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23 January 2003

Iraq Still Unwilling to Disarm, Wolfowitz Says

(Deputy Defense Secretary addresses foreign relations council on
Iraq) (5290)
New York -- Saddam Hussein "has not made the fundamental decision to
disarm" and until he does, the threat posed by his chemical,
biological, ballistic and nuclear weapons programs will continue to
grow, U.S. Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz said January 23.
Comparing what disarmament should look like and what has happened in
Iraq in a major foreign policy speech to the Council on Foreign
Relations, Wolfowitz said that so far Baghdad has treated disarmament
"like a deadly game of hide-and-seek or cheat and retreat."
"Even when inspectors were in Iraq before, the Baghdad regime pursued
weapons of mass terror. It would be folly to think those efforts
stopped when the inspectors left," he said.
Saying several times throughout the speech that "time is running out,"
the deputy secretary said that "the imperative" is that "Baghdad must
disarm -- peacefully, if at all possible, but by force, if necessary."
The deputy secretary talked about: what inspectors can and cannot do
in the disarmament process; Iraq's practice of hiding and moving its
prohibited weapons; Baghdad's use of its own intelligence abilities
not only to conceal its illegal activities but also to spy on and
intimidate U.N. inspectors; and its policy of obstruction and lying.
He used the nuclear disarmament programs of South Africa, Ukraine, and
Kazakhstan to illustrate "what real disarmament looks like."
"The decision on whether Iraq's weapons of mass terror will be
dismantled voluntarily, or whether it will have to be done by force is
not up to us, not up to the inspectors, or to the U.N.," Wolfowitz
said. "The decision rests entirely with Saddam Hussein."
Wolfowitz also said that:
-- Iraq's December declaration "is a catalog of recycled information
and flagrant omissions;"
-- Iraq's Special Security Organization employs thousands to hide
documents and materials from U.N. inspectors, sanitize sites and
monitor inspectors' activities;
-- Iraq has accumulated sufficient computer expertise to break into
the U.N. inspectors' computer systems;
-- Multiple sources have said that Saddam Hussein has ordered that any
scientists cooperating with the U.N. be killed; and
-- Iraq has refused to allow U-2 reconnaissance flights as called for
in U.N. Security Council resolution 1441.
If Iraq chose to disarm, "we would know it," Wolfowitz said. "We would
know it from their full and complete declaration of everything that we
know that they have, as well as by revelations of programs that our
intelligence has probably not yet discovered. ... [W]e would know it
from an attitude of the government that encouraged people to cooperate
with the inspectors, rather than intimidated them into silence and
lies."
Following is the text of Wolfowitz's prepared remarks:
(begin text)
Remarks As Prepared For Delivery
By Deputy Secretary of Defense Paul Wolfowitz
Council on Foreign Relations
New York, New York
January 23, 2003
It is a pleasure to be back here in New York, where I was born. The
last time I spoke here was a little more than a year ago. I was here
to commission a ship named the USS Bulkeley, a ship named after a New
Yorker, Admiral John Bulkeley, who left a big mark on the Navy during
a career that spanned decades and included actions in combat in his PT
boat in the Philippines during WWII that earned him the Congressional
Medal of Honor. It was enormously fitting to commission a great
warship named for a man whose life symbolized the resilience and
resolve that the world has come to associate with this great city
since September 11, 2001 -- and how appropriate that the commissioning
ceremony took place within walking distance of Ground Zero.
As terrible as the attacks of September 11th were, we now know that
the terrorists are plotting still more and greater catastrophes. We
know the terrorists are seeking more terrible weapons -- chemical,
biological, and even nuclear weapons. In the hands of terrorists, what
we often call weapons of mass destruction would be more accurately
described as weapons of mass terror.
