Colin Powell's admission about WMDs and Iraq War widely overlooked.

When former Secretary of State Colin Powell announced his support for Barack Obama during his October 19 Meet the Press appearance, his endorsement was widely publicized. Not widely reported was what he said on the same program about the cause-and-effect relationship between the U.S. government's false statements about Saddam Hussein's reputed weapons of mass destruction and the U.S. invasion of Iraq.

Meet the Press interviewer Tom Brokaw asked Powell: "Removing the weapons of mass destruction from the equation, because we now know that they did not exist, was it then a war of necessity or just a war of choice?" Powell did not challenge Brokaw's premise that the WMDs did not exist. Instead, he responded: "Without the weapons of mass destruction present, as conveyed to us by the intelligence community in the most powerful way, I don't think there would have been a war. It was the reason we took it to the public, it was the reason we took it to the American people, to the Congress, who supported it on that basis, and it's the presentation I made to the United Nations. Without those weapons of mass destruction then Iraq did not present to the world the kind of threat that it did if it had weapons of mass destruction."

Prior to that question, Powell referred to his pre-Iraq War UN Security Council speech, wherein he presented the case that Saddam possessed WMDs, saying: "I know the importance of that speech, and I regret a lot of the information that the intelligence community provided us was wrong."