GEN. POWELL: Well, we�you know, until somebody could show me something, you have to always keep, in the back of your mind, some element of questioning. I’m a soldier. I’m trained to consider all possibilities. But when we prepared for this presentation at the UN, and, of course, it was the most vivid demonstration of our intelligence, but it was not something that was made up just for that presentation. It reflected the consistent view of the intelligence community over time to 2001, 2002, 2003, and also reflected the kind of intelligence that President Clinton was being given in 1998 when he operated�executed Operation Desert Fox, which bombed Iraq for a period of four days. Same reason. They had this capability and they had these stockpiles, and something had to be done about it.

The thing about it, Tim, is when we decided to take it to the UN, I worked for seven weeks to get a UN resolution, a unanimous resolution. as it turned out, 1441, and that resolution had a get out of jail card for Saddam Hussein. It gave him, I think it was 30 or 60 days, to come forward and answer all the questions that are outstanding about your capability and your stockpiles and what you’ve done with it. And, instead of seriously trying to answer that question, he just dumped a whole bunch of stuff on us that really wasn’t credible or believable. And it was at that point that he set us on the road to war. He had a chance to stop this. And when I briefed the president in August of 2002 about the potential consequences of the war, and he said, “What do we do?� I said, “I recommend we go to the UN.� He accepted that recommendation, we went to the UN. But I said to the president at that time, you know, “He could satisfy us, and if he satisfies us, if he makes it clear that here is it�here it all is, then you have to be prepared to accept that, and there may not be a war, and we may have a changed regime but not a regime change.�

MR. RUSSERT: What did the president say?

GEN. POWELL: He said yes, he understood that.

MR. RUSSERT: Karen DeYoung wrote a book called “Soldier: The Life of Colin Powell,� and she quotes someone very close and near and dear to you, your wife of almost 45 years, Alma Powell, and this what she says: “Powell’s wife Alma thought Colin had been callously used to promote a war she wished had never happened. ‘They needed him to do it,’ Alma said, ‘because they knew people would believe him.’� Do you feel used?

GEN. POWELL: No. I feel that when�I was part of an administration that, over a period of years, had created a body of evidence and intelligence that said this is a dangerous regime. And I had no love for Saddam Hussein, as you can appreciate. For 12 years I’d been listening to, “Well, why didn’t you take him out back in 1991?� So I had no truck with this regime, and we had a steady stream of intelligence reports that suggested he was a danger. And he became more of a danger after 9/11 when the possibility emerges that some of these terrible weapons he was working on�and let there be no doubt that he was continuing to work on these. He was continuing to hope that he could escape the boundaries of the UN sanctions and get back to making these kinds of weapons. And if you believe otherwise, I think that would be a naive belief. And so, throughout that time, we had this consistent body of evidence. And when the president called me in and said, “I want you to go to the United Nations and make the presentation,� I didn’t blink in the slightest because I had been using that intelligence all along in my presentations and had every reason to believe it. The problem we had in the next five days was that a product was being worked on in the White House and the NSC which was unusable. It was more a legal brief than it was an analysis.

MR. RUSSERT: But did you think at that time a pre-emptive war was the best course for the US, or did you think that Saddam was already boxed because of the sanctions?

GEN. POWELL: I would’ve preferred no war because I couldn’t see clearly the unintended consequences. But we tried to avoid that war with the UN sanctions and putting increasing diplomatic and international pressure on Saddam Hussein. But when I took it to the president and said, “This is a war we ought to see if we can avoid,� I also said and made it clear to him, “If, at the end of the day, it is a war that we cannot avoid, I’ll be with you all the way.� That’s, that’s part of being part of a team. And therefore I couldn’t have any other outcome, and I had no reservations about supporting the president in war.

So what does it mean? Is he a liar? A co-conspirator? Is he self deluded? Or was he just a good soldier?