The threat posed by the connection between terrorist networks and
states that possess weapons of mass terror presents us with the danger
of a catastrophe that could be orders of magnitude greater than
September 11th. Iraq's weapons of mass terror and the terror networks
to which the Iraqi regime are linked are not two separate threats;
they are part of the same threat. Disarming Iraq and the War on Terror
are not merely related. Disarming Iraq of its chemical and biological
weapons of mass destruction and dismantling its program to develop
nuclear weapons is a crucial part of winning the War on Terror.
Iraq has had 12 years to disarm, as it agreed to do at the conclusion
of the Gulf War. But, so far, they have treated disarmament like a
game of hide-and-seek -- or, as Secretary of State Powell has called
it, "rope-a-dope in the desert."
But this is not a game. It is deadly serious. We are dealing with a
threat to the security of our nation and the world. At the same time,
President Bush understands fully the risks and dangers of war and the
president wants to do everything humanly possible to eliminate this
threat by peaceful means, if possible. That is why the president
called for the U.N. Security Council to pass U.N. Security Council
Resolution 1441, giving Iraq a final opportunity to comply with its
disarmament obligations and, in so doing, to eliminate the threat of
Iraq's weapons of mass terror falling into hands of terrorists.
In making that proposal, President Bush understood perfectly well that
compliance with that resolution would require a massive change of
attitude and actions on the part of the Iraqi regime. However, history
proves that such a change is possible. Other nations have rid
themselves of weapons of mass terror cooperatively in ways possible to
verify.
What Disarmament Looks Like
There are several significant examples from the recent past -- among
them South Africa, Ukraine and Kazakhstan. In South Africa, for
example, President De Klerk decided in 1989 to end that country's
nuclear weapons production and, in 1990, to dismantle all weapons.
South Africa joined the Nonproliferation Treaty in 1991 and later that
year accepted full-scope safeguards of the U.N.'s atomic energy
agency. South Africa allowed U.N. inspectors complete access to both
operating and defunct facilities, provided thousands of current and
historical documents, and allowed detailed, unfettered discussions
with personnel involved in the South African program. By 1994, South
Africa had provided verifiable evidence that its nuclear inventory was
complete and its weapons program was dismantled.
President Kravchuk of Ukraine and President Nazarbayev of Kazakhstan
ratified the Nuclear Nonproliferation and START Treaties, committing
their countries to give up the nuclear weapons and strategic delivery
systems they had inherited with the dissolution of the Soviet Union.
Kazakhstan and Ukraine both went even further in their disclosures and
actions than required by those treaties. Ukraine requested and
received U.S. assistance to destroy its Backfire bombers and
air-launched cruise missiles. Kazakhstan asked the United States to
remove more than 500 kilograms of highly enriched uranium.
Given the full cooperation of both governments, implementation of the
disarmament was smooth. All nuclear warheads were returned to Russia
by 1996, and all missile silos and heavy bombers were destroyed before
the December 2001 START deadline. The United States had full access,
beyond treaty requirements, to confirm silo and bomber destruction,
which were done with U.S. assistance.
Each of these cases was different, but the end result was the same:
the countries disarmed while disclosing their programs fully and
voluntarily. In each case, high-level political commitment to
disarmament was accompanied by the active participation of national
institutions to carry out the process. In each case, the countries
created a transparent process in which decisions and actions could be
verified and audited by the international community.
In Iraq's case, unfortunately, the situation is the opposite. U.N.
Security Council Resolution 1441 gave Saddam Hussein one last chance
to choose a path of cooperative disarmament, one that he was obliged
to take 12 years ago. We were under no illusions that the Baghdad
regime has had the kind of fundamental change of heart that
underpinned the successes I just mentioned. Nevertheless, there is
still the hope -- if Saddam is faced with a serious enough threat that
he would otherwise be disarmed forcibly and removed from power -- that
he might decide to adopt a fundamentally different course. But time is
running out. It was with that hope that the United States entered a
process that would offer one last chance to eliminate the threat posed
by Iraq's weapons of mass terror, without having to resort to force.
