Slate's War Stories: Powell's U.N. Intercepts

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MADELEINE BRAND, host:

This is DAY TO DAY. Coming up, a rap master who says never mind the dazzle of diamonds. What matters is real money. I'm Madeleine Brand.

ALEX CHADWICK, host:

And I'm Alex Chadwick. First, this. We are happily stealing material now from not one, not two, but three other news sources. The New York Times, Foreign Affairs magazine, and our friends at Slate Magazine online, where Fred Kaplan writes the War Stories column. Fred, welcome back to DAY TO DAY.

Mr. FRED KAPLAN (Columnist, Slate Magazine): Good to be here.

CHADWICK: Your latest column up on Slate harkens back to the pre-Iraq war days, when Secretary of State Colin Powell made his U.N. speech about the case for war and weapons mass destruction. Highly controversial appearance, but utterly convincing, you wrote at the time, because of the tapes he cited--intercepted conversations between Iraqi military officers who seem to be talked about WMD. Here's one of those tapes. Secretary Powell played it, and then read from a transcript, translated into english.

(Soundbite of a man speaking in foreign language)

General COLIN POWELL (U.S. Army, Retired; Former Secretary of State): I'm worried you all have something left. We evacuated everything, we don't have anything left. Note what he says: we evacuated everything. We didn't destroy it. We didn't line it up for inspection. We didn't turn it in to the inspectors. We evacuated it to make it was not around when the inspectors showed up.

CHADWICK: Fred, ever since the U.S.-led invasion and the WMD claims evaporating, you've been wondering, what about those tapes? And now, as your column is headlined, mystery solved. Explain about this report, will you?

Mr. KAPLAN: Right. Well, the U.S.-joint forces command conducted an elaborate, an extensive study of the war from Iraqi's point of view. And on this point, they concluded that Saddam Hussein very much wanted to comply with the U.N. inspections, fearing an invasion, and he worried that there might be residue from chemical and biological weapons from way back before the 1991 war, and he wanted his guys to go in a clean out that debris before the inspectors came. And this strikes me as an utterly plausible explaination.

CHADWICK: You wrote, at the time of Secretary Powell's speech, this is the smoking gun. This is the best case for going to war against Iraq.

Mr. KAPLAN: Mm-hmm. Yeah, well, you know, let me just say two things in my defense, first. One, I thoroughly critisized everything else that he said in that speech. I was very sceptical of the claims about everything else. Two, I, you know, every reporter and columnist has one piece that they regret having written, and I guess that's mine.

CHADWICK: It was hard to imagine an alternative inference, you wrote at the time, but it wasn't just you. I didn't see anyone else reaching the inference that Saddam might be referring to earlier stockpiles or something.

Mr. KAPLAN: No, that, it listen. I mean, the Joint-Forces Command study quotes one Iraqi Generel who was watching Powell on CNN, and this guy was pretty high up, and he said, you know, I knew that we didn't have weapons of mass destruction. Saddam told us that he didn't have any, but I'm watching the speech, and I'm thinking, God, maybe we do. Maybe there's something that I don't know about. He found it that convincing.

CHADWICK: There's no question in your mind that Secretary Powell believed what he was saying.

Mr. KAPLAN: No, I think he believed it. I think, look, Alex, almost everybody thought that they had at least biological and chemical weapons. And why wouldn't they? I mean, inspectors had been out of the country for five years. Making biological and chemical weapons isn't exactly rocket science. I don't anybody, except for Scott Ridder, the former weapons inspector, who thought that Saddam really didn't have anything.

CHADWICK: Fred, this is just one aspect of this article in Foreign Affairs, which is actually an excerpt from this Joint-Forces Command report about the Iraqi thinking before the war. What did you think of the piece in its whole?

Mr. KAPLAN: Well, it's a fascinating piece. Some of the highlights are that Saddam Hussein still didn't think we would really invading, even a few weeks before the war. Right up into the last minute, he didn't think that we would actually go into Baghdad. He knew he didn't have weapons of mass destruction, and the rumors in some quarters that he planned the post-war insurgency all along, and scattered munitions all over the country are nonsense. He thought that he would survive. There was no Saddam-controlled preparations for an insurgency.

CHADWICK: Fred Kaplan writes the War Stories column for Slate magazine. Fred, thank you.

Mr. KAPLAN: Thank you.

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