Intelligence

Interview: Jasper Gerard meets Colin Powell

Interview: Jasper Gerard meets Colin Powell - Sunday Times - Times Online

Yes, Iran is like Iraq ... but let’s not rush in
There is no cavalcade, no parade, no men in braid. Just an old boy in a trench coat wandering alone down windy streets. He could be any lost American tourist.

Except this is Manchester and he is attracting way too many gawpers: “I have had a row with my mate,” burbles a taxi driver. “I swore I just saw Colin Powell, but my mate said, ‘What would he be doing in Manchester?’” A fair question. One Powell — until recently among the most powerful men on the planet — must have asked himself when the taxi collecting him was too small for his luggage. The general who held the world enthralled at the United Nations when he produced “irrefutable and undeniable evidence” that Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction is now on the speaking circuit.

He has spent the past week in Britain, and whenever he orates you are reminded why he had been so damned persuasive. Outside his hotel there are protesters, but inside only eulogies.

Everyone respects Powell: the one Bushite who even Euro cheese-munchers thought they could do business with. Iraq might have left him isolated in the Bush administration, but he is the war’s only politician whose reputation didn’t take a hit. Powell oozes charm. As guest of the Jewish National Fund he smiles through an excruciating rendition of Imagine (strangely missing the line about imagine no religion) before he does his stuff — brilliantly.

He recalls how, in the run-up to war in Iraq, whenever he felt exasperated with France he had to remind himself: “France has been with us since 1776, and we have been in marriage guidance ever since.” He recalls a Kremlin showdown with Mikhail Gorbachev, who suddenly smiled and said: “General, you are going to have to find yourself a new enemy.” To which Powell thought: “I don’t want a new enemy: I am happy with the one I got.”

Having retired as secretary of state he no longer needs to be the constant diplomat, so in our interview he speaks frankly of his disagreements with George W Bush and his doubts about British intelligence. He almost giggles over how he saw off Jeremy Paxman in a recent interview: “I’d heard of his reputation but I think I escaped with a nil-nil draw.”

Next year he will be 70 but the married father of three grown children remains a powerful physical force: broad as a tank with searching almond eyes. The old warhorse doesn’t do retirement: “I’m busy: I don’t play golf.”

His presence turns minds to war: does the ramping up of pressure on Iran remind him of the build-up to invading Iraq? “The parallel is both countries pursuing a nuclear programme: the big difference is there is little dispute this time over the evidence.” Yikes.

Isn’t the irony that Iran is a greater threat than Iraq but after the political deception and military stalemate there is no appetite for aggro this time? “Even if there hadn’t been Iraq I do not believe there would have been an immediate leap from anyone for military action. I’m fascinated everyone here wants to talk about military options: just slow down. Iran is some years off a nuclear weapon. One of the papers said ‘if they had the material they could (make bombs in a couple of months’; well, they don’t. If I had the material, so could I.”

He may be sanguine but after the rift on Iraq with “old Europe” he can’t resist a dig at Euro efforts to cow Iran. He calls the unsuccessful European foreign ministers who have been involved in the negotiations, including Jack Straw, “my three tenors”: “They wanted to take the lead so I said, ‘Fine, it might even be better if (Americans) are not seen as part of your group’, and they came up with a couple of agreements, but they did not hold. Dr (Condoleezza) Rice (his successor) gave more support to EU efforts but it still didn’t produce results.”

However, Powell offers scant alternative. He even cautions against mild sanctions: “Banning sports tends to disappoint athletes, who are not building nuclear programmes. Rather than being mad at their regime they might be mad at us. Plus the Iranians have no doubt had their own national security council meetings and have factored in likely sanctions.”

His wry scepticism about European posturing also comes through when talking about “rendition”, where America shuttles terror suspects to Third World interview centres to loosen tongues. After an outcry Straw wrote to Rice demanding details of exactly when and where prisoners had been taken, but Powell suggests the foreign secretary and the “tenors” knew the score all too well: “Such things have benefited us and Europe. To suggest renditions are such a shocking thing to everyone’s sensibilities is a bit much. There are two parties to a rendition, if not more. So I thought Europe overreacted.”

We turn to Iraq. America initially sought war simply to oust Saddam; it was Tony Blair who ramped up the iffy intelligence about weapons of mass destruction. What did Powell make of Blairite claims such as Niger being in the market to supply Saddam with material to build a nuclear bomb? “I believe the British government still stands by that.” Which is amazing! “Yeah. I didn’t use Niger, except perhaps once early on at Davos. It just didn’t hold up.”