And we've put more than just our hopes into this process. Last fall,
the U.N. Security Council requested that all Member States "give full
support" to U.N. inspectors in the discharge of their mandates,
including "providing any information related to prohibited programmes
or other aspects of their mandates, including on Iraqi attempts since
1998 to acquire prohibited items, and recommending sites to be
inspected, persons to be interviewed, conditions of such interviews,
and data to be collected."
The United States answered that call and President Bush directed
departments and agencies to provide "material, operational, personnel,
and intelligence support" for U.N. inspections under U.N. Security
Council Resolution 1441. Such assistance includes a comprehensive
package of intelligence support -- including names of individuals whom
we believe it would be productive to interview and information about
sites suspected to be associated with proscribed material or
activities. We have provided our analysis of Iraq's nuclear, chemical,
biological and missile programs, and we have suggested an inspection
strategy and tactics. We have provided counterintelligence support to
improve the inspectors' ability to counter Iraqi attempts to penetrate
their organizations.
The United States also has made available a wide array of technology
to support the inspectors' efforts, including aerial surveillance
support in the form of U-2 and Predator aircraft. So far, Iraq is
blocking U-2 flights requested by the U.N., in direct violation of
U.N. Security Council Resolution 1441, which states that inspectors
shall have free and unrestricted use of manned and unmanned
reconnaissance vehicles. In addition, we have supplied laboratory
equipment and services, sampling equipment, secure communications
equipment and ground-penetrating radar. Some of these technologies and
techniques are the most advanced in the world.
What Inspectors Can Do and What They Can't
As in the case of South Africa and the others, inspection teams can do
a great deal to verify the dismantling of a program when working with
a cooperative government that wants to prove to the world it has
disarmed. It is not the job of inspectors to disarm Iraq; it is Iraq's
responsibility to disarm itself. What inspectors can do is confirm
that a country has willingly disarmed and provided verifiable evidence
that it has done so. If a government is unwilling to disarm itself, it
would be unreasonable to expect inspectors to do it for them. They
cannot be charged with a "search and destroy" mission to uncover
so-called "smoking guns" -- especially not if the host government is
intent on hiding them and impeding the inspectors' every move.
Inspectors cannot verify the destruction of weapons materials if there
are no credible records of their disposition.
When an auditor discovers discrepancies in the books, it is not the
auditor's obligation to prove where the embezzler has stashed his
money. It is up to the person or institution being audited to explain
the discrepancy. It is quite unreasonable to expect a few hundred
inspectors to search every potential hiding place in a country the
size of France, even if nothing were being moved. And, of course,
there is every reason to believe that things are being moved
constantly and hidden underground. The whole purpose of Iraq's
constructing mobile units for producing biological weapons was
presumably to be able to hide them. We know about this capability from
defectors and other sources, but unless Iraq comes clean about what it
has, we cannot expect the inspectors to find them.
Nor is it the inspectors' role to find Saddam's hidden weapons when he
lies about them and conceals them. That would make them not
inspectors, but detectives -- charged with going through that vast
country, climbing through tunnels and searching private homes, to
catch things that someone doesn't want them to see. Sending a few
hundred inspectors to find hidden weapons in an area the size of the
state of California would be to send them on a fool's errand. Or to
play a game. And let me repeat: this is not a game.
David Kay, a former chief UNSCOM inspector, has said that confirming
voluntary disarmament is a job that shouldn't take months or years.
With cooperation, it would be relatively simple and should be over
relatively quickly because the real indicators of disarmament are
readily apparent. They start with the willingness of the regime to be
disarmed, the commitments communicated by its leaders, its disclosure
of the full scope of its work on weapons of mass destruction, and
verifiable records of dismantling and destruction.
Unfortunately, if unsurprisingly, we have seen none of these
indications of willing disarmament from Iraq.
What Disarmament Doesn't Look Like
Despite our skepticism about the intentions of the Baghdad regime, we
entered the disarmament process in good faith. Iraq has done anything
but.
Instead of a high-level commitment to disarmament, Iraq has a
high-level commitment to concealing its weapons of mass terror.
