U.S. DEPARTMENT OF STATE
Office of the Spokesman
For
Immediate
Release
February 14, 2003
As Delivered
2003/160
Remarks
Secretary of State Colin L. Powell
To the United Nations Security Council
February 14, 2003
New York, New York
(12:20 p.m. EST)
SECRETARY POWELL: Thank you
very much, Mr. President. Mr. President, Mr. Secretary
General, Distinguished Members of the Council, it's a great
pleasure to be here with you again to consider this very
important matter. And I'm very pleased to be here as the
Secretary of State of a relatively new country on the face
of the earth, but I think I can take some credit sitting
here as being a representative of the oldest democracy that
is assembled here around this table.
I'm proud of that. A democracy that
believes in peace, a nation that has tried in the course of
its history to show how people can live in peace with one
another, but a democracy that has not been afraid to meet
its responsibilities on the world stage when it has been
challenged; more importantly, when others in the world have
been challenged or when the international order has been
challenged or when the international institutions of which
we are a part have been challenged.
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That's why we have joined
and been active members of institutions such as the
United Nations and a number of other institutions that
have come together for the purpose of peace and for the
purpose of mutual security and for the purpose of
letting other nations which pursue a path of
destruction, which pursue paths of developing weapons of
mass destruction which threaten their neighbors, to let
them know that we will stand tall, we will stand
together, to meet these kinds of challenges. |
I want to express my appreciation to
Dr. Blix and
Dr. ElBaradei for their presentation this
morning. They took up a difficult challenge when they went
back into Iraq last fall in pursuit of disarmament, as
required by
Resolution 1441. And I listened very
attentively to all they said this morning and I am pleased
that there have been improvements with respect to process.
I'm pleased that there have been improvements with respect
to not having five minders with each inspector, down to
something less than five minders with each inspector. But I
think they still are being minded, they are still being
watched, they are still being bugged. They still do not
have the freedom of access around Iraq that they need to do
their job well.
I am pleased that a few people have
come forward for interviews, but not all the people who
should be coming forward for interviews, and with the
freedom to interview them in a manner that their safety can
be protected and the safety of their families can be
protected, as required by UN Resolution 1441.
I am glad that access has been
relatively good. But that is all process; it is not
substance. I am pleased to hear that decrees have now been
issued that should have been issued years and years ago.
But does anybody really think a decree from Saddam Hussein,
directed to whom, is going to fundamentally change the
situation? And it comes out on a morning when we are moving
forward down the path laid out by Resolution 1441.
These are all process issues. These
are all tricks that are being played on us. And to say that
new commissions are being formed that will go find materials
that they claim are not there in the first place, can
anybody honestly believe that either one of these two new
commissions will actively seek out information that they
have been actively trying to deny to the world community, to
the inspectors, for the last eleven plus years?
I commend the inspectors. I thank them
for what they are doing. But at the same time, I have to
keep coming back to the point that the inspectors have
repeatedly made, and they've made it again here this
morning. They've been making it for the last eleven plus
years: What we need is not more inspections, what we need
is not more immediate access; what we need is immediate,
active, unconditional, full cooperation on the part of
Iraq.
What we need is for Iraq to disarm.
Resolution 1441 was not about inspections. Let me say that
again. Resolution 1441 was not about inspections.
Resolution 1441 was about the disarmament of Iraq. We
worked on that resolution for seven weeks, from the time of
President Bush's powerful speech here at the United Nations
General Assembly on the 12th of September until the
resolution was passed on the 8th of November.
We had intense discussions. All of you
are familiar with it. You participated in these discussions
and it was about disarmament. And the resolution began with
the clear statement that Iraq was in material breach of its
obligations for the past eleven years and remains to that
day, the day the resolution was passed, in material breach.
And the resolution said Iraq must now
come into compliance. It must disarm. The resolution went
on to say that we want to see a declaration from Iraq within
30 days of all of its activities. Put it all on the table.
Let's see what you have been doing. Give us a declaration
that we can believe in that is full, complete and accurate.
That's what we said to Iraq on the 8th of November. And
some 29 days later we got 12,000 pages. Nobody in this
Council can say that that was a full, complete or accurate
declaration.
And now it is several months after that
declaration was submitted, and I have heard nothing to
suggest that they have filled in the gaps that were in that
declaration or they have added new evidence that should give
us any comfort that we have a full, complete and accurate
declaration.
You will recall, we put that
declaration requirement into the resolution as an early test
of Iraq's seriousness. Are they serious? Are they going to
disarm? Are they going to comply? Are they going to
cooperate? And the answer with that declaration was, "No.
We're going to see what we can get away with. We can see
how much we can slip under your nose," and everybody will
clap and say, "Isn't that wonderful? They provided a
declaration that was of not any particular use."
We then had some level of acceptance of
the fact inspectors would be going back in. Recall that
Iraq tried to use this gambit right after the President's
speech in September to try to keep Resolution 1441 from ever
coming down the pipe.
Suddenly, on the following Monday after
the President's speech, "Oh, we'll let inspectors back in."
Why? Because when the President spoke and when Iraq saw
that that the international community was now coming
together with seriousness and with determination, it knew it
better do something. It didn't do it out of the goodness of
its heart or it suddenly discovered that it's been in
violation for all those years. They did it because of
pressure. They did it because this Council stood firm.
