12 February 1998
PICKERING: UNSCOM MUST HAVE UNFETTERED ACCESS TO ALL IRAQI SITES
(US "gratified by very wide support" for its policies) (540) By Rick Marshall USIA Staff Writer Washington -- The way to arrive at a solution to the Iraqi crisis is for the United Nations weapons inspectors to have "unfettered and free access to all of the sites it chooses to inspect in Iraq," Under Secretary of State Thomas Pickering said at a special Foreign Press Center briefing February 12. Iraq's recent proposals to end the crisis "are unacceptable," Pickering said. "To be effective, inspections and monitoring can be limited neither by dictating the composition of the team, nor by restricting access to certain sites, nor by limiting the number of visits, nor by limiting the visits to a certain period of time." "The time for diplomacy is nearing an end," Pickering continued. "Should military action be necessary it would have two significant objectives: substantially reduce or delay Saddam's reconstitution of weapons of mass destruction program, and reduce his ability to threaten his neighbors." While the "first and primary objective remains to have UNSCOM back in Iraq to do these jobs," the United States is "developing a broad coalition for compliance," Pickering said. "We're gratified by the very wide support for the proposition that Saddam is to blame for this crisis and that he must comply with the Security Council resolutions. There is also a widely held view that if grave consequences occur as a result of Saddam's intransigence, the responsibility is his alone. We have strong support for military action from allies like the United Kingdom, Canada, Australia, Portugal, Germany, a number of East Europeans and a growing number of other states." Pickering also cited the Gulf Cooperation Council foreign ministers, who issued a statement in Kuwait yesterday, in which, he said, the ministers stated "forcefully and repeatedly that the Iraqi regime bears the responsibility for the crisis and indeed for any severe results of its own intransigence." "I also want to emphasize very firmly that we have no quarrel with the people of Iraq," Pickering continued. "We have consistently promoted efforts to relieve the suffering that they are undergoing. We were, for example, the prime mover of the United Nations Security Council resolution 986. We worked on the original idea to exclude food and medicine from sanctions, and we continue to support the idea that oil can be exported from Iraq in order to finance the import of food and medicine under the regime set up by the United Nations to assure that. We therefore support the call of the Secretary General at the end of the month of January to expand the oil for food program, and we are examining in detail, and very closely, a resolution to assure that humanitarian goods flow to the Iraqi people and that money does not flow into the hands of Saddam." Pickering flatly rejected the idea that the Iraqi leader was somehow not responsible for the suffering of his people, saying: "For five years, Saddam himself rejected any idea that oil could be pumped in return for food and medicine for his people, and then, when that idea was finally accepted, he took a year and a half actually to implement the program." (For more information on this subject, contact our special Iraq website at: http://www.usia.gov/iraq)
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