3.8 |
Development of UK strategy and options, 8 to 20 March
2003
unilateral
action but by multilateral agreement and a world governed by rules.
Yet
tonight the
international partnerships most important to us are weakened …
Those
are heavy
casualties in a war in which a shot has yet to be
fired.”
855.
Dismissing any
parallels with the action in Kosovo in 1999, where there had
been
multilateral
support and the need to respond to an urgent and compelling
humanitarian
crisis,
Mr Cook stated:
“Our
difficulty in getting support this time is that neither the
international community
nor the
British public is persuaded that there is an urgent and compelling
reason for
this
military action in Iraq.
“The
threshold for war should always be high. None of us can predict the
death toll
of
civilians …”
“Nor is it
fair to accuse those of us who want longer for inspections of not
having
an
alternative strategy … Over the past decade that strategy [of
containment] had
destroyed
more weapons than in the Gulf War, dismantled Iraq’s nuclear
weapons
programme
and halted Saddam’s medium and long range missile
programmes.”
Iraq’s
military strength was now less than half its size in 1991; and,
“Ironically” it was
“only
because Iraq’s military forces” were “so weak that we can even
contemplate
its invasion”.
857.
Mr Cook
questioned the threat posed by Iraq:
“Iraq
probably has no weapons of mass destruction in the commonly
understood
sense of
the term – namely a credible device capable of being delivered
against
a strategic
city target. It probably … has biological toxins and battlefield
chemical
munitions,
but it has had them since the 1980s when US companies sold
Saddam
anthrax
agents and the then British government approved chemical and
munitions
factories.
Why is it now so urgent that we should take military action to
disarm a
military
capacity that has been there for twenty years, and which we helped
to
create? Why
is it necessary to resort to war this week, while Saddam’s ambition
to
complete
his weapons programme is blocked by the presence of UN
inspectors?”
858.
Drawing
attention to the lack of action in the face of Israel’s refusal to
comply with
resolution
242 (1967) demanding its withdrawal from the Occupied Territories,
Mr Cook
warned of
the “strong sense of injustice throughout the Muslim world” as a
result of the
perception
that there was “one rule for the allies of the US and another rule
for the rest”.
He
added:
“Nor is our
credibility helped by the appearance that our partners in
Washington
are less
interested in disarmament than they are in regime change in Iraq.
That
551