Madam Speaker, I will conclude quickly in that regard.
The evidence that we have now is not only, as Dr. Blix has disclosed, that Iraq has impeded access to skilled scientists on the Iraqi weapons program, but that it has intimidated them on penalty of death including their families should they provide any witness testimony or should they even try to leave the country for that purpose.
Fourth, Iraq has withheld the necessary documentation regarding its weapons programs, especially nuclear programs, which require an array of supporting data which need to be cross-checked against the material that has been declared.
Fifth, there needs to be a determination of nuclear capability data including the exposing of new technologies like those developed by North Korea and which can be used to mask, as we have learned, a nuclear program. In this connection allegations respecting importation of controversial shipments of aluminum tubes must also be addressed in this regard.
Sixth, Iraq must guarantee the safe deployment of a U-2 reconnaissance plane for aerial imagery and surveillance during inspections which it has not done.
Seventh, the inspections regime should also factor into their own inquiry the serious allegations made by Secretary of State Powell regarding Saddam Hussein's weapons capacity.
In conclusion, the military option may at some further point, if so determined by the UN Security Council respecting both the gravity of the material breaches and the compellability of serious consequences, become necessary. However it is not yet inevitable. The remedies have not yet been exhausted. The UN inspections regime has yet to be reported to the UN Security Council on February 14. The UN Security Council has yet to deliberate even upon such a report and determine whether there has been a material breach based on all witness testimony and documentary evidence available to that point.
Again, we appear to forget that it must be the UN Security Council which makes that finding of fact as to whether there has been a material breach, not all the compelling evidence which we now have in the form of witness testimony and in the form of documentary evidence which appears to make that prima facie case. That determination can only be made by the UN Security Council from a juridical point of view. Only the UN Security Council can determine what are the serious consequences to follow and only the Security Council can authorize military action.
In that sense, the motion before the House in some sense is jumping ahead of ourselves, though I can appreciate its merits. As President Bush himself said, and this may have been forgotten, “War should be a last resort”. That itself, by President Bush in that statement, was an acknowledgement of the foundational, juridical principle of the exhaustion of all remedies short of war.
We are in that process right now. We are seeking to exhaust all those remedies short of war. When the inspection regime reports back to the UN Security Council on February 14 another deliberative process must take place to for the purpose of whether there is a finding of a material breach, a determination of whether serious consequences should follow, and a determination of what those serious consequences may be which follow. It is not necessarily automatically military action.
Even then all the serious consequences of war must be factored into such a decision: the humanitarian, political, economic, juridical and regional consequences of resorting to war as well as consequences of perhaps not resorting to war.