They did it because the international community said,
“Enough.” We will not tolerate Iraq continuing to have
weapons of mass destruction to be used against its own
people, to be used against its neighbors."
Or worse, if we find a post-9/11 nexus
between Iraq and terrorist organizations that are looking
for just such weapons -- and I would submit and will provide
more evidence that such connections are now emerging and we
can establish that they exist -- we cannot wait for one of
these terrible weapons to show up in one of our cities and
wonder where it came from after it's been detonated by al-Qaida
or somebody else. This is the time to go after this source
of this kind of weaponry. And that's what 1441 was all
about.
And to this day, we have not seen the
level of cooperation that was expected, anticipated, hoped
for -- I hoped for. No one worked harder than the United
States, and I submit to you no one worked harder, if I might
humbly say, I did to try to put forward a resolution that
would show the determination of the international community
to the leadership in Iraq so that they would now meet their
obligations and come clean and comply. And they did not.
Notwithstanding all of the discussion
we've heard so far this morning about giving inspections
more time, let's have more airplanes flying over, let's have
more inspectors added to the inspection process, Dr. Blix
noted earlier this week that it's not more inspectors that
are needed; what's needed is what both Dr. Blix and Dr.
ElBaradei have said what's been needed since 1991:
immediate, active, unconditional compliance and cooperation.
I'm pleased that Iraq is now discussing
this matter with South Africa, but it isn't brain surgery.
South Africa knows how to do it. Anybody knows how to do
it.
If we were getting the kind of
cooperation that we expected when 1441 was passed and we
hoped for when 1441 was passed, these documents would be
flooding out of homes, flooding out of factories. There
would be no question about access. There would be no
question about interviews. If Iraq was serious in this
matter, interviewees would be standing up outside of
UNMOVIC
and IAEA offices in Baghdad and elsewhere, waiting to be
interviewed, because they are determined to prove to the
world, to give the world all the evidence needed that these
weapons of mass destruction are gone.
But the questions, notwithstanding all
of the lovely rhetoric, the questions remain, and some of my
colleagues have talked about it. We haven't accounted for
the anthrax. We haven't accounted for the botulinum, the VX,
bulk biological agents, growth media, 30,000 chemical and
biological munitions. These are not trivial matters one can
just ignore and walk away from and say, well, maybe the
inspectors will find them, maybe they won't. We have not
had a complete, accurate declaration.
We have seen the reconstitution of
casting chambers for missiles. Why? Because they are still
trying to develop these weapons.
We have not seen the kind of
cooperation that was anticipated, expected and demanded of
this body. And we must continue to demand it. We must
continue to put pressure on Iraq, put force upon Iraq, to
make sure that the threat of force is not removed, because
1441 was all about compliance, not inspections. The
inspections were put in as a way, of course, to assist Iraq
in coming forward and complying, in order to verify, in
order to monitor, as the Chief Inspector noted. But we've
still got an incomplete answer from Iraq. We are facing a
difficult situation.
More inspectors? Sorry, not the
answer. What we need is immediate cooperation.
Time? How much time does it take to
say, "I understand the will of the international community
and I and my regime are laying it all out for you"? And not
playing guess, not forming commissions, not issuing decrees,
not getting laws that should have been passed years ago,
suddenly passed on the day when we are meeting.
These are not responsible actions on
the part of Iraq. These are continued efforts to deceive,
to deny, to divert, to throw us off the trail, to throw us
off the path.
The resolution anticipated this kind of
response from Iraq, and that's why in all of our discussions
about that resolution we said they're in material breach; if
they come into new material breach with a false declaration
or not a willingness to cooperate and comply, as OP 4 says,
then the matter has to be referred to the Council for
serious consequences.
I submit to you that notwithstanding
the improvements in process that we have noted, and I
welcome and I thank the inspectors for their hard work,
these improvements in process do not move us away from the
central problem that we continue to have; and more
inspections and a longer inspection period will not move us
away from the central issue, the central problem we are
facing; and that central problem is that Iraq has failed to
comply with 1441. The threat of force must remain.
Force should always be a last resort.
I have preached this for most of my professional life, as a
soldier and as a diplomat, but it must be a resort. We
cannot allow this process to be endlessly strung out as Iraq
is trying to do right now-- string it out long enough and
the world will start looking in other directions, the
Security Council will move on, we'll get away with it again.
My friends, they cannot be allowed to
get away with it again. We now are in a situation where
Iraq's continued noncompliance and failure to cooperate, it
seems to me, in the clearest terms, requires this Council to
begin to think through the consequences of walking away from
this problem with a reality that we have to face this
problem; and that, in the very near future, we will have to
consider whether or not we've reached that point where this
Council, as distasteful as it may be, as reluctant as we may
be, as many as -- there are so many of you who would rather
not have to face this issue, but it's an issue that must be
faced. And that is whether or not it is time to consider
serious consequences of the kind intended by 1441.
The reason we must not look away from
it is because these are terrible weapons. We are talking
about weapons that will kill not a few people, not a hundred
people, not a thousand people, but that could kill tens of
thousands of people if these weapons got into the wrong
hands.
And the security of the region, the
hopes for the people of Iraq, themselves, and our security
rest upon us meeting our responsibilities. And, if it comes
to it, invoking the serious consequences called for 1441 --
in 1441. 1441 is about disarmament and compliance and not
merely a process of inspections that goes on forever without
ever resolving the basic problem.
Thank you.

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