Instead of charging national institutions with the responsibility to
dismantle programs, several Iraqi government institutions operate a
concealment effort that targets inspectors and thwarts their efforts.
Instead of the full cooperation and transparency that is evident in
each disarmament success story, Iraq has started the process by openly
defying the requirement of Resolution 1441 for a "currently accurate,
full and complete" declaration of all of its programs.
With its December 7th declaration, Iraq resumed a familiar process of
deception. Of this 12,200-page document, Secretary Powell has said, it
"totally fails to meet the Resolution's requirements.... Most brazenly
of all, the Iraqi declaration denies the existence of any prohibited
weapons programs at all.... Iraq's response is a catalog of recycled
information and flagrant omissions." Among those omissions are large
quantities of anthrax, and other deadly biological agents and
nuclear-related items that the U.N. Special Commission concluded Iraq
had not verifiably accounted for.
There are also gaps in accounting for such deadly items as 1.5 tons of
the nerve gas VX, 550 mustard filled artillery shells, and 400
biological weapons-capable aerial bombs that the U.N. Special
Commission concluded in 1999 Iraq had failed to account for. There is
no mention of Iraqi efforts to procure uranium from abroad. Iraq's
declaration fails to account for its manufacture of missile fuel for
ballistic missiles Iraq claims it does not have. Nor is there
information on 13 recent Iraqi missile tests cited by Dr. Blix that
exceeded the 150-kilometer limit. Iraq has not verifiably accounted
for, at a minimum, two tons of anthrax growth media. There is no
explanation of the connection between Iraq's extensive unmanned aerial
vehicle programs and chemical or biological agent dispersal. There is
no information about Iraq's mobile biological weapon production
facilities.
When U.N. inspectors left Iraq in 1998, it was concluded that: "The
history of the Special Commission's work in Iraq has been plagued by
coordinated efforts to thwart full discovery of Iraq's programs." What
we know from the testimony of Iraqis with first-hand knowledge, from
U.N. inspectors, and from other countries, about Iraq's current
efforts to deceive inspectors, suggests that Iraq is fully engaged
today in the same old practices of concealment and deception. Iraq
seems to be employing virtually all of the old techniques used to
frustrate U.N. inspections in the past.
Concealment and Removal: In the past, Iraq made determined efforts to
hide its prohibited weapons and to move them if inspectors were about
to find them. In 1991, in one of the first, and only, instances of
finding prohibited equipment, inspectors came upon some massive
calutrons used for enriching uranium at an Iraqi military base. Even
at that early stage, Iraq had begun. to make provisions to move its
illegal weapons and programs in case inspectors stumbled across them.
As the inspectors appeared at the front gate, the Iraqis moved the
calutrons out the back of the base on large tank transporters.
Today, those practices continue, except that over the last 12 years,
Iraqi preparations for concealing their WMD programs from inspectors
have become more extensive and sophisticated. Iraq's national policy
is not to disarm but rather to conceal its weapons of mass terror.
That effort is led by Saddam's son, Qusay, who uses the Special
Security Organization under his control for that purpose. Other
security organizations contribute to "anti-inspection" activities,
including the National Monitoring Directorate -- whose ostensible
purpose is to facilitate inspections. Instead, however, it provides
tip-offs to inspections sites and uses "minders" to intimidate
witnesses. Iraqi security organizations and government agencies --
including the Military Industrial Organization (OMI), the SSO, the
Iraqi Intelligence Service (IIS), the Special Republican Guard, and
the Director of General Security -- provide thousands of personnel for
hiding documents and materials from inspectors, to sanitize inspection
sites and to monitor the inspectors' activities. The anti-inspectors
vastly outnumber the couple of hundred U.N. personnel on the ground in
Iraq.
We already have multiple reports and other evidence of intensified
efforts to hide documents in places where they are unlikely to be
found, such as private homes of low-level officials and universities.
