Last Part--(Does SI now have a limited on how much one can past on a page?)
7. My government has acknowledged that we did have weapons of mass destruction at one time, when we were locked in combat with Iran. We have acknowledged using chemical weapons against the Iranian army just as the Iranian army used chemical weapons against our country. We reject the assertions by President Bush that we ever used such weapons against Iraqi citizens and note that U.S. intelligence agencies to this day agree that the only Iraqi civilians who died of such weapons during the war with Iran were caught between the two armies engaged in battle.
8. Once UNMOVIC and the IAEA can report to the Security Council that their work has been finished and verify that Iraq is completely free of nuclear, chemical and biological weapons, Iraq has further assured these agencies that no attempts will be made in the future to reconstitute such programs and that the new inspection protocols will guarantee the UN of that fact through the ongoing monitoring system.
9. War is the failure of diplomacy. There are those who believe diplomacy has failed because it has not produced a UN resolution authorizing war. It is quite the opposite. The UNSC voted 15-to-0 last fall authorizing a diplomatic effort to produce the complete disarmament of Iraq, and that diplomatic effort has succeeded beyond all expectations, including my own. As so many members of the Security Council have said in recent days, the process has proved the viability of the United Nations in solving difficult problems of this kind with diplomacy backed with the credible threat of force.
10. I am personally proud of the way my government has conducted itself in these past months... and proud of the way my fellow citizens of Iraq have conducted themselves. At first, I must say, I worried that the belligerence from the United States would be met by belligerence by my government, but in his wisdom, my President, Saddam Hussein, saw that in as much as we had nothing to hide, we would open our doors and let the whole world look wherever it wished, and that war could then not be justified. This is why I still believe war can be averted at the last minute.
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Mr. Aldouri is Iraq's Ambassador to the United Nations
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