[A-List] US state: administration fractures over Iraq

["Michael Keaney" <michael.keaney@xxxxxx>]

Powell and White House Get Together on Iraq War
By RICHARD W. STEVENSON
New York Times, February 4 2004

WASHINGTON, Feb. 3 - The White House and Secretary of State Colin L. Powell
scrambled on Tuesday to present a united front about the war in Iraq, a day
after Mr. Powell said he was not sure if he would have recommended an
invasion had he known Saddam Hussein did not have stockpiles of banned
weapons.
After telling The Washington Post in an interview on Monday that the absence
of weapons stockpiles "changes the political calculus" about whether to go
to war, Mr. Powell told reporters on Tuesday, in comments coordinated with
the White House, that "the bottom line is this: the president made the right
decision."

Mr. Powell's comments to The Post clearly irritated some White House
officials, who have complained before that Mr. Powell sometimes strays from
the official line on national security issues. Repeating a line that Mr.
Powell had used to describe himself during a dispute with the White House on
another topic three years ago, one administration official said on Tuesday
that the secretary was "a little forward on his skis again."

Mr. Powell's comments focused attention again on the longstanding foreign
policy conflicts within the administration that have often pitted Mr. Powell
against Vice President Dick Cheney and Secretary of Defense Donald H.
Rumsfeld. Mr. Powell's statements highlighted the contrast between his
sometimes measured support for the war and the more full-throated
justifications offered by Mr. Cheney and Mr. Rumsfeld.

"There definitely appears to be some jockeying going on around here," said
one administration official. "There's a high degree of frustration and it
does creep out."
Mr. Powell and the State Department staff have clashed repeatedly with Mr.
Rumsfeld and his team at the Pentagon over Iraq and other issues. And Mr.
Powell is known to be deeply resentful over the large role that Mr. Cheney
and the vice president's influential staff play in foreign policy, and feels
that he has been undercut and marginalized on major issues. Mr. Powell has
told associates that he has never before seen a vice president with so large
a voice and so powerful a staff, and that it has created enormous problems
for an administration that has never been able to speak with one voice on
foreign policy.

The administration has struggled for the last week to deal with the
conclusions made public by the former chief weapons inspector in Iraq, David
A. Kay, that Mr. Hussein did not have any large caches of chemical or
biological weapons at the start of the war. Unlike Mr. Powell, Mr. Bush has
carefully avoided making any public statements suggesting that he views the
prewar intelligence he relied on as flawed or that his case for war has in
any way been undermined or complicated.

Mr. Cheney and Mr. Rumsfeld have been equally unwavering in defending the
war as justified. A senior administration official said Mr. Rumsfeld told
the cabinet at its meeting on Monday morning that he had spent the weekend
reading Dr. Kay's testimony before the Senate Armed Services Committee last
week and that it supported the administration's position that Iraq was a
dangerous place that was growing more dangerous to the region and the world
before the war.

Mr. Cheney joined the president and Condoleezza Rice, the national security
adviser, for lunch with Dr. Kay on Monday. Despite Dr. Kay's views on the
absence of weapons stockpiles, they focused on his statements that Iraq was
nonetheless a threat that had to be dealt with, the senior official said.

After first suggesting that no new study was necessary, Mr. Bush signed off
this weekend on the creation of a quasi-independent commission, whose
membership will be announced in the next few days, to study whether and how
the intelligence system broke down and how it should be organized to deal
with the threats from terrorism and weapons proliferation.

An administration official said the commission was likely to include at
least one sitting member of Congress in an effort to defuse criticism from
Democrats on Capitol Hill that the group would not be sufficiently
independent of the White House to deliver a credible report.

Even as they have defended the war, members of Mr. Bush's team have been
shifting their rationale away from the presence of weapons. Even before Dr.
Kay's disclosures, Mr. Cheney had been quietly backing away from his
assertions that Iraq had possessed illegal weapons at the start of the
conflict.

"I think the jury is still out in terms of how extensive a program Saddam
Hussein had," Mr. Cheney said in an interview with The Rocky Mountain News
on Jan. 9.
In an interview with 10 European journalists in Rome on Jan. 27, Mr. Cheney
said, "There's still work to be done to ascertain exactly what's there, and
I am not prepared to make a final judgment until they have completed their
work."

Mr. Powell, in his interview with The Post, was supportive of the decision
to go to war, and his public comments on Tuesday were more pointedly in sync
with the White House's official line. But he appeared to acknowledge in the
interview, more openly than any other senior administration official so far,
that the failure to find any weapons not only looked bad but weakened Mr.
Bush's argument that Iraq was a direct and urgent threat.

Asked whether he would have recommended the invasion had he known what Dr.
Kay would conclude after the war, Mr. Powell replied, "I don't know because
it was the stockpiles that presented the final little piece that made it
more of a real and present danger and threat to the region and the world."

Pressed on whether the lack of stockpiles removed that real and present
danger, Mr. Powell said: "The absence of a stockpile changes the political
calculus. It changes the answer you get with the little formula I laid out.
But the fact of the matter is we went into this with the understanding that
there was a stockpile and there were weapons."

Mr. Powell's statements, some administration officials said, reflected in
part his frustration at having to field questions about his own credibility
after Dr. Kay's conclusion about the absence of weapons stockpiles. A year
ago, Mr. Powell gave the United Nations a comprehensive presentation on
American intelligence findings about the threat from Iraq, and many of his
assertions at the time now seem to be in doubt.

But Mr. Powell's nuanced but distinct departure from the official line also
reflected another example of his willingness to hold himself slightly apart
from the positions held by Mr. Cheney and Mr. Rumsfeld, administration
officials said.

Some senior officials said on Tuesday that Mr. Bush was not angry at Mr.
Powell, and understood that his comments to The Post were generally
supportive of the war and in line with Mr. Bush's own comments. The State
Department took the unusual step of quickly issuing a transcript of the
interview with The Post to put Mr. Powell's comments in their full context.