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Back in 2003, Tony Blair's government released the Downing St. Dossier, which turned out to plagiarized from US researcher. It was Microsoft Word's revision log that revealed how the dossier moved through the British government to Colin Powell.
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Powell used this as one of his sources when he testified before the U.N. Security Council.
https://www.zdnet.com/article/downin...ision-history/
Powell later said he only gave evidenced that had been triple-checked by the CIA, but it still fell apart.
https://www.pbs.org/wgbh/frontline/a...gence-failure/
It seemed like the interviewer focused on Abu Masab al-Zarqawi, who Powell mentioned twenty-one times in the speech, but was not of interest of Powell, who indicated he had not heard of him before, and did not hear of him for a while thereafter. Powell said he only mentioned Z because his sources said he was the connection between Al-Qaeda and Saddam, but that was not true until he was mentioned twenty-one times to the U.N.
He also said that the official plan had been to remove the leaders of the Iraqi Army and the Baath party, but make use of the good parts; however the Pentagon announced they were getting rid of the Army and Baath, seemingly independently of Powell, Rumsfield, Condoleezza Rice, the Vice Chairman of the Join Chiefs of Staff, and the CIA.
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We were going to reconstitute the Iraqi army so that they could secure their country, and instead we dismissed them, and we turned loose all of these trained military people who might have weapons with them and knew where weapons were.
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[We] created a massive vacuum with respect to security and stability and bureaucracy. And that vacuum was filled by the insurgency. I think it was a major, massive strategic error.
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So by the early fall of 2003, we were in an insurgency, a serious insurgency that was growing, and I don’t think we reacted to it adequately. You have to remember that once Baghdad fell, the Pentagon, Mr. Rumsfeld, cut off the flow of additional troops, and then we started ordering those that were there to go home. The two corps commanders were sent back home with their corps staffs, and a very junior two-star was put in charge of the theater, the most important theater we were in. He didn’t have a staff for it; he wasn’t given a staff for it, and there weren’t good relations between he and Mr. Bremer. We simply were not responding to the facts on the ground.
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United States Central Command Commander in Chief General Tom Franks only had the mission of taking Baghdad, not occupying it. Powell had a study listing the infrastructure that needed to be established when you overthrew a régime, but everyone else told W. that everything was fine, but it fell apart.
Twice.
Someone please remind me how this is related to the cost of gas.