We have many reports and other evidence of WMD material being
relocated to agricultural areas and private homes, hidden beneath
mosques or hospitals. Furthermore, according to these reports, the
material is moved constantly, making it difficult to trace or find
without absolutely fresh intelligence. It is a shell game played on a
grand scale with deadly serious weapons.
Surveillance and Penetration:
In the past, Iraq systematically used its intelligence capabilities to
support its efforts to conceal illegal activity. Former inspector
David Kay has recalled that in 1991, the inspectors came across a
document warning the chief security official of the facility about to
be inspected that Kay would lead the U.N. team. That warning had been
issued less than 48 hours after the U.N.'s decision had been made, at
which time fewer than 10 people within the inspection organization
were supposed to know about the operational plan.
In the 1990s, there were reports that Iraqi intelligence recruited
U.N. inspectors as informants, and that Iraqi scientists were fearful
about being interviewed. Recent reports that Iraq continues these
kinds of efforts are a clear sign that it is not serious about
disarmament.
Today, we also anticipate that Iraq is likely to target U.N. and IAEA
computer systems through cyber intrusions to steal inspections,
methods, criteria, and findings. We know that Iraq certainly has the
capability to do so. According to Khidhir Hamza's book, "Saddam's
Bombmaker," Iraq's Babylon Software Company was developing cyber
warfare capabilities on behalf of the Iraqi Intelligence Service as
early as the 1990s. Some people assigned to Babylon were segregated
into a "highly compartmented unit" and tasked with breaking into
foreign computers in order to download sensitive data. Some of the
programmers reported that they had accumulated sufficient expertise to
break into moderately protected computer systems, such as those used
by the inspectors.
Intimidation and Coercion: In the past, Iraq did not hesitate to use
pressure tactics to obtain information about the inspectors. Often the
pressure was quite crude. During the UNSCOM period, one inspector was
reportedly filmed in a compromising situation and blackmailed.
Sometimes the pressure was subtler. Richard Spertzel, a former UNSCOM
specialist in biological warfare, recalled the case of an Iraqi
official coyly asking a new member of his team: "How far is it from
Salt Lake City to Minneapolis?" Having moved from Salt Lake City to
Minneapolis just days prior to her arrival in Iraq, she was unnerved
by the comment, according to Spertzel.
More recently, Iraq has again begun referring to the inspectors as
spies, clearly hoping to make them uncomfortable at best and afraid at
worst and intimidate Iraqis from interacting with the inspectors.
For Iraqis, there is nothing subtle at all about the intimidation.
When President Bush said, and as reports by Human Rights Watch and
others have confirmed, "The dictator of Iraq is a student of Stalin,
using murder as a tool of terror and control, within his own cabinet,
within his own army, and even within his own family."
Today, we know from multiple sources that Saddam has ordered that any
scientist who cooperates during interviews will be killed, as well as
their families. Furthermore, we know that scientists are being tutored
on what to say to the U.N. inspectors and that Iraqi intelligence
officers are posing as scientists to be interviewed by the inspectors.
Obstruction and Lying:
In the past, U.N. inspectors faced many instances of delay, with
excuses ranging from not being able to find keys to not being able to
admit inspectors because only women were present in the building. When
all else fails, lying is a standard technique.
Richard Butler, the former head of the U.N. Special Commission,
reported that "Iraqi leaders had no difficulty sitting across from me
and spontaneously changing a reported fact or figure - for example,
six previously reported warheads could suddenly become 15, or vice
versa - with no explanation or apology about a previous lie." Butler
reported that actions taken to obstruct inspectors were often
explained away with excuses that were "the equivalent of 'the dog ate
my homework.'" One actual example: "The wicked girlfriend of one of
our workers tore up documents in anger." Another: "A wandering
psychopath cut some wires to the chemical plant monitoring camera. It
seems he hadn't received his medicine because of the U.N. sanctions."
During the UNSCOM period, Richard Spertzel on one occasion confronted
Dr. Rihab Taha, still a principal figure in Iraq's biological weapons
program: "Dr. Taha, you know that we know that you're lying, so why
are you doing it?" Dr. Taha drew herself up and replied, "Dr.
