10 September 2002
Official Says Bush at U.N. Will Urge Action on Iraq
(Says president continues to consult with leaders) (4150) The purpose of President Bush's September 12 speech to the U.N. General Assembly is to challenge the international community to take action on Iraq, "to deal with a problem that has been festering far too long and that is growing worse," said a senior administration official. At a briefing at the White House September 10, the official said "The President has not decided that we need this course of action or that course of action. He is consulting. But what he does believe, and I think a growing number of leaders are echoing that, is that we can't wait any longer to take some kind of action against Saddam Hussein," the official said. "And he will rally international support for taking action to deal with the threat from Iraq because the President is -- believes very deeply that the only option that we do not have is to do nothing. Inaction is simply not an option," the official said. The policy of the U.S. government "remains that regime change is the most effective and surest way to make certain that he [Saddam] is not a threat to his region, to his people and to us. "How we get there, what means we use, what we do about various elements of his defiance of the U.N. I think is what we want to discuss," the senior administration official said. But President Bush is also "going to make very clear that the United States is not prepared to stand by and let this situation continue," the official said. In addition to Iraq, President Bush "has a very broad agenda" on his schedule when he is in New York attending the General Assembly meeting, the official said. He is to meet with U.N. Secretary General Kofi Annan, Pakistan's President Pervez Musharraf, India's Prime Minister Atal Bihari Vajpayee, Afghanistan's President Hamid Karzai, Japan's Prime Minister Junichiro Koizumi, and with ten Central African leaders. He will meet as well with Presidents Thabo Mvuyelwa Mbeki of South Africa, Paul Kagame of Rwanda and Joseph Kabila of the Democratic Republic of the Congo, to discuss the Rwanda-Congo peace agreement and South African mediation of that agreement, the official said. Following is a transcript of the senior administration official's remarks: (begin transcript) THE WHITE HOUSE Office of the Press Secretary September 10, 2002 PRESS BACKGROUND BRIEFING BY SENIOR ADMINISTRATION OFFICIAL MR. McCORMACK: Good afternoon, everybody. Welcome to this background briefing. All the comments today will be attributable to a senior administration official. Our background briefer is here to talk about the President's trip to attend the U.N. General Assembly, talk about his agenda and his meetings and activities up there. SENIOR ADMINISTRATION OFFICIAL: Good afternoon. I'm here to talk about the President's agenda for his trip to New York, for the United Nations General Assembly. And I'll then take your questions. Let me just make the point that the President has a very broad agenda when he goes to New York. He's going to meet with U.N. Secretary General Kofi Annan. He will talk about the war on terror, about the Middle East and about global development assistance and the AIDS fund in which they've had common interests. He will meet with Chairman Karzai and will talk about the progress of implementing the Bonn agreement and about Afghan reconstruction, including the security situation in Afghanistan. He will have a chance to meet a second time with Prime Minister Vajpayee, and at that meeting will talk about our broad bilateral agenda with India. We have a number of important issues with India, a number of areas of cooperation. And in that context also about regional security and, of course, the problem of the line of control and Kashmir. The President will also see President Musharraf, to talk about the war on terror, the bilateral issues in our relationship, the importance of democracy and, in particular, the fact that the United States is watching very closely the elections that are to take place in October. And, of course, also about diminishing tensions between India and Pakistan over Kashmir. He will meet with Prime Minister Koizumi to talk about Afghan reconstruction. Japan is a very large aid donor and, of course, hosted the Tokyo conference on reconstruction in Afghanistan. Prime Minister Koizumi is getting ready to go to North Korea so they will have a discussion of that trip. And then, of course, Japan's progress on economic reform and the state of the Japanese economy continue to be of concern. And I'm sure that Prime Minister Koizumi will want to talk about the American economy, as well. He will then give, of course, a speech to the General Assembly. And let me just take a moment to outline the purpose of that speech. I think you all already know what the topic is, I suspect -- but I want to just clear up some misconceptions about what has been out there about the speech, and just let you know what he does intend to do. The President is going to make clear that the current regime in Iraq is an outlaw regime, that it has defied U.N. resolutions for 11 years now. This is a decade of defiance. He's going to talk about that defiance, about his cruelty -- Saddam Hussein's cruelty to his own people, his aggressive pursuit of weapons of mass destruction, his support for terror, his repression of minorities within his country. He's going to ask the question, what more does the world need to know about this regime to know that it poses a real threat to peace and stability in the world; and will remind U.N. members that the United Nations acted forcefully in 1991, has been ignored, and that that is a problem for the United Nations. In other words, the Saddam Hussein regime is not just a problem for the United States, not just a problem -- as Prime Minister Blair