Local view for "http://purl.org/linkedpolitics/eu/plenary/2002-10-09-Speech-3-044"
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"en.20021009.5.3-044"2
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"Mr President, the debate on Iraq you provided us with last month in Strasbourg made us fear the worst, namely war. All the speakers involved in today’s debate, as a whole, have the merit of taking into consideration the developments of Iraqi positions over the past few weeks and resistance within the UN itself to US unilateralism, as well as to the excesses of the Bush administration. As Europeans, we cannot agree to or allow others to bombard this complicated region with simple, I would even go so far as to say simplistic, ideas, which are those of the Bush dynasty, whether of the father, who admitted on television that he hates Saddam Hussein, or of the son, who justifies his obsession with Saddam Hussein with these ridiculous words: 'the guy … tried to kill my father'. These statements could be laughable were it not for the fact that a war in Iraq would have a cost, in terms of human lives, obviously, both in the Iraqi camp and in that of the allied armies, and at this point I would like to thank the speaker from the PSE Group for recalling or re-launching the debate on the subject of lifting the embargo for the Iraqi civilians who have already been suffering for eleven years. This cost, moreover, would be incalculable in terms of the instability created by a military intervention in the region, and would also be irreversible for international law, and we therefore feel that, at the end of the day, it is in relation to the Iraqi crisis that UN credibility is at stake.
That is why, above and beyond the moral considerations, we cannot lose sight of these few factors. After a year in which the United States have not made any bones about comparing Saddam Hussein to Bin Laden, we still have no proof that Iraq was involved in the September 11 attacks and the broader Al Qaida organisation. Similarly, we still have no proof of the existence of weapons of mass destruction in Iraq today, notwithstanding the impassioned assertions of Tony Blair. The only certainty so far is that, to the United States, Iraq and the Iraqi regime are a setback on the road to oil. This much is clear. At this point, however, we are a long way from the objectives assigned to the international coalition that Europe joined just one year ago and the countries of Europe must now ally themselves with the United States so that together we can fight the only real, immediate threat to the world, the broader Al Qaida organisation. We could not seriously, however, tell the world today that tomorrow we will be able to capture Mullah Omar or Osama Bin Laden on Babylonian soil."@en1
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