered resigning and that his relationship with President Bush was a cool one.