Spertzel, it is not a lie when you are ordered to lie." Lying was more
than a technique; it was policy.
Today, Iraqi obstruction continues on large issues as well as small
ones. Authorities that U.N. Security Council Resolution 1441 confers
unconditionally on the inspectors are constantly subject to conditions
by the Baghdad regime. For example, the Resolution requires that
"UNMOVIC and the IAEA shall have the free and unrestricted use and
landing of fixed- and rotary-winged aircraft, including manned and
unmanned reconnaissance vehicles." However, Iraq has objected to U-2
flights and threatens our Predators. Even more serious is the fact
that Iraq has yet to make a single one of its scientists or technical
experts available to be interviewed in confidential circumstances free
of intimidation, as required by the U.N. Resolution.
Cheat and Retreat:
In the past, the Iraqi reaction, when caught in one lie, was simply to
replace it with a new one. This happened on issue after issue. For
example, as Richard Butler reports, "Initially, Iraq had denied ever
having manufactured, let alone deployed, VX. But this was not
true...." Confronted with evidence of VX in soil samples, the Iraqis
then admitted to having manufactured a quantity of no more than 200
liters. Subsequent probing showed they'd made far more. "So, Iraq's
initial complete lie had been replaced by a false statement on
quantity.... Iraq then reached for its third lie on VX: they'd never
'weaponized' the chemical." This, it turned out, was another lie.
The same pattern was repeated with Iraq's nuclear and biological
weapons programs. Baghdad revised its nuclear declaration to the IAEA
four times within 14 months of its initial submission in April 1991.
During the UNSCOM period, Iraq formally submitted six different
biological warfare declarations, each of which the U.N. inspectors
rejected. Following Husayn Kamil's defection, Iraq dramatically
disclosed more than half a million pages of WMD-related documents.
Sparse relevant information was buried within a massive volume of
extraneous data all of which was intended to create the appearance of
candor and to overwhelm the U.N. inspectors' analytic resources.
A process that begins with a massive lie and proceeds with
concealment, penetration, intimidation and obstruction, cannot be a
process of cooperative disarmament. The purpose of Resolution 1441 was
not to play a deadly game of "hide-and-seek" or "cheat and retreat"
for another 12 years. The purpose was to achieve a clear resolution of
the threat posed by Iraq's weapons of mass terror.
If Iraq were to choose to comply with the requirement to dismantle its
weapons of mass terror, we would know it. We would know it from their
full and complete declaration of everything that we know that they
have, as well as by revelations of programs that our intelligence has
probably not yet discovered. (Recall, after the Gulf War, how stunned
we were by the magnitude of Iraq's nuclear program, despite all of our
intelligence efforts and those of our allies, and even though Iraq had
been subject to IAEA inspections.) We would know it from an attitude
of the government that encouraged people to cooperate with the
inspectors, rather than intimidated them into silence and lies. We
would know it when inspectors were able to go about their work without
being spied on or penetrated. We would know it, most of all, when
Iraqi scientists and others familiar with the program were clearly
free to talk.
However, in the absence of full cooperation -- particularly in the
absence of full disclosure of what Iraq has actually done -- it is
unreasonable to expect that the U.N. inspectors have the capacity to
disarm an uncooperative Iraq, even with the full support of American
intelligence and the intelligence of other nations.
American intelligence capabilities are extraordinary, but they are far
from the omniscient, all-seeing eye depicted in so many Hollywood
movies. For a great body of what we need to know, we are very
dependent on traditional methods of intelligence -- that is to say,
human beings who either deliberately or inadvertently are
communicating to us.
It was only after Saddam Hussein's son-in-law, Husayn Kamil, defected
in 1995, that U.N. inspectors were led to a large cache of documents
on a chicken farm with important revelations about Iraq's biological
weapons program. In contemplating the magnitude of the task of finding
such hidden sites, one may well ask, how many chicken farms are there
in Iraq? How many structures are there in which important documents
could be stored? How many garages in the country are big enough to
hold the tractor-trailers that make up an Iraqi mobile biological
weapons production unit?
