Local view for "http://purl.org/linkedpolitics/eu/plenary/2003-09-03-Speech-3-135"
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"en.20030903.6.3-135"2
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"Mr President, before speaking on the subject of Iraq, I would like to honour the memory not only of Mr Vieira de Mello, but also of that of one of his fellow-workers, Mr Jean-Sélim Kanaan. Mr Kanaan had worked for the European Parliament as an assistant to Pierre Pradier, and for the Commission, particularly in Burundi.
Let me now turn to Iraq, where I believe there are great dangers. There are those who say that the United States should admit their mistakes. Where is that going to get us? Personally, I do not want to be in the right and tell the Americans that they were wrong, because there was, at the time, one question to which we had no answer, and it was this: ‘How do we rid ourselves of Saddam Hussein?’ We may have been right to oppose the war, but we did not come up with any alternative way of getting rid of Saddam Hussein. In this respect, then, Commissioner Patten is right: the Iraqi people have the right to live in peace without Saddam Hussein.
Today, Saddam Hussein is no longer in power, but the Iraqi people are not yet living in peace. In such a situation, what matters is not whether or not we are satisfied with what the Americans are doing, but that we help them and the British to emerge from their isolation. Whether or not we were right beforehand, it is for us to take the most intelligent approach now. That, alas, is too expensive, which is why Great Britain is currently reviewing its position. This is the devil of a business, being more about money than about principles, but that is life.
Even if the UN were to adopt a resolution tomorrow, and the United States were to hand over operational command to it, it would not find it a simple matter to pacify Iraq. The UN is not God, and nor, for that matter, is Europe. What do you do in a situation like that, when a society that once knew such power has now completely fallen to pieces? There are those who say we have no right to occupy a country. To them I would reply that the Allies had the right to occupy Germany. If the United Nations had decided that Iraq had to be occupied, that would have been legitimate. The problem is that the UN has come to no such decision. There are times, unfortunately, when you have to occupy a country if you want to overturn a dictatorship.
I would welcome it if, today, the European Union were to put forward proposals by, for example, organising a conference on stability and peace in the region, which would involve Iran and other nearby countries. This would allow the United States and Great Britain to slowly find their way back to the UN. By concentrating the debate on the rights and wrongs of a UN resolution, we are in fact in a deadlock, as neither side is at present able to overcome yesterday’s divisions. What this means is that we have to work towards a solution by taking a different route, that of a conference on stability and peace in the region, and then hand over to the UN, which will take charge of rebuilding democracy in Iraq. I do not, unfortunately, believe that next year’s elections will bring us any closer to solving the problem of how to stabilise that country."@en1
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