NH Delegation Calls Powell’s UN Presentation “Extraordinary, Powerful”
WASHINGTON—New Hampshire’s Republican congressional delegation said Wednesday that Secretary of State Colin Powell made a powerful and convincing presentation to the United Nations Security Council regarding Iraq’s unwillingness to disarm.
Powell presented U.S. and foreign intelligence gathered over the past several months, including satellite photographs, intercepted telephone conversations and first hand accounts that he said proves Iraq has not been destroying but concealing weapons of mass destruction.
“Everything we have seen and heard indicates that, instead of cooperating actively with inspectors to ensure their mission, [Iraqi leader] Saddam Hussein and his regime are busy doing all they possibly can to ensure that inspectors succeed in finding absolutely nothing,” Powell said in his presentation Wednesday.
New Hampshire Sen. John Sununu called Powell’s address a “very powerful one” and said the most startling aspect of the information released during the presentation was its “sheer volume,” which he said demonstrated not an “oversight but a deliberate pattern of obstruction to prevent the world from finding out about” Iraq’s weapons of mass destruction.
Sununu—who said he and several other senators joined President Bush for lunch at the White House following Powell’s presentation—said “the administration would like to see the Security Council act effectively [and] an additional Security Council resolution would be welcome, but it is not a prerequisite to disarming Saddam Hussein with our coalition partners.”
The United States will work with its allies, Sununu said, to determine whether or not a second Security Council resolution will be issued or whether the council will endorse action to enforce Resolution 1441, which it approved last fall. The resolution gave Iraq a last chance to cooperate with U.N. weapons inspectors and disarm its weapons of mass destruction or face serious consequences.
“If the Security Council is not willing to enforce their own resolutions then they’re nothing but a debate society,” Sununu said. “[The Security Council] will be given time to take up this question but I believe the president’s exact words this afternoon at our lunch were that this is a matter of weeks not a matter of months that they have to take action and to make clear that they’re willing to enforce their own resolutions.”
New Hampshire Rep. Charlie Bass, who previously served on the House Intelligence Committee, said the committee was briefed regularly on Iraq’s “stockpiles” of weapons and said he has never doubted the country’s violations of many U. N. sanctions.
“I think Secretary Powell produced a broad and convincing justification for alleging that Iraq has not complied with the U.N. resolution that was passed last year,” Bass said. He added that Powell’s presentation “absolutely” bolstered the president’s case for forcefully disarming Iraq.
Sen. Judd Gregg in a statement said Powell “made the case clearly, decisively and incontrovertibly that Saddam Hussein is not only a threat to us, but a threat to the world, and something has to be done about it.”
“I hope the U.N. will step up [to] the plate now, but if they don’t, we have to defend the security of our nation. There is a significant coalition that agrees with us and we need to move forward,” said Gregg
New Hampshire Rep. Jeb Bradley said in a statement that he “supports allowing weapons inspectors to continue their efforts.” He continued, “However, my concerns about the massive amounts of chemical and biological weapons that remain unaccounted for as well as the lack of cooperation and outright deception by the Iraqi regime have been greatly amplified” by Powell’s presentation.
Bradley said the presentation bolstered the president’s case against Iraq and showed the world how the “cat and mouse game Hussein has been playing with weapons inspectors for years” works.
Published in The Manchester Union Leader, in New Hampshire.
