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07 March 2003

Powell Tells UN "Clock Continues to Tick" on Iraq

(Secretary of State's Remarks to U.N. Security Council) (2960)
Calling U.N. weapons inspectors' reports a "catalogue of
non-cooperation," U.S. Secretary of State Colin Powell said March 7
that the Security Council must face up to the fact that Iraq has not
made the fundamental, strategic decision to disarm.
In a speech to the Security Council, Powell said that new reports from
the weapons inspectors show that Iraqi cooperation in recent weeks "is
coming in a grudging manner, that Iraq is still refusing to offer what
was called for by [Security Council Resolution] 1441: immediate,
active, and unconditional cooperation. Not later, immediate. Not
passive, active. Not conditional, unconditional in every respect."
The secretary cited several instances in the reports of Hans Blix,
executive chairman of the U.N. Monitoring, Verification, and
Inspection Commission (UNMOVIC) and Mohamed ElBaradei, director
general of the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) that could
have been cleared up with Iraqi cooperation.
An UNMOVIC report on 29 clusters of remaining disarmament issues, he
said, is 167 pages that "adds up, fact by chilling fact, to a damning
record of 12 years of lies, deception, and failure to come clean on
the part of Iraq."
Referring to a draft resolution submitted by the United States, United
Kingdom, and Spain, Powell said that it would be put to a vote "in the
very near future."
"Now is the time for the council to send a clear message to Saddam
that we have not been taken in by his transparent tactics. ... The
clock has not been stopped by his stratagems and his machinations," he
said.
"Nobody wants war, but it is clear that the limited progress we have
seen ... the slight substantive changes we have seen, come from the
presence of a large military force -- nations who are willing to put
their young men and women in harm's way in order to rid the world of
these dangerous weapons," the secretary said.
"The clock continues to tick and the consequences of Saddam Hussein's
continued refusal to disarm will be very, very real," Powell said.
Following is the transcript of the secretary's remarks:
(begin transcript)
Remarks to the United Nations Security Council
Secretary Colin L. Powell
New York, New York March 7, 2003
(12:00 p.m. EST)
SECRETARY POWELL: Thank you very much, Mr. President and Mr. Secretary
General, distinguished colleagues. Mr. President, let me join my
colleagues in congratulating you on the assumption of the presidency,
and I know you will lead us in these difficult days with great
distinction. And let me also express to my German colleagues my thanks
and admiration for the stewardship that they provided to the Council
over the past month.
We meet today, it seems to me, with one question, and one very, very
important question before us: Has the Iraqi regime made the
fundamental strategic and political decision to comply with the United
Nations Security Council resolutions and to rid itself of all of its
weapons of mass destruction, all of the infrastructure for the
development of weapons of mass destruction? It's a question of intent
on the part of the Iraqi leadership.
The answer to that question does not come from how many inspectors are
present, or how much more time should be given, or how much more
effort should be put into the inspection process. It's not a question
of how many unanswered clusters of questions are there, or are there
more benchmarks that are needed, or are they enough unresolved issues
that have been put forward to be examined and analyzed and conclusions
reached about. The answer depends entirely on whether Iraq has made
the choice to actively cooperate in every possible way, in every
possible manner, in the immediate and complete disarmament of itself
of its prohibited weapons. That's what 1441 called for.
I would like to thank Dr. Blix and Dr. ElBaradei for their reports
this morning which shed more light on this difficult question. I
listened to them very carefully. I listened to them very, very
carefully to see if I was hearing that, finally, Iraq had reached that
point where it understood that the will of the international community
must now be obeyed.
I was pleased to hear from both of these distinguished gentlemen that
there has been some continuing progress on process and even some new
activity with respect to substance.
But I was sorry to learn that all of this still is coming in a
grudging manner, that Iraq is still refusing to offer what was called
for by 1441: immediate, active, and unconditional cooperation. Not
later, immediate. Not passive, active. Not conditional, unconditional
in every respect.
Unfortunately, in my judgment, despite some of the progress that has
been mentioned, I still find what I have heard this morning, a catalog
still of non-cooperation. If Iraq genuinely wanted to disarm, we would
not have to be worrying about setting up means of looking for mobile
biological units or any units of that kind. They would be presented to
us. We would not need an extensive program to search for and look for
underground facilities that we know exist. The very fact that we must
make these requests seems to me to show that Iraq is still not
cooperating.
The inspectors should not have to look under every rock, go to every
crossroad, peer into every cave for evidence, for proof. And we must
not allow Iraq to shift the burden of proof onto the inspectors. Nor
can we return to the failed bargain of Resolution 1284, which offered
partial relief for partial disclosure. 1441 requires full and
immediate compliance and we must hold Iraq to its terms.
