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Okay, just watched it. I was going to watch the reactions from the other nations as well, but it's 4.30am here and the guy from Cameroon just kept going on and on, so I only got to hear the reactions of China, UK and Russia, all of which were pre-prepared and added nothing to their stances that we didn't already know. Anyway, to Powell's speech.
He seemed to split the speech up into five major categories (in that he addressed each of the major issues in turn, without much overlapping) so I suppose that's the way I'll talk about them here.
The first area dealt with Iraqi deception, and he attempted to prove the lengths to which the Iraqi government went to in order to cover up its "production of weapons of mass destruction". There were three recorded messages in the speech, all, really, were attempts to demonstrate just how subversive the Iraqi's were being in their attempts to throw off the UN Inspectors.
The first recorded message had something to do with a "modified vehicle" and was, just a few minutes into the speech, probably the most convincing evidence presented all-in-all. It started with a higher ranking Iraqi official appearing to be rebuking a lower-ranked Iraqi official for possessing this "modified vehicle" at his base in advance of a visiting UN inspection team. The lower official then said something along the lines of "what shall I tell the inspectors if they see it?" sparking some frustated disbelief in the higher official that they should possess this "vehicle" ahead of UN inspections and that it shouldn't be there. I found this picture on the BBC website, which provides a small part of the transcript:
Taken out of context it looks pretty condemning, but viewed in context of the rest of the transcript I can't remember thinking that it was anywhere near conclusive evidence that Iraq was moving around weapons in anticipation of UN visits. Colin Powell seemed to think that the use of the Arabic equivelent of the word "evacuation" used in favour of "destruction" or "removed for presentation to the UN inspectors" was proof enough that the Iraqis have been running the inspectors around, but, once again, you need a pretty broad imagination to associate the phrase "modified vehicle" with "weapons of mass destruction".
The second message was similar, with a higher official talking to a lower official about the upcoming visit of some specific part of the UN inspection team (I cannot remember the name). My memory is hazy on this point, but it had something to do with one of the inspectors asking what would happen if any "forbidden ammunition" was found on a certain site. In fact, to quote CNN, one official said:
"They are inspecting ammunition you have ... for the possibility there are forbidden ammo"
And the other replied:
"We sent you a message yesterday to clean out the areas, scrap areas, abandoned areas. Make sure there is nothing there."
Once again, it could be construed as evidence of the Iraqis cleaning out evidence of WMDs in anticipation of UN inspections, or it could be construed in a number of ways. The phrases are ambiguous and taken out of any meaningful context. Once again, as with the above quote, it strikes me as very odd that US intelligence can tap into so many calls, and be precise enough in their tracing to identify the people speaking and the sites they are referring to, yet cannot convey this information to inspection teams who would have - if the allegations are correct - ample time to catch the Iraqis with their pants down. If this really is evidence that the Iraqis are moving large amounts of weaponry, then surely the US could have instructed the UN to visit these sites as quickly as possible (you cannot dispose of evidence pertaining to chemical and biological weaponry overnight) and would have long found the "smoking gun" they seek by now.
The third message seemed irrelevant to me, with one official telling another to take the phrase "nerve agents" out of a report. Taken out of context, the phrase is meaningless and could have been referring to anything. I'll leave it to your own judgement though.
The second part of the speech dealt with supposed evidence pertaining to Iraqs production of chemical and biological weapons, and most of it was heavily dated and skewed so that Iraq could be allowed no right of reply. For instance, Powell accused the Iraqis of possessing large amounts of biolgical agents "before the Iraq/Iran war" and then challenged Iraq and suggested that the fact that it had not been accounted for was evidence enough that Iraq was guilty of this material for 20+ years and that it was up to Iraq to prove that it had been destroyed. And if I may side-track for a moment, that was another main thrust of Powell's speech - that the burden of proof is on the Iraqis rather than the Americnas. That is, that the Iraqis are guilty until proven innocent. Quite what you can do to prove that you don't have any WMDs apart from saying "I don't have any WMDs, come in and take a look" is beyond me, and severly subverts my own conceptions of justice - but then maybe that's just me.
