In a Washington Post interview on February 2, 2004, Secretary of State Colin “Powell admitted that they had gone to war [with Iraq] on false premises. While he told the newspaper that he still thought the war ‘was the right thing to do,’ he hedged when asked whether he would have favored it if he knew then what he knew now. ‘I don’t know,’ he said, ‘because it was the stockpile that presented the final little piece that made it more of a real and present danger and threat to the region and to the world.’ The ‘absence of a stockpile changes the political calculus,’ he added, and ‘changes the answer you get.’ [President] Bush and [Vice President Dick] Cheney were furious. Powell tried to backtrack. ‘It was something we all agreed to, and would probably agree to again under any other set of circumstances,’ he told reporters.”
– Peter Baker, Days of Fire, Pages 308-309