We also heard this morning of an acceleration of Iraqi initiatives. I
don't know if we should call these things initiatives. Whatever they
are, Iraq's small steps are certainly not initiatives. They are not
something that came forward willingly, freely, from the Iraqis. They
have been pulled out or have been pressed out by the possibility of
military force by the political will of the Secretary Council.
They have been taking these initiatives, if that's what some would
choose to call them, only grudgingly, rarely unconditionally, and
primarily under the threat of force.
We are told that these actions do not constitute immediate
cooperation, but that's exactly what is demanded by 1441. And even
then, progress is often more apparent than real. I am pleased, very
pleased, that some al-Samoud II missiles are now being broken up,
although perhaps the process of breaking them up has now paused for a
moment.
And I know these are not toothpicks, but real missiles. But the
problem was we don't know how many missiles there are, how many
toothpicks there are. We don't know whether or not the infrastructure
to make more has been identified and broken up. And we have evidence
that shows that the infrastructure to make more missiles continues to
remain within Iraq and has not yet been identified and destroyed.
There is still much more to do, and, frankly, it will not be possible
to do that which we need to do unless we get the full and immediate
kind of cooperation that 1441 and all previous resolutions demanded.
The intent of the Iraqi regime to keep from turning over all of its
weapons of mass destruction seems to me has not changed, and not to
cooperate with the international community in the manner intended by
1441.
If Iraq had made that strategic decision to disarm, cooperation would
be voluntary, even enthusiastic -- not coerced, not pressured. And
that is the lesson we learned from South Africa and the Ukraine, where
officials did everything possible to ensure complete cooperation with
inspectors.
I also listened to Dr. ElBaradei's report with great interest. As we
all know, in 1991, the IAEA was just days away from determining that
Iraq did not have a nuclear program. We soon found out otherwise. IAEA
is now reaching a similar conclusion, but we have to be very cautious.
We have to make sure that we do keep the books open, as Dr. ElBaradei
said he would. There is dispute about some of these issues and about
some of these specific items.
Dr. ElBaradei talked about the aluminum tubes that Iraq has tried to
acquire over the years. But we also know that notwithstanding the
report today, that there is new information that is available to us,
and I believe available to the IAEA, about a European country where
Iraq was found shopping for these kinds of tubes. And that country has
provided information to us, to IAEA, that the material properties and
manufacturing tolerances required by Iraq are more exact, by a factor
of 50 percent or more, than those usually specified for rocket motor
casings. Its experts concluded that the tolerances and specifications
Iraq was seeking cannot be justified for unguided rockets. And I am
very pleased that we will keep this issue open.
I also welcome the compilation of outstanding issues that Dr. Blix and
his staff have provided to some of us and will make available to all
of us. UNMOVIC put together a solid piece of research that adds up,
when one reads the entire 167 pages, adds up fact by chilling fact, to
a damning record of 12 years of lies, deception and failure to come
clean on the part of Iraq.
This document is, in fact, a catalog of 12 years of abject failure,
not by the inspectors, but by Iraq. We have looked carefully at the
draft given to the UNMOVIC commissioners and which will be available
more widely after this meeting, and we have found nearly 30 instances
where Iraq refused to provide credible evidence substantiating its
claims. We have counted 17 examples when the previous inspectors
actually uncovered evidence contradicting Iraqi claims. We see
instance after instance of Iraq lying to the previous inspectors and
planting false evidence, activities which we believe are still
ongoing.
As you read this document, you can see page after page of how Iraq has
obstructed the inspectors at nearly every turn over the years. Just by
way of example, we've talked about the R-400 bombs. The report says
that during the period 1992, Iraq changed its declaration on the
quantity of bombs it had produced, changed the declaration several
times. In 1992, it declared it had produced a total of 1,200 of these
bombs. With the admission, finally, after it was pulled out of them,
of an offensive biological warfare program in 1995, this number was
subsequently changed to a total of 1,550 such bombs. Given the lack of
specific information from Iraq, UNSCOM could not calculate the total
number of R-400 bombs that Iraq had produced for its programs.
And so, this report says it has proved impossible to verify the
production and destruction details of R-400 bombs. UNMOVIC cannot
discount the possibility that some CW- and BW-filled R-400 bombs
remain in Iraq.
In this document, UNMOVIC says actions that Iraq could take to help
resolve this question, present any remaining R-400 bombs and all
relevant molds, provide more supporting documentation on production,
inventory relating to the R-400 and R-400A bombs it manufactured,
provide further documentation explaining the coding system that it had
used with the R-400 type bombs, including coding assigned to specific
CBW agents, provide credible evidence that the R-400 bomb production
line stopped after September 1990.
