Posted on 02/05/2003 3:09:54 PM PST by MadIvan
The US has powerfully reinforced the case against Iraq
Colin Powell’s 75-minute speech to the Security Council yesterday was a withering riposte to Iraq’s taunt that the US has no proof that it has hidden, and continues to hide, illicit weapons of enormous destructive power. This was, as the general had said it would be, a sober presentation, but the cumulative effect of his circumstantial, visual and auditory evidence powerfully reinforced the US and British contention that Iraq continues to deceive UN inspectors, to defy the UN Security Council, and to manufacture weapons so appalling that they are outlawed by UN conventions. Iraq claims that it has no more banned weapons, nothing to hide and nothing more to disclose. UN inspectors had already told the Security Council late last month of their frustration at Iraq’s enduring refusal to produce proof that it had destroyed weapons and precursors discovered before 1998. The intercepts General Powell produced added dramatic positive evidence that it has lied.
The Security Council listened to one officer in the Republican Guard ordering another to “remove the expression ‘nerve agents’ wherever it comes up in the wireless instructions”. These, as the US Secretary of State observed, are field commanders; they would not have been issued with such weapons if they were not expected to use them. The night before the UN inspectors returned to Iraq, the Council heard hurried instructions to “evacuate” a “modified vehicle” before they reached the plant where it was secreted. Satellite imaging, as General Powell acknowledged, is hard for non-experts to interpret; but the “before and after” shots he produced support American claims that Iraq has clandestinely stripped 30 sites of incriminating evidence, including chemical munitions and ballistic missiles.
This powerfully buttresses the legal case for declaring Iraq in breach of a series of binding Security Council resolutions, culminating in November’s “final chance” Resolution 1441. The case for giving the inspectors much more time looks threadbare; and with the exception of the German Government, which irresponsibly announced beforehand that nothing General Powell said would alter its contrary vote, the presentation could not but influence his immediate audience. Yet evidence sufficient to convict Iraq of the diplomatic equivalent of perjury has been in the public domain for years, not months.
General Powell’s second task was thus to persuade a global audience that Iraq poses so great and immediate a threat that it must at all costs be disarmed, even if that involves the risks and horror of war. His case for action rested on three pillars. The first is evidence that Baghdad’s nuclear programme remains live. The second is Iraq’s active effort to develop and extend the range of ballistic missiles, sprayer planes and unmanned aerial vehicles; these are able to deliver chemical and biological weapons that Iraq is known to have possessed in massive quantities in the 1990s.
America’s “conservative estimate” is that it has enough chemicals to fill 16,000 battlefield rockets; it also has stockpiles of biological weapons and new mobile production facilities. Such weapons, as General Powell said, are so toxic that amounts the size of his little finger could devastate an area the size of Manhattan.
The third part of his evidence was an unexpectedly detailed account of Iraq’s high-level contacts with Osama bin Laden, its provision of training to al-Qaeda agents seeking to manufacture biological and chemical weapons and, most recently, its collaboration with Abu Musab Zarqawi. Zarqawi, a Palestinian who ran a camp in Afghanistan specialising in poisons, is now based in Iraq; he is the al-Qaeda operative considered by European intelligence agencies to be behind the ricin plot in Britain and cells plotting toxin attacks in Italy, France, Spain and Russia. The bin Laden connection has been the weakest link; it looks less weak now. It is still not decisive; but as General Powell says, such a connection is dangerous in the extreme. In Iraq, the world is not up against a diminished threat lingering from the past, but confronting a dangerous serial offender, a dictator as contemptuous of human life as he is of international law. Containment has failed to prevent him building and hiding weapons that, he must be assumed to believe, would make him ultimately impossible to restrain. Even if it ultimately takes war, he must be stopped.
Regards, Ivan
THESE ARE the 26 ALLIES for IRAQI people’s (women & children included) FREEDOM
U.S., Britian, Australia, Hungary, Bulgaria, Romania, Poland, Italy, Portugal, Turkey, Lithuania
Slovakia, Denmark, Czech Republic, Spain, Quatar, Jordan, Albania, Kuwait, Israel, Slovenia, Estonia, Latvia, Macedonia, Croatia, and Japan
FREE the IRAQI people!!!
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There are those on the Left that will claim Powell did not connect the dots of Iraq to Al Qaeda. Unfortunately when these "dots" are connected enough, something, somewhere, in Europe or North America will explode and a lot of people will be dead.
The word of the day, Cauterize
hahahaha!!! LOL...
Close. It's not that they think Saddam is a better guy, it's that they hate Bush a lot and in their eyes America is powerful and rich and therefore, always wrong. It's sort of like those academics who believe it's impossible for black people to be racists-- it's not that they support black racism, it's that they think only whites can be racist because only whites have power.
How the West puts up with Quebec even now, baffles me
I certainly don't mind them dying stupid.
It all those years in between I can't stand.
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UK
AUSTRALIA
ROMANIA
ISRAEL
POLAND
SPAIN
CZECH
PORTUGAL
KUWAIT
HUNGARY
QATAR
ITALY
ALBANIA
JORDAN
DENMARK
SLOVAKIA
TURKEY
ESTONIA
LATVIA
LITHUANIA
MACEDONIA
SLOVENIA
ALBANIA
CROATIA
BULGARIA
JAPAN