said -- for Great Britain, not just a problem for its neighbors, it's a problem for international peace and stability because it has been so defiant in simply ignoring Security Council resolutions that it signed on to after having lost a war of aggression. The President is going to talk about this great organization, the U.N., and what it has meant to the world and what it can continue to mean to the world, but that it is in fact being challenged by this outlaw regime. And he will rally international support for taking action to deal with the threat from Iraq because the President is -- believes very deeply that the only option that we do not have is to do nothing. Inaction is simply not an option. Then the President will host a reception for heads of delegation on Thursday evening. On Friday he will meet with ten Central African leaders. And there he will talk about the need to end wars and reduce the humanitarian suffering. He especially wants to talk about the Great Lakes region and the recent conflict in the Congo, and to reinforce the need for responsible African leadership to pursue the political and economic and social well being of their people. He will meet as well with Mbeki of South Africa, Kagame and Kabila of Rwanda and Congo, to discuss the Rwanda-Congo peace agreement and South African mediation of that agreement. He will obviously also talk about the human rights situation and the continuing search for people who have committed genocide, something that the United States has been very involved in. So with that background, I'm happy to take your questions. Ron. QUESTION: You said that he will rally international support to take action against Iraq. Will he specify what action he thinks needs to be taken Iraq, and can you? SENIOR ADMINISTRATION OFFICIAL: The purpose of this speech is to, in a sense, charge and challenge all of us as the international community to deal with a problem that has been festering far too long and that is growing worse. The purpose of consultations in which the President is now involved and in which Secretary Powell will be involved while he's at the U.N. and which the President will be continuing, is to think about a course of action for dealing with this problem. The President has not decided that we need this course of action or that course of action. He is consulting. But what he does believe, and I think a growing number of leaders are echoing that, is that we can't wait any longer to take some kind of action against Saddam Hussein. Q: So you are saying that he's not going to be specific and ask for inspectors or military support -- keep it vague, is that what you're saying? SENIOR ADMINISTRATION OFFICIAL: It's not a matter of being vague, Ron, it's a matter of getting other people's ideas and talking about it and coming to some view of how we proceed. But the President is also going to make very clear that the United States is not prepared to stand by and let this situation continue. Q: We can't wait any longer, you say. In a way, then, this is really the first exercise in the President's doctrine announced at West Point, of preemption, of hitting first. Diane Feinstein and others on the Hill are saying that that's not constant with American traditions, international law, morality. What do you say, then -- how do you make hitting first all American? SENIOR ADMINISTRATION OFFICIAL: Well, first of all, the President is not talking about a military option only with his colleagues. He's talking about the full range of options that might be at our disposal. So I'm going to disconnect the question from the link to Iraq, because the issue of what we do about Iraq is not yet -- he's not yet jumped to the idea that it has to be a military option. But on the question of preemption, the idea of preemption has been around a very, very long time. It is, in fact, the case that the United States has in the past had doctrines that made clear that it might not wait -- that it would not wait to be attacked before it acted. For instance, during the Cold War, the United States was -- would not ever adopt a doctrine of no first use, you will remember that. That at a time under much more extreme circumstances, when we were worrying about 12,000 nuclear weapons pointed at the United States. So it's just not right to say that the United States has always said, we will be attacked first and then we will act. It is also historically inaccurate that most countries have said, we will always wait to be attacked before we act. I think it's only common sense that if you have the possibility of doing something to prevent an attack on your territory you might choose to do it. Now, in the shadow of September 11th, we know how awful the consequences can be of an attack taking place on our territory. It is not that preemption is the first, second or necessarily even the third option. It might be an option that one wants to use after you have exploited a lot of other possibilities. But it is simply not accurate to say that the United States has always said, we will wait to be attacked before we attack. It's just not accurate. Q: The question has been raised several times here and I'd like to pose it to you, as well. What has changed with Iraq since the 1998 Iraq Liberation Act was signed? What has changed in the last year to suddenly raise the level of urgency to this point? SENIOR ADMINISTRATION OFFICIAL: Well, John, when I'm asked why now, I have to say, why later? In 1998, already, it was the collective wisdom of the United States Congress and the then Clinton administration that Iraq constituted a threat -- such a threat that regime change was necessary, and that was an overwhelming decision of the United States Congress and of the administration. Things have certainly not gotten better since 1998, and in fact, since 1998, with no monitoring of his