This is just one example of the kinds of documentation we'll all be
seeing. The question that leaps out at you is that these are issues,
these actions that Iraq is being asked to take, they could have taken
many times over the preceding 12 years. We're not talking about
immediately. We're talking about why hasn't it been done over the last
12 years, and how can we rely on assurances now in the presence of
this solid record of lying and deceit over the years?
These questions could easily have been cleared up in Iraq's December
7th declaration. There should not be these kinds of outstanding issues
to work on, but there are, and we will all examine them carefully.
The point is that this document conclusively shows that Iraq had and
still has the capability to manufacture these kinds of weapons, that
Iraq had and still has the capability to manufacture not only chemical
but biological weapons, and that Iraq had and still has literally tens
of thousands of delivery systems, including increasingly capable and
dangerous unmanned aerial vehicles.
These are not new questions being presented for our consideration.
These are old questions that have not been resolved and could have
been resolved in December with a declaration, or could have been fully
resolved over the last four months if Iraq had come forward and do
what 1441 wanted it to do.
In his report this morning, Dr. Blix remarked on the paucity of
information on Iraq's programs since 1998. We've all been working hard
to fill that gap. But Iraq is the one who could fill that gap, if it
was truly complying with 1441. It would be inundating the inspectors
with new information, not holding it back begrudgingly.
The draft we reviewed today in preparation for this meeting was 167
pages long. If Iraq were genuinely committed to disarmament, Dr.
Blix's document would not be 167 pages of issues and questions; it
would be thousands upon thousands of pages of answers about anthrax,
about VX, about sarin, about unmanned aerial vehicles. It would set
out in detail all of Iraq's prohibited programs. Then, and only then,
could the inspectors really do the credible job they need to do of
verification, destruction and monitoring.
We've been down this road before. In March 1998, Saddam Hussein was
also faced with the threat of military action. He responded with
promises. Promises to provide inspectors at that time with immediate,
unconditional and unrestricted access. The then-chief inspector
reported to this Council a new spirit of cooperation, along with his
hope that the inspectors could move very quickly to verify Iraq's
disarmament.
We know what happened to that hope . There was no progress on
disarmament, and nine months later the inspectors found it necessary
to withdraw.
I regret that not much has changed. Iraq's current behavior, like the
behavior chronicled in Dr. Blix's document, reveals its strategic
decision to continue to delay, to deceive, to try to throw us off the
trail, to make it more difficult to hope that the will of the
international community will be fractured, that we will go off in
different directions, that we will get bored with the task, that we
will remove the pressure, we will remove the force. And we know what
has happened when that has been done in the past.
We know that the Iraqis still are not volunteering information and,
when they do, what they are giving is often partial and misleading. We
know that when confronted with facts, the Iraqis still are changing
their story to explain those facts -- but not enough to give us the
truth.
So has the strategic decision been made to disarm Iraq of its weapons
of mass destruction by the leadership in Baghdad? My judgment, I think
our judgment, has to be clearly not. And this is now the reality we,
the Council, must deal with.
Security Council membership carries heavy responsibility,
responsibility of the community of nations to take the hard decisions
on tough issues such as the one we are facing today.
Last November, this Council stepped up to its responsibilities. We
must not walk away. We must not find ourselves here this coming
November with the pressure removed and with Iraq once again marching
down the merry path to weapons of mass destruction, threatening the
region, threatening the world.
If we fail to meet our responsibilities, the credibility of this
Council and its ability to deal with all the critical challenges we
face will suffer. As we sit here, let us not forget the horror still
going on in Iraq, with a spare moment to remember the suffering Iraqi
people whose treasure is spent on these kinds of programs and not for
their own benefit; people who are being beaten, brutalized and robbed
by Saddam and his regime.
Colleagues, now is the time for the Council to send a clear message to
Saddam that we have not been taken in by his transparent tactics.
Nobody wants war, but it is clear that the limited progress we have
seen, the process changes we have seen, the slight, substantive
changes we have seen, come from the presence of a large military force
-- nations who are willing to put their young men and women in harm's
way in order to rid the world of these dangerous weapons.
It doesn't come simply from resolutions. It doesn't come simply from
inspectors. It comes from the will of this Council, the unified
political will of this Council and the willingness to use force, if it
comes to that, to make sure that we achieve the disarmament of Iraq.
Now is the time for the Council to tell Saddam Hussein that the clock
has not been stopped by his stratagems and his machinations. We
believe that the resolution that has been put forward for action by
this Council is appropriate and, in the very near future, we should
bring it before this Council for a vote.
The clock continues to tick and the consequences of Saddam Hussein's
continued refusal to disarm will be very, very real.
Thank you. 
Released on March 7, 2003
(end transcript)
(Distributed by the Office of International Information Programs, U.S.
Department of State. Web site: http://usinfo.state.gov)