Anyway, Powell made a long list of substances that Iraq used to have, and punctuated these statistics with graphic references as to how potent these materials really are, using his pen-lid, at times, as a point of reference. Nonetheless, throughout all the statistics he provided, none, from memory, were more recenent than 5 years old (i.e. 1998 or earlier, the time, he said, when Hussein "booted out the inspectors" when it was actually Bill Clinton who kicked out the inspectors at that point in time). Once again, he made numerous assertionst that Iraq did have this that or the other at some point in time (most of which was supplied to it by the US anyway if you would care to do some research) and once again demanded that Iraq prove that - post 7 years of inspections - it no longer had these materials. Once again, Powell and his government are the protagonists, the ones pressing for a war, so why should the burdern of proof be on the Iraqis? Could I justly accuse a man of murder and assert that he prove otherwise, especially given that I am the one determining the merit of the evidence he presents in the first place?
The only present (i.e. post 1998) evidence he presented on the issue was that of satellite photographs taken of Iraqi sites supposed to be producing chemical/biolgocial weapons. By his own admission, the photgraphs require expert analysis to be made meaningful, but I'm sure that we can examine them and do our own analysis:
Once again, this image is from the BBC website. It was a lot more clear in the presentation, but essentially what Colin Powell was trying to show was a site busy with activity in November and then being bulldozed in December. In the first image he presented (you can't see it on the image above) he showed a warehouse (the big square thing in the image on the left) being surrounded by trucks, tents, personnel and other things that, in his view, demonstrated that the site was active. No I have no qualms with the summation, the site was active (which seemed to be the point Powell wished to stress the most - that something was happening there in November) but I still see no proof that this site was a production site for WMDs. Perhaps you need to have a better trained eye than I do, but to conclude that the site was used to store/produce weapons merely because there were trucks/security there, you would - in my eyes - need to draw quite a long bow indeed. If the site was being monitered so closely, after all, surely they would have noticed massive missles being loaded into the back of the trucks? Or, if it's not quite that simple, but if they were so sure that the site was producing weapons, then surely they could have traced the trucks to wherever they were headed, passed the information onto the UN and demanded a thorough search of the relevent complexes? Surely this would have provided the excuse for a war that they were looking for?
Besides, I think that the subsequent slides (and the commentary provided by Mr Powell) actually end up working aginst the US in their assertion that Iraq are moving weapons around at will. Look at the dates separating the pictures: one month. That is, going by this case study, it takes one month from the point at which weapons are removed from a factory, to the point at which it is demolished "and the top soil removed" (Powell's own words) to remove any evidence of weapons from the site. Remember, as I said earlier, you can't just sweep chemical/biolgical/nuclear weapons production under the carpet overnight. Toxins and radioactivity have the habit of staying around long after the responsible materials have been removed, and the UN inspectors aren't stupid. They aren't just looking for boxes labelled "Weapons of Mass Destruction", they are thoroughly analyising the sites thought to have housed weapons production plants. If there had been large scale chemical/biological weapons production plant at a particular site, it would take a long time to clean it all up. You couldn't just throw everything into a few boxes, drive them away and then deny everything. Even if the Iraqi officials had a few days warning prior to UN inspections (which, most of the time, they don't) disposing of the evidence isn't that easy, it's a long process (a month in the above case) and I'm sure that with the US's satellite monitoring capabilites, sneaking large amounts of chemical weapons around the country would be pretty damn difficult.
The third part of the speech had to do with Saddam Hussein's attempt to build a nuclear weapon, and it failed to tell us anything that we don't already know. Basically, Powell ran through a long list of items that Hussein had either procured or attempted to procure, and how these may be tied in with the aim of building a nuclear bomb. Yet, even by Powell's own admission, Hussein does not yet have all the components necessary to build one, even if he wanted to. He went on at length about the "aluminium tubing" that could be used in the production of a nuclear bomb, despite the fact that this issue had been addressed by the IAEA several weeks before. Taken from the BBC website (an article concerning the allegations made against Iraq, written on 20/01/03):
"There was better news for Iraq on the mystery of its attempted import of thousands of aluminium tubes.
The suspicion was that it wanted these for centrifuges to enrich uranium for a nuclear bomb but Mr ElBaradei's report to the Council said that the IAEA analysis "indicated that the... tubes sought by Iraq... appear to be consistent with reverse engineering of rockets" as Iraq had asserted."
So on the nuclear front, much as we had suspected. Saddam doesn't have a nuclear bomb, and couldn't make one even if he wanted to.
