Jack Straw: Reflecting on Colin Powell’s Legacy and Death

JACK STRAW, FORMER BRITISH FOREIGN SECRETARY: General Powell was the greatest man I ever worked with in international diplomacy, or, indeed, domestic diplomacy as well. And I saw a lot of really good people. But he was absolutely outstanding. And I think the key to why he succeeded was because, above all, he was able to engender trust at a very personal level. So he was a brilliant negotiator. When you’re negotiating, you have got to be very tough, you have got to know what you want, you have got to know what the other side wants. But you can’t get anywhere in negotiations without trust. And Colin Powell conveyed that he trusted other people, and they trusted him in turn.

BIANNA GOLODRYGA: And it was that trust that obviously led to that fateful speech in February of 2003 at the United Nations, offering all of the intelligence that he said backed an invasion of Iraq. And, behind the scenes, that is something that the two of you really bonded over, in the sense that you were — you had a lot of reservations about going into war.

STRAW: We did indeed. And I worked very closely with General Powell when he was successfully persuading, as was Tony Blair seeking to, General George W. Bush, his boss, to go down what was called the U.N. route, to put Iraq into the Security Council, against the wishes, like they said, of the vice president, Cheney, or — and of Secretary for Defense Don Rumsfeld. And that was successful. And it’s just worth recording that the whole of the world, everybody across — around the table in the Security Council signed up to a resolution which said that it believed that Iraq posed a threat to international peace and security because of its weapons of mass destruction. As for that 5th of February, 2003, presentation, Colin had spent two days at least, hours and hours and hours, in the vaults of Langley, the CIA headquarters just outside D.C., going through the script. He discarded the original script he was given. He called me two or three times that weekend, saying it was hopeless. And he decided to write it himself. So, when he said this is based on very clear intelligence, he was speaking what he thought to be a truth and I, sitting next to him in the Security Council, also thought to be a truth. Now, as it turned out, the intelligence which he was using and which we were using was flawed. And that really rankled with him, but I do not believe that it should or will detract from the verdict of history towards General Powell, which is, here is a great man.