Powell is justifying why he made a mistake. He’s blaming his mistake on the intelligence community.
He says the intelligence was misleading and somebody withheld intelligence (qualifiers as to sources). Rumsfeld over at Defense had suspicions and shared them with the Chiefs. Powell had his own independent sources of intelligence and set of advisors. Ditto P.M. Tony Blair. I’m sorry, all of them as well as the President erred. In a sense, they were misled. But, they had bear the ultimate responsibility. They should have been more skeptical.
At the time of this interview, the Democrats were in charge of both houses of Congress. This was their opportunity to determine if and what was the breakdown in the intelligence community that would have exonerated Powell (or kept him in the same boat with Bush and others, in terms of not being sufficiently skeptical).
Two years later, there was a new President. If the Democrats in Congress couldn’t get to the bottom of it, maybe the new President could. Instead, we got one after another failure of intelligence: (1) the collapse of Iraq, (2) the rise of ISIS, (3) the debacle in Libya, (4) the debacle in Yemen, and (5) the spread of terrorism into Africa and Indonesia, and forays into the west.
I’m sorry, but every war has a dynamic of its own. Fundamentally, this is because the each side is itself adapting to what the other side is doing. If you have overwhelming force, you can overcome this, and achieve victory quickly with few casualties and little collateral damage. But, when you don’t have, or have but refuse to use overwhelming force, the other side can and will surprise you.
In terms of the doctrine of “preemptive defense,” based on intelligence, the war in Iraq was disquieting. The reason conclusion should be that we need levels of defense so as to be able to take a hit. Striking before getting hit, is fraught with danger.
The only question for Trump is whether or not Powell said what he said.
We can pick Powell apart all we want, we can refuse to let our daughters date him, we can dump garbage on his grave some day, BUT that doesn’t change the fact that he said he was lied to by the Bush administration intel community.
Nor does it mean that Trump MADE UP his belief that the Bush administration lied about his stuff.