Year Gone By Feels Like One Long Day

Guess what day in history this is?

That's right. This time last year, we were hanging on every word of the speech by Secretary of State Colin Powell to the United Nations Security Counsel:

I asked for this session today for two purposes. First, to support the core assessments made by Dr. Blix and Dr. ElBaradei. As Dr. Blix reported to this Council on January 27, "Iraq appears not to have come to a genuine acceptance, not even today, of the disarmament which was demanded of it."
And as Dr. ElBaradei reported, Iraq's declaration of December 7 "did not provide any new information relevant to certain questions that have been outstanding since 1998."

My second purpose today is to provide you with additional information, to share with you what the United States knows about Iraq's weapons of mass destruction, as well as Iraq's involvement in terrorism, which is also the subject of Resolution 1441 and other earlier resolutions.

I might add at this point that we are providing all relevant information we can to the inspection teams for them to do their work.

What is really sad, is to read the conclusion of Secretary Powell's remarks (about which he was, no doubt, sincere, but there were others with different plans):

My colleagues, we have an obligation to our citizens. We have an obligation to this body to see that our resolutions are complied with. We wrote 1441 not in order to go to war. We wrote 1441 to try to preserve the peace. We wrote 1441 to give Iraq one last chance.

In retrospect, there is a strong possibility that Secretary Powell was shamefully used, by people who wanted this war. Who really believed what? Isn't that the question a truly independent panel should be appointed to answer?