Sec­re­tary of State Colin Pow­ell presents the United States’ evi­dence against Iraq to the Secu­rity Council.

U.S. Sec­re­tary of State Colin Pow­ell attempted to lay out the case for war against Iraq, using tape record­ings, pho­tographs and dia­grams in an attempt to per­suade a reluc­tant U.N. Secu­rity Coun­cil that war is the only answer to deal with Sad­dam Hussein’s defi­ance of UNSCR 1441. (A tran­script of his speech is avail­able here.) China, Rus­sia and France, how­ever, remained skep­ti­cal that war was the answer.
Still, Pow­ell was good with his 90-minute pre­sen­ta­tion. The New York Times said, “Mr. Powell’s pre­sen­ta­tion was all the more con­vinc­ing because he dis­pensed with apoc­a­lyp­tic invo­ca­tions of a strug­gle of good and evil and focused on shap­ing a sober, fac­tual case against Mr. Hussein’s regime. It may not have pro­duced a ‘smok­ing gun,’ but it left lit­tle ques­tion that Mr. Hus­sein had tried hard to con­ceal one.” This pre­sen­ta­tion was the rhetor­i­cal equiv­a­lent of the Pow­ell Docrine: Go in with over­whelm­ing force.
But there was lit­tle in the pre­sen­ta­tion that came as a sur­prise. Pow­ell made a strong case that Iraq was not coop­er­at­ing with UMOVIC and not dis­arm­ing. “Sad­dam Hus­sein and his regime are doing every­thing they can to make sure the inspec­tors find absolutely noth­ing,” he told the Coun­cil and used taped inter­cepts from Novem­ber and Jan­u­ary that he says demon­strate that the Iraqis are hid­ing pro­hib­ited items to thwart inspec­tors’ efforts. Sci­en­tists have been threat­ened and spies installed on the UNMOVIC teams. What was most sig­nif­i­cant about the pre­sen­ta­tion was the degree that it relied on recent data, with much of the satel­lite pho­tos hav­ing been taken in Novem­ber mere days before the weapons inspec­tors returned to Iraq.
“Sad­dam Hus­sein has chem­i­cal weapons. Sad­dam Hus­sein has used such weapons. And Sad­dam Hus­sein has no com­punc­tion about using them again, against his neigh­bors and against his own peo­ple,” Pow­ell said.
I’m not going to get into the stan­dard answer to these charges. Of course, Sad­dam has chem­i­cal weapons and bio­log­i­cal weapons. Many might say this didn’t bother the United States when it was arm­ing Sad­dam and pro­vid­ing his army with intel­li­gence to rain death down on the Ira­ni­ans dur­ing the 1980 – 88 Iran-Iraq War. And many might wish that the Rea­gan and first Bush admin­is­tra­tions had been more force­ful in their con­dem­na­tion when Sad­dam was gassing the Kurds of Hal­abja. Be that as it may, this is now.
Turn­ing to nuclear weapons how­ever, Powell’s case begins to shake a lit­tle. “We have more than a decade of proof that he remains deter­mined to acquire nuclear weapons.” Pow­ell says, admit­ting implic­itly that Saddam’s goal remains unful­filled. If Pow­ell was attempt­ing to make a case for war based on Iraq’s nuclear ambi­tions, he actu­ally made the case for stronger sanc­tions. He lays out all the ways that Iraq’s plans were foiled either through inspec­tors or defec­tors or inter­cep­tion of com­mu­ni­ca­tions. In short, he admits that while Iraq is seek­ing a bomb, it does not have one. The (prob­a­bly unin­tended) impli­ca­tion is that Sad­dam will not get one, either, while the U.N. watches so closely.
And when Pow­ell turns to links to al Qa’ida, the case begins to wob­ble badly. It all rests on the shoul­ders of Abu Musab Al-Zarqwi, whom Powel calls a high-ranking Qa’ida mem­ber based in north­east­ern Iraq (Iraqi Kur­dis­tan.) As I’ve men­tioned in a pre­vi­ous post, Baghdad’s back­ing of Ansar al-Islam is hardly a solid link to al Qa’ida. Splin­ter groups opposed to the Kurds are funded by every enemy of the PUK and KDP, includ­ing Iran and Turkey. Ansar may be an al Qa’ida affil­i­ate — it’s cer­tainly inspired by Osama bin Laden’s Islamo-fascism — but few mem­bers of the secu­rity coun­cil are will­ing to go to war over Ansar, espe­cially since if the group were such a threat, the United States could have wiped it out long ago with a series of bomb­ings out of Incir­lik Air Base or a sur­gi­cal strike by SpecOps. Instead, the United States seems to be allow­ing the group to harass the Kurds of north­east­ern Iraq so that it can point to the group when­ever it needs an Iraq-Qa’ida con­nec­tion.
In all, Pow­ell pre­sented noth­ing really new, and noth­ing that will likely pro­duce a flock­ing to the United States’ side from the per­ma­nent mem­bers of the Coun­cil. In fact, skep­tics, such as France and Rus­sia, still see the U.S. case as unproven. Tang Jiax­uan, Chi­nese For­eign Min­is­ter, said, ““[UN weapons inspec­tors] are not in a posi­tion to draw con­clu­sions and they have sug­gested con­tin­u­ing the inspec­tions. We should respect their views […] and sup­port the con­tin­u­a­tion of their work.“
“This infor­ma­tion has to be imme­di­ately handed over for pro­cess­ing by the IAEA through on-site ver­i­fi­ca­tion dur­ing the inspec­tions in Iraq,” added Igor Ivanov, Russ­ian For­eign Min­is­ter. “Experts in our coun­tries must imme­di­ately get down to analysing and draw­ing the appro­pri­ate con­clu­sions.“
And Dominique de Villepin, French For­eign Min­is­ter, ever sniffy, said, “For now we must rein­force the inspec­tion regime. The use of force can only be a final resort.“
So. There is lit­tle doubt that Iraq is guilty and in breach of UNSCR 1441, at least as far as hav­ing chem­i­cal weapons is con­cerned. That’s not really the issue, and even France, our not-ally, has signed on to the greater goal of dis­arm­ing Sad­dam. The ques­tion is really, how does the world sen­tence the guilty?