activities, with increasing evidence that his procurement networks, for instance, on nuclear weapons are actively engaged, for instance, in getting aluminum tubes for centrifuge development, with continuing gaps in what people know about what was declared, and what was found. We have to ask ourselves, four years later, with no inspectors there, why was regime change an action to -- an action necessary in 1998, and not in 2002? The President also put this on the agenda very early in his administration. I think it was in this very press room that in his first press conference he talked about the fact that the sanctions, one of the principal means of containment had become swiss cheese, as he called it. And we did go a long way to try to repair, as we could -- to the degree that we could -- the sanctions. We have tried hard to deal with the fact that Saddam Hussein's access to illegal proceeds from -- illegal oil proceeds has increased over the last several years. What we can't do is to say, it was bad in '98, it's bad in 2000, it's bad in 2002, it's going to be bad in 2004, it's going to be bad in 2006. The question is, when is it going to get bad enough that you're going to actually do something? And after September 11th, nobody wants to take the risk that when you connect the dots on Iraq, that the first time that you see what that picture really looks like is when there's an attack on American soil or against American interests. Q: If I could just follow up on that, everybody from UNMOVIC on down says, we really don't know what Saddam Hussein has got. Do you know, with any reasonable certainty, what Saddam Hussein has got, and are you concerned that he is within -- that the threat is imminent, that he is prone to use this at some time in the not so distant future? SENIOR ADMINISTRATION OFFICIAL: We are concerned about what he's got. We are concerned about what he's trying to acquire. The reason UNMOVIC says that they don't know is that there are large gaps between what was known to be there and what he produced when they went in. So there are large gaps in our knowledge, or in their knowledge about what he has. We've been able to fill some of that in with intelligence, not all of it. When you ask, John, is he someone who will use it, I think the picture -- Q: Someone who will use it soon. SENIOR ADMINISTRATION OFFICIAL: Well -- Q: I mean, are you worried that the threat is approaching critical mass? SENIOR ADMINISTRATION OFFICIAL: The problem is that if he continues to get this capability over a longer period of time and get better and better at it, the idea that you're better off waiting until he's good at it -- you're better off waiting until he's got a nuclear weapon, you're better off waiting until he can deliver biological agents seems to me a very strange argument. And it is also an odd argument that this is somebody who's just a kind of status quo guy, who will sit there -- if we don't bother him, he won't bother us. Everything about his behavior suggests that he has major ambitions and they're going to clash with ours sooner or later. Q: You spoke of a illegal sale of oil -- Iraq gets money from illegal sale of oil. How about legal sales of oil, under the Food for Oil program -- is Saddam Hussein keeping up his end of the bargain in that? SENIOR ADMINISTRATION OFFICIAL: It's a very good question. In terms of the Oil for Food program we've tried to design sanctions that keep him from using proceeds to buy things that he's not supposed to buy, but for instance, dual use technologies, chemicals, for instance, which we've tried to put back on the list to make life easier for the Iraqi people can of course be used in chemical weapons programs. When you have a dictator of this kind, you really are I think taking a tremendous risk if you give him the benefit of the doubt. Q: Let me make sure I have it straight. The administration, as I understand it, the goal is disarmament. And the reason that there's been so much talk about regime change was because we couldn't rely on Saddam, he wouldn't cooperate and that the only way to get disarmament appeared to be regime change. Obviously, there are some ideas now in the U.N., people are starting to throw out ideas or almost falling all over themselves to come up with something other than military action. If, in fact, someone at the U.N. offers or proposes something that they argue would accomplish disarmament without regime change, is the administration willing to contemplate something along those lines? SENIOR ADMINISTRATION OFFICIAL: Well, we of course are listening. And that's the reason the President is consulting. I will say this, that the United States -- and, again, this goes back to 1998 -- has become deeply skeptical that this is a regime that will ever undertake its obligations. And while it is true that the disarmament was one of those obligations, he undertook other obligations, as well: not to threaten his neighbors, not to repress his people, to deal with the human rights situation in his country, to return Kuwaiti property. I mean, there's a long list of things that he agreed to do. And after 11 years of experience with this regime, I think that one has to be skeptical that you could ever get there. And that's what led to a regime change policy. The policy of this government remains that regime change is the most effective and surest way to make certain that he is not a threat to his region, to his people and to us. How we get there, what means we use, what we do about various elements of his defiance of the U.N. I think is what we want to discuss. Q: So you're saying, in a sense, convince us there is some other way, but in the absence of some convincing alternative, there is no alternative? SENIOR ADMINISTRATION OFFICIAL: Yes, it's very hard to imagine how you do this with him there. I mean, this is a brutal dictator. He's