Wasn’t the inaccuracy of the intelligence the fault of politicos pressuring spooks to produce smoking guns? “I wanted to know what the truth was. When I prepared my UN speech I sat there for four days and nights: we went through everything, to make sure this huge presentation I was giving, watched by the whole world, was accurate. Every word was approved by the CIA with no political pressure. I tossed out things because they weren’t sufficiently sourced.”

Like Niger? “Niger being one. There were also some remotely piloted vehicles found but which didn’t pass my instinct. So I went into the UN with a fair degree of confidence.”

Still, his UN presentation turned out to be almost as dodgy as Blair’s intelligence dossiers. Are British records accurate that purportedly detail a meeting Powell attended with Bush and Blair where Blair dissuaded the president from bombing the Arab television station Al-Jazeera? “I have no vivid recollection,” he says. “Whether something was said in jest or in passing, certainly I don’t think it was ever seriously in the president’s mind. Remember (Al-Jazeera) is located in a friendly country.” Hmm: so was the village in Pakistan that America bombed to bits the other day.

Powell, though, refuses to be a “referee” over claims by Sir Christopher Meyer, our former ambassador to Washington and “a great guy”, that Blair failed to use his “leverage” over the president in the period leading up to the war, but he insists Blair was no poodle. “Britain always comes to the table as a sovereign nation with a strong prime minister ever since I have been involved, going back to the days of Mrs Thatcher.

“Every administration I have been in has respected the views of the UK and has never taken it for granted. And I have yet to meet a British prime minister who is a shrinking violet.”

But then he could hardly say anything else.

On Iraq he says: “I think Blair felt as strongly as Bush.” The question is: did Powell? He laughs uproariously, saying the failure to find weapons of mass destruction was due to the success of that much-derided earlier war, Operation Desert Storm, as it destroyed Saddam’s nuclear programme — even if not Saddam himself.

The suggestion is that Powell was sceptical of the war from the start as he did not buy Donald Rumsfeld’s dream that it could be won with a tiny force. “There were enough troops to defeat the army. (But that) was only part of the battle. The difficult part was taking control of a very large country with 25m people and you have just taken out the whole government. And guess what: who then becomes the new government? You do, under the laws of land warfare. We were not able to take control, nor did we have the right political approach.

“We were characterising the insurgents as a few dead-enders and saying, ‘This isn’t all that bad’. A larger troop presence would have been helpful. I raised the question. The Pentagon says that is not what the generals thought. But the generals were working under political direction that said ‘this is not going to be that bad’. But it did turn out that bad — we were unable to strangle the insurgency in its crib — and now it is raging.”

From one so close to the action, that is quite an indictment. Wasn’t the trouble with President Bush that he wanted solutions not problems, so he only recognised the difficulty too late? “You can have that analysis. I know in the course of my conversations with colleagues and the president they were aware of the potential for a problem.”

So why wasn’t there a plan? “You will have to ask others,” he smiles pointedly. “We worked on a plan and it was available but there was a view that once we got there all we had to do was make sure food was flowing and the oilfields were secured, things would fall into place; but things did not fall into place.”

As Powell warned? Pause. “Er, the president was aware of all the possibilities. I will leave it there.” This is all the more powerful for Powell’s greatest talent is making everything sound not “so bad”. The July 7 bombings were okay because “by sundown, the London people, with that great stiff upper lip you have always had, were back to normal, the terrorists were hunted down and you had moved on”.

Similarly he admits that after September 11 America backed “unpleasant regimes” in the “Stans”, but dictators are learning “there is a limit to how much they can use their geopolitical card in the face of pressure for human rights”. And rather than sinking into an inferno of terrorism he says the world is looking good: war is at an all-time low and struggling countries will follow eastern Europe’s example and embrace the West: “I joke with these eastern European leaders, ‘You used to be on my target list, now we are sitting down talking democracy’.” All of which is true: though residents of Guantanamo might struggle to see the rosy vista.

As we part I ask if he regrets not running for president. “Oh no. I have no psychic need to be on stage. Yesterday was Martin Luther King’s birthday and he helped create the conditions under which I could go from being thrown out of hamburger bars because I was black to being the first black secretary of state. Besides, I am still in my own mind an obscure infantry officer.”

Hardly; but with that he steps out for his lonely walk.

January 22, 2006 at 02:52 AM in Middle East | Permalink | Top of page | Blog Home