The "lie" of Iraq's concealment of weapons of mass destruction that America announced before the UN Security Council to justify its invasion of this country and the overthrow of the late President Saddam Hussein in 2003 has become strongly present in the statements of Russian officials to refute the US and Western accusations that Moscow is preparing to invade Ukraine.
Dmitry Polyansky, Russia's first deputy permanent representative to the United Nations, declared on Sunday that US and British intelligence assessments about Ukraine could not be trusted, because they had made many grave mistakes in the run-up to the US-led invasion of Iraq.
"We do not trust the American and British intelligence. They have failed us...they have failed the entire world in several events. It is enough to remember the issue of weapons of mass destruction in Iraq," Polyansky said in an interview with the US network, Sky News.
"We don't trust the US and British intelligence, they have let us down, the whole world, on many occasions. Enough to remember the weapons of mass destruction in Iraq," says the Russian ambassador to the UN, Dmitry Polyanskiy. Phillips: https://t.co/0ynewTy38G pic.twitter.com/eLratrBEnC
— Trevor Phillips on Sunday (@RidgeOnSunday) February 20, 2022
Earlier, the Permanent Representative of the Russian Federation to the United Nations, Ambassador Vasily Nebenzia, accused the United States of launching a disinformation campaign, and said that it is an American policy, as happened in this council when the representative of the United States began showing pictures of trucks in Iraq, stressing that they were carrying weapons of mass destruction, and then it turned out to be unreliable. Those assertions, and look what happened in Iraq where they invaded and destroyed it.
He said that the United States was the one that waged many wars in which hundreds of thousands were killed in more than one country.
Powell during his famous speech on weapons of mass destruction in Iraq before the Security Council in 2003 (Reuters)
The late US Secretary of State Colin Powell had defended the war in Iraq and made a lengthy speech to the UN Security Council on February 5, 2003 about his country's obtaining conclusive evidence that Iraq possessed weapons of mass destruction, arguments that were behind the justification of the invasion of the country.
He later admitted that this speech was a stain on his reputation, saying, "It was a stain because I gave this show to the world on behalf of the United States, and it will always remain a part of my performance."
The United States and Western countries accuse Russia of preparing a military attack on Ukraine, stressing that "this invasion can happen at any time," which Moscow has denied on several occasions;
Considering that the accusations are a pretext to increase NATO's military presence near its borders.