COLIN POWELL ADRESSES UN
February 5th, 2003

        On February 5th, 2003, the United States Secretary of State, Colin Powell, delivered an address to the UN. Powell sought to gather UN support for an invasion of Iraq seeking regime-change. His speech was the culmination of an immense intelligence gathering campaign spanning years, and the first concrete stage of the American push for war. His goal was to convince them that Saddam Hussein was evading weapons inspectors, developing weapons of mass destruction, concealing biological weapons, harboring terrorists associated with Osama bin Laden and Al Qaeda, namely Abu Musab Al-Zarqawi, and seeking to dominate the Middle East through “intimidation, coercion, and annihilation”. Satellite images and taped conversations between Iraqi officials were displayed in order to support these claims. Powell declared that “The photos that I am about to show you are sometimes hard for the average person to interpret, hard fro me," in order to stave off concerns that the photos revealed little to nothing. Later, he also states that these claims "are not assertions. These are facts, corroborated by many sources, some of them sources of the intelligence services of other countries." 
         Powell repeatedly referred to Resolution 1441, passed unanimously by the Security Council on November 8th of 2002, which was created to disarm Iraq of its weapons of mass destruction. His speech emphasized that Iraq had disregarded its obligations with respect to Resolution 1441, and that this necessitated action. 
          In retrospect, Colin Powell’s speech has become a huge source of embarrassment for the United States. It used a great deal of questionable information to assert the existence of Iraqi WMDs, and after the invasion occurred, not a single one was found. His address to the UN has become a symbol of the US failure in Iraq.