The Report
of the Iraq Inquiry
589.
In his memoir,
Dr Blix recorded that he had finalised his ideas about
how
UNMOVIC’s
work on clusters might be used on 17 February, producing both a
draft
resolution
and a background paper which he gave to Sir Jeremy
Greenstock.162
Sir Jeremy
gave the documents to the Americans.
590.
Explaining his
thinking that inspections offered Iraq “an opportunity that was
not
open
endlessly” and that it was “for the Council – but not individual
members of it –
to consider
and decide on the alternative to inspections”, Dr Blix wrote
that military
pressure
“was and remained indispensable to bringing about Iraqi compliance”
but:
“… many
delegations felt that not enough time had yet been given to
inspections;
eleven
weeks was rather a short time to allow the final conclusion that
disarmament
could not
be achieved through the inspection path and would have to be
abandoned.
It would
not seem unreasonable … to set ‘an explicit time line’ within
which
satisfactory
co-operation and resolution of unresolved disarmament issues and
key
remaining
disarmament tasks would be demanded. It was a political judgement
…
to decide
how much time would be given.
“It would
be for the Security Council to judge – after a report by the
inspectors –
whether
there had been adequate co-operation and resulting disarmament
…
“My draft
requested that UNMOVIC/IAEA submit by 1 March a list of ‘key
points’
… along
with indications of what Iraq should do to resolve them (the
benchmarks).
It further
spelled out a number of demands for Iraqi actions … It
requested
UNMOVIC/IAEA
to report to the Council before a specific date … whether
Iraq had
done what
was asked of it. Lastly, it stipulated that if the Security Council
were to
conclude that
Iraq had not fulfilled what was demanded and thus had
‘not made
use of
the inspection process,’ the inspections would be terminated and
the
Council would
‘consider other measures to solve the disarmament
issue’.”
591.
Sir
Christopher Meyer advised that there was no agreed position within
the
US
Administration about how to work on a second resolution and UK
views were
best
registered directly with President Bush.
592.
Sir
Christopher Meyer advised that the US Administration was still
debating the
timing and
contents of a second resolution and that there was no agreed
interagency
position on
how best to work with Dr Blix on a second
resolution.163
593.
There was
concern about Dr Blix’s reluctance to press Iraq on mobile
biological
weapons
facilities, because the “knowledge” of those facilities came from
intelligence,
which
“appeared to put the onus on the US/UK to prove these existed
rather than on
Iraq to
reassure the Council that they did not”; and that he might have
lost sight of the
fact that
Iraq’s co-operation on process was not synonymous with
disarmament.
162
Blix
H. The Search
for Weapons of Mass Destruction: Disarming Iraq. Bloomsbury
Publishing
Plc, 2005.
163
Telegram
219 Washington to FCO London, 19 February 2003, ‘Iraq: US Thinking,
19 February’.
286