Powell Defends Strikes on Iraqi Chemical Sites

Allies voiced concerns about bombing biological weapons plants during the Persian Gulf War, but U.S. military commanders approved the strikes on the assurance toxins would not spread over friendly troops, retired Gen. Colin L. Powell told lawmakers Thursday.

“This was a very difficult decision for us to make,” Powell said at a Senate hearing on Gulf War illnesses. “Some of my allied counterparts were a little nervous about us attacking these facilities.”

In the end, based on detailed intelligence assessments of how such attacks might unfold, Powell, then the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, endorsed the strikes. President Bush then gave the go-ahead.

Strikes by U.S. and allied warplanes on Iraqi chemical and biological weapons sites in the 1991 war are part of a much broader inquiry into what may be causing the chronic illnesses afflicting thousands of Gulf War veterans.

Members of the Senate Veterans Affairs Committee who have sharply criticized the Pentagon’s performance on the Gulf War illness issue were careful to assure the popular general they were not criticizing him. Several referred to Powell as a hero.

Still, Powell’s tone was at times defensive as, for example, when he explained the Pentagon’s approval of the use of the nerve gas antidote pyridostigmine bromide even though it hadn’t been approved by the Food and Drug Administration. Some sick veterans have speculated that the drug contributed to their health problems.

“The suggestion that somehow I, as chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, would sit in the Pentagon and approve the use of medicines for our troops that I knew at that time to be improper or injurious to our troops or put them at some risk is just not accurate,” Powell said.

The Joint Chiefs had no intelligence reports that Powell could recall indicating that Iraq had stored chemical weapons at the Kamisiyah bunker complex in southern Iraq. The Pentagon now believes that the site may have contained nerve gas shells at the time it was blown up in March 1991, just after the war, by an Army demolition team.