made -- his colors have been very, very clear. We will see. But the U.S. government policy remains regime change. MR. McCORMACK: We have time for one last question. Q: One last question. Okay, I have one on Iraq, but since we have you here, is there anything you can say on background about why the threat level has increased? Is there anything very specific that you all are aware of? SENIOR ADMINISTRATION OFFICIAL: Well, let me just say, there is going to be a briefing about it. When we -- we do this very carefully, Kelly, and when we increase the threat level, it's a very considered decision. I think it's better to let them lay it out, so that you get a full picture. Now you can have your Iraq question, yes. Q: On Iraq, is -- so deadlines ruled out, the President will not be issuing any deadline for weapons inspectors back in? And is he not quite issuing, then, an ultimatum to Saddam Hussein? SENIOR ADMINISTRATION OFFICIAL: Let me let the President speak on Thursday. But what he is going to do is he's going to call on the U.N. to act, and then we will begin the process of trying to determine how that is. Bill. Q: Most people seem to think that there is no direct connection between al Qaeda and Iraq. Your friendly critics say the attention on Iraq is diverting attention from the fight against terrorism. Your unfriendly critics say it's a red herring to draw attention away and to aggrandize the President for his own reasons. What connection can you make? SENIOR ADMINISTRATION OFFICIAL: Well, the President in his State of the Union said there were three major threats in the post-Cold War era, that had come very clear since 9/11. One is extremism, terrorism of the kind we experienced. Secondly was weapons of mass destruction in the hands of hostile states. And the third would be the awful nexus, should they come together, extremism and this technology. And they -- Saddam Hussein has a terrorist past. There is no doubt that he has supported terrorism in the Middle East, he pays $25,000 to Hamas bombers -- I think that's supportive of terrorism. There are al Qaeda personnel that have been found in Iraq, running around Iraq. We will be making more of a case about this. Nobody is trying to make the case that he personally directed the attacks on 9/11. But if you ask yourself if this coincidence or confluence of Saddam Hussein and his weapons of mass destruction, his animus toward the United States, his activity in the world and what we know of him, might in some way link up with our worst fears of a terrorist attack on the United States. You have to say that that is a possibility, and it's one that you better account for. And so that's it. Q: Thank you. SENIOR ADMINISTRATION OFFICIAL: Hold on a second. I promised Steve. Q: What did you think of President Chirac's proposal for a two-pronged strategy, first get the inspectors back in, then down the line authorize military force? SENIOR ADMINISTRATION OFFICIAL: What I took from that decision by -- that statement by the French President is that we are gaining some momentum in people's understanding that it is time to do something about the threat of Saddam Hussein. Now, it's an interesting idea, I'm sure the President will want to hear more about it from the French. But the fact is that the -- what we're getting is an understanding that the United States is not prepared to let this stand in its -- this decade of defiance. And I think the rest of the world is rallying to that. Karen, you've got the last question. Q: A process of consultation implies taking the views of others into consideration. You've been pretty specific in the past several weeks and months about what the level of threat is you perceive from Iraq, and yet that has elicited a lot of statements from a lot of leaders saying, we don't agree that there should be military action. Is it at least implicit in the President's remarks that if you don't come up with something that we think solves the problem, we have to act in our own defense? SENIOR ADMINISTRATION OFFICIAL: Well, clearly the President of the United States reserves the right to act on behalf of American interests. But he is going to go to the U.N. and he will say that this is not just our problem, this is the world's problem. It's not the United States that sanctioned Saddam Hussein, it's the U.N. Security Council. Q: But if the world decides that there should be an approach that's different -- that we don't think will solve the problem -- SENIOR ADMINISTRATION OFFICIAL: The President of the United States always reserves his options to act on behalf of the United States. But I think it would be a mistake to read what you are seeing as, people don't think he is a threat. There are a lot of people who think he is a threat. We just talked about President Chirac's idea, which suggests that people are starting to try to think about how to deal with the threat. And I think that's the discussion that we want to go and have. Q: I don't think they have disagreed on the threat. What they disagree on is what to do about it and when to do it. SENIOR ADMINISTRATION OFFICIAL: Well, the President believes that he also has options about what to do about it and when to do it. But what he does not have an option to do, and I think he is succeeding in convincing the rest of the world, is we don't have an option to let this defiance stand while Saddam Hussein gathers weapons of mass destruction, while he supports terrorism to the point that one day he is capable of either keeping us from acting by his blackmail -- in other words, he tries to deter us -- or heaven forbid, he actually uses one of these weapons. Thanks very much. (end transcript) (Distributed by the Office of International Information Programs, U.S. Department of State. Web site: http://usinfo.state.gov)
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