Secretary of State Colin Powell's February 5th speech to the
United Nations Security Council was a damning indictment of Iraq
for failing to comply with its disarmament obligations. Powell did
not reveal "smoking gun" evidence of Iraqi possession of prohibited
weapons, but he was not required to do so. All that he needed to do
was to prove that Iraq was not cooperating as required under
Security Council Resolution 1441, and he did that beyond a shadow
of a doubt.
Powell's skillful use of "solid intelligence" exposed the
systematic efforts Iraq has made to cover its tracks. These include
intercepted communications between Iraqi Republican Guard officers
discussing plans to hide prohibited weapons and satellite photos of
trucks removing material from suspected weapons sites before the
arrival of U.N. inspectors.
Powell also revealed new information about Iraq's links to Osama
bin Laden's Al Qaeda terrorists, which underscored the urgent need
to disarm Iraq to prevent it from passing chemical and biological
weapons -- the ultimate terrorist weapons - to the world's most
dangerous terrorists.
Powell charged that Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, one of bin Laden's
lieutenants who oversaw a terrorist training camp in Afghanistan
that specialized in the use of poisons, had moved to Iraq and
established another Al Qaeda training camp there. Al-Zarqawi, now
based in Baghdad, has operated freely in Iraq for more than eight
months, moving terrorists, money, and supplies throughout that
country and beyond. Last year, two Al Qaeda agents associated with
al-Zarqawi's Baghdad cell were caught trying to cross Iraq's border
with Saudi Arabia.
Powell's speech would be strong enough to persuade any impartial
jury of Iraq's failure to disarm and the urgent need to enforce
U.N. Resolution 1441, which gave Iraq one last chance to avoid
"serious consequences." As Powell noted, "The facts speak for
themselves." But the Security Council is far from an impartial
jury. It is a collection of U.N. member-states that often pursue
their own narrow national interests at the expense of collective
defense. France, Russia, and China have an economic and political
stake in the survival of Saddam Hussein's brutal regime because of
their past ties to that regime. They likely will continue to lobby
for more time for U.N. weapons inspections, despite Iraq's manifest
failure to cooperate with the inspections as required under
Resolution 1441.
Giving inspections more time will not solve anything. As
Secretary of State Powell noted, the inspectors are not detectives.
They are not capable of finding prohibited weapons hidden by a
ruthless regime in a country bigger than Texas. Moreover,
ineffective inspections are worse than no inspections at all,
because they convey the dangerous illusion that arms control is
working in Iraq.
The United States cannot afford to be diverted from its urgent
goal of disarming Iraq by shortsighted efforts to prolong a
stillborn inspection process that allows Saddam Hussein to feign
disarmament. The Bush Administration should follow up Powell's
strong speech by seeking the Security Council's acknowledgement
that Iraq is in material breach of Resolution 1441. If the Security
Council fails to enforce its own resolution to disarm Iraq, then
the United States should do the right thing and lead a coalition of
the willing, effectively implementing the course of action laid out
in Resolution 1441.
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