Why we should be worried
Even when inspectors were in Iraq before, the Baghdad regime pursued
weapons of mass terror. It would be folly to think those efforts
stopped when the inspectors left.
Iraq has ballistic missiles that threaten Israel, Saudi Arabia, Turkey
and other countries, in which thousands of American service members
are serving or civilians are working. We know that Iraq's fleet of
UAVs continues to expand. We're concerned about this, of course,
because they can be used to disperse the chemical and biological
weapons Saddam has worked so hard to obtain and conceal.
Consider that, in 1997, U.N. inspectors found that Iraq had produced
and weaponized at least 10 liters of ricin in concentrated form --
that quantity of ricin is enough to kill more than a million people.
Baghdad declared to U.N. inspectors that it had over 19,000 liters of
botulinum toxin, enough to kill tens of millions, and 8,500 liters of
anthrax with the potential to kill hundreds of millions. U.N.
inspectors also believed that much larger quantities of biological
agents remained undeclared. Indeed U.N. inspectors think Iraq has
manufactured two to four times the amount of biological agents it has
admitted to -- and has failed to explain the whereabouts of more than
two metric tons of raw material for the growth of biological agents.
Despite 11 years of inspections and sanctions, containment and
military response and Baghdad retains chemical and biological weapons
and is producing more. And Saddam's nuclear scientists are still hard
at work.
As the president put it: "The history, the logic, and the facts lead
to one conclusion: Saddam Hussein's regime is a grave and gathering
danger. To suggest otherwise is to hope against the evidence. To
assume this regime's good faith is to bet the lives of millions and
the peace of the world in a reckless gamble. And this is a risk we
must not take."
So, we come back to the imperative: Baghdad must disarm -- peacefully,
if at all possible, but by force, if necessary.
The decision on whether Iraq's weapons of mass terror will be
dismantled voluntarily, or whether it will have to be done by force is
not up to us or to the U.N.. The decision rests entirely with Saddam
Hussein. So far, he has not made the fundamental decision to disarm
and, unless he does, the threat posed by his weapons programs will
remain with us and, indeed, will grow.
There are real dangers in confronting a tyrant who has and uses
weapons of mass terror and has links to terrorists. But those dangers
will only grow. They are far greater now than they would have been 5
or 10 years ago, and they will be much greater still 5 or 10 years
from now. President Bush has brought the world to an extraordinary
consensus and focus on this problem, and it is time to see it
resolved, voluntarily or by force -- but resolved one way or the
other.
Once freed from Saddam's tyranny, it is reasonable to expect that
Iraq's educated, industrious population of more than 20 million could
build a modern society that would be a source of prosperity, not
insecurity, for its neighbors.
Barham Salih, an Iraqi Kurdish leader, has spoken of the dream of the
Iraqi people, "In my office in Suleymaniyah, I meet almost every day
some traveler who has come from Baghdad and other parts of Iraq.
Without exception they tell me of the continued suffering inflicted by
the Iraqi regime, of the fearful hope secretly nurtured by so many
enslaved Iraqis for a free life, for a country where they can think
without fear and speak without retribution."
We may someday look back on this moment in history as the time when
the West defined itself for the 21st century -- not in terms of
geography or race or religion or culture or language, but in terms of
values -- the values of freedom and democracy.
For people who cherish freedom and seek peace, these are difficult
times. But such times can deepen our understanding of the truth. And
this truth we know: the single greatest threat to peace and freedom in
our time is terrorism. So this truth we affirm: the future does not
belong to tyrants and terrorists. The future belongs to those who seek
the oldest and noblest dream of all, the dream of peace and freedom.
(end text)
(Distributed by the Office of International Information Programs, U.S.
Department of State. Web site: http://usinfo.state.gov)