The fourth part of the speech concerned Iraq's links with Al Qaeda, and was even more spurious than the preceding parts of the speech. The entire argument rested on the assumption that Hussein had links with a man named "Abu Musab Zarqawi" which I don't remember Colin Powell going any way to verifying. Basically Powell made out a great case as to why this "Zarqawi" is a threat to global security (making sure to specifically spell out the threat he posed to the nations present at the council - Spain, Italy, Russia etc) but his ties to Hussein were weak. Apparently the fact that he and some of his factions were working within Iraq (within the Northern Kurdish areas outside of Husseins control - by Powell's own admission) and that he had met with some Iraqi officials were enough to suggest that Hussein had ties with Al Qaeda, but, needless to say, there was no evidence presented to support this assumption. If Zarqawi is such a threat, then it is he who needs to be stopped. If these threats are coming out of the Kurdish part of Iraq, then I fail to see what Baghdad has to do with it. Also, he asserted that "Iraqis visited Osama Bin Laden in Afghanistan and provided training to al-Qaeda members" in the early 1990s and that this was grounds to condemn Hussein. But Collo, mate, didn't the US do exactly the same thing? Did they not fund and train Al Qaeda and Bin Laden? "Ambition and hatred are enough to bring Iraq and al-Qaeda together" Powell said, barely acknoledging the fact that the Secularism of Hussein and the theism of Bin Laden drive them further apart than a common hatred of the US ever could bring them together.
The last part of the speech (which was much shorter than the other parts) was essentially a moral condemnation of Hussein's human rights record, which - while being technically accurate - was rife with hypocracy, and as much a justification for a pre-emptive stike on the US as it was justification for a pre-emptive strike on Iraq. Firstly Powell cited Iraqi violation of UN resolutions and treaties, which - while they may be valid, do not excuse the fact that many other countries are guilty of violating many more (and much more serious) resolutions than Iraq, and the fact that the human rights record of the US (as well as their violation of similar UN treaties/resolutions) has been, for a western country, quite abysmal. Secondly, Powell condemned Hussein for gassing his own people in 1988.
Now I've already run through this before in another topic, so I won't labour the point, but essentially the chemical weapons used by Hussein against the Kurds in 1988 were supplied by the US and after the event, the US government (headed by Bush snr, and of which Powell - unless I am very much mistaken - was a part) actually increased the export of such weapons to Iraq. Thus, to spell it out more bluntly, Powell condemns the Iraqi president for murdering his own people when it was his government who supplied him with the means to commit such an action, and his government who - being so outraged by these "humanitarian attrocities" - increased the supply of such weapons after the event. I'm not sure what else to add, as the US begging along the "human rights" angle really does speak for itself.
Anyway, overall, having said all that I have, I believe that Powell came across quite confidently and spoke forcefully and passionately. I am proud that he has - or at least has been shown to have - convinced Bush to pursue the UN angle as far as possible. I doubt that any of the other individuals holding Bush's strings would have come across quite so convincingly, so in that sense, at least Powell presented a semi-reputable argument and presented the bare, necessary justification for a war on Iraq. Having said that, though, much of the information was aged and outdated, and virtually all of it relied on "human accounts", or - to put it another way - "things that people told us". In a court of law, that would count as hear-say and conjecture, and I'm not sure it would be enough to convict Hussein of the crimes with which he has been charged. I'm fairly certain I've addressed most of the substantiated points (in the sense that there is evidence supporting the claims that reaches beyond mere hearsay and conjecture) and if I haven't, then I'd be happy to address it should you remind me of it (as my memory ain't what it used to be).
Nonetheless, I would be interested to see how the other nations address the speech in the coming days (as they all read pre-prepared remarks today) as well as how Hans Blix and his team consider the evidence presented, but - for me anyway - the speech did little to convince me that a war on Iraq is the right thing. Powell did not address the many deaths certain to occur from such an action (and this is by far the most major issue to be considered in the justification for war) nor did he address what would happen once Hussein had been deposed as leader. The speech did moderately well in justifying why the US might be legally justified in going to war, but did nothing to clarify why war is the best available option, or why other diplomatic avenues have necessarily been depleted.
But still, I would like to hear what the rest of you thought about it, especially since I wrote most of this several hours after having watched the actual speech. 
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