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Russian Envoy: U.N. Credibility Intact
The credibility of the United Nations remains intact and may even have been strengthened since the Iraq war because the reports of U.N. weapons inspectors have now been confirmed by U.S. search teams, Russiaâs U.N. envoy said Monday night.He hasnât spoken with many of my neighbors apparently. A year after Secretary of State Colin Powell put the U.S. case for war against Iraq to a bitterly divided Security Council, countries that supported the war and countries that did not are all pressing for the United Nations to play a Being the Russians are a nation of chess players, I would have counted on better logic than this. Last year, Powellâs arguments failed to convince the Security Council, which refused to authorize the war against Iraq. France, Russia and Germany led the opposition, and in the weeks and months that followed some politicians and pundits predicted that the United Nations would become irrelevant. Theyâre almost right on that point,the UN has NEVER been relevant. But Lavrov said "as far as U.N. credibility is concerned ... I would say that it did not suffer." You never had any, ask anyone from Rwanada, better yet ask the Iraqiâs. He said Russia and many other Security Council members relied on the conclusions of U.N. weapons inspectors, who returned to Iraq in November 2002 and reported to the council that Iraq had finally started to cooperate fully and had provided immediate access to sites. "Through this Iraqi cooperation, the inspectors were allowed to establish quite a number of facts, but basically confirming that there were no weapons of mass destruction in Iraq and no signs of a resumption of weapons of mass destruction programs which had existed before the 1991 Gulf War," Lavrov said. But the capacity to produce them was always there,at the very least. "The search teams employed by the (U.S.-led) coalition in the past few months basically came to the same conclusion," he told a news conference. Last month, David Kay, the former CIA special adviser on Iraqi weapons who led the U.S. hunt for banned Iraqi weapons, said "we were almost all wrong" about Iraqâs weapons of mass destruction. I think david Kay also mentioned that Saddam was much more dangerous than we could have imagined. "We were relying on the conclusions and the opinion of the inspectors who were saying that given two or three more months, theyâd be able to give us some kind of definite report," Lavrov said. "We trusted the inspectors - and they so far have not been proven to be wrong." He said the U.N.âs credibility "was proven by the fact" that U.N. nuclear, chemical, biological and long-range missile inspectors "were reporting objectively," he said. I still donât think that the UN weapons inspectors could find their ass with both hands.
Posted by: JerseyMike 2004-02-10 |
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