Powell Says Iraq Failing to Meet Mandate of U.N. Resolution
(Also discusses North Korea, Venezuela in remarks to journalists)
usinfo.state.gov
Iraq is failing to meet the requirements placed upon it by the United
Nations Security Council in Resolution 1441, Secretary of State Colin
Powell said January 17 in remarks at the State Department to
journalists from nations newly elected as members of the 15-member
United Nations Security Council.
"Iraq has failed to cooperate. It has failed to put forward a
believable declaration, as required. It is not making people
available. It is not making documents available. It is deceiving the
inspectors. It is trying to make it harder for the inspectors to do
their work," Powell said.
[...]
And so it seems to me that a regime that has the intent to develop
weapons of mass destruction, the capacity to do so, and we believe has
been doing so, the burden is on them to prove that they do not have
weapons of mass destruction. That's the problem. It is not -- you
know, we believe and we believe that we will be presenting information
in the days ahead, more than we have in the past, that will give you
our impression and our evidence, and we are waiting to see what the
inspectors turn up. That's why we're waiting for the first official
report from Dr. Blix on the 27th of January.
There are also many people who don't want to see the evidence. They
don't want to know anything about it. We just don't want to have to
deal with this problem. The reason the inspectors are back in Iraq now
is because the President of the United States and other nations made
it clear that Iraq was going to be disarmed one way or the other.
[...]
And what we don't want to see happen is for the Iraqis to suddenly
play this game on us again where the world says, "Oh, gee. Let's just
leave them alone. They're not bothering anybody. And let's not put any
military forces into play. Let's not show them any forceful
determination on the part of the international community, and all will
be well again."
And we'll be right back here, and if a year or two years from now we
were to follow such a course of action and suddenly one day Saddam
Hussein pops up and said, "Surprise, you didn't get it. But here it
is." Then we'll all be staring at each other wondering why we didn't
do something.
So it is not that we are in a rush to judgment. We think that it has
been a rather slow movement to justice over the last -- or judgment,
over the last 12 years. And now that we have started it with 1441, it
is time to move rapidly to get to the bottom of the case with this
regime.
1284 was done in 1999 for another time and another place, and it
essentially talks about coming up with a list of uncompleted tasks, I
think, or something like that is the term of (inaudible). Well, how do
you make a solid determination of what uncompleted tasks are if you're
not getting the kind of cooperation you need to determine what the
full set of tasks are in the beginning, to begin with?
[...]
The UN has been given a challenge by Iraq. For 12 years, Iraq said to
the most important international organization on earth, one that was
created to deal with problems like this, "We don't care what you think
or what resolutions you pass. We don't care and we no longer want the
inspectors here. We're going to make it impossible for them to act and
we're going to try to hide things." Anybody who thinks they're not
hiding things is not looking at reality. |
