Weapons of Mass Destruction (WMD)

QUESTION: Madame Secretary, can you tell us where the hang-up with the Iraq resolution is now? And I would be interested in how both of you feel about the statement of principles that the French apparently are circulating.

SECRETARY ALBRIGHT: Let me just say that for us what we have been working very hard to do is to regain consensus that the Security Council had previously. But the point here is that we have to make sure that -- and the reason we want the Security Council consensus regained is that we are concerned about the fact that Saddam Hussein should not be in a position to be able to reconstitute his weapons of mass destruction. And it's important to get a monitoring team on the ground so that we can tell what is going on.

For us, it is very clear that in order to have this resolution work there has to be Iraqi compliance. And that is where we are on this, and we have obviously been working with the British and the other members of the Council.

QUESTION: What about the statement of principles, though?

SECRETARY ALBRIGHT: I think that I would like to confine my remarks to what I have said. I haven't seen them.

QUESTION: Could we ask Secretary Cook a question, please? Your resolution doesn't seem to be doing well. There's still three hold-outs on the Security Council, unless we miscounted, and then there's another one -- Malaysia. Do you really think you can get that strong resolution through?

FOREIGN SECRETARY COOK: We've had some good progress over the last three months, and we've been at this for some time now. And we're continuing discussions in the course of this week. There will be a further discussion on Thursday. We have the very clear impression that a lot of members of the Security Council are on board with the text that we have, and that we've made a lot of progress with other members in meeting their concerns.

Now, as I said earlier today, we are not there yet. There is further work to be done, and we're going to keep at it. I absolutely agree with Madeleine Albright that the important thing is we have got to restore consensus within the Security Council on this very important issue to make sure that Iraq cannot develop weapons of mass destruction and to make sure also that we're able to help with the humanitarian needs of Iraqi people.

QUESTION: It was said earlier today that really the Russians are the problem: the Chinese wouldn't stand alone; the French are drifting toward your view. Of course, the French prime minister says there's an impasse. I'm not sure where the French are. But are you convinced -- as the Americans are -- that it's really the Russians that have to be convinced?

FOREIGN SECRETARY COOK: We're working for consensus and we're trying to get as many people on board as possible. And in my experience of international relations it doesn't actually help to speculate at large as to where the problem rests. We'll take anybody on board.

Thank you.