Healing the Alliance Against Terrorism - 8 August 2003

A remarkably thoughtful, or perhaps I should say a remarkably intuitive listener has found me out. He - unless George has turned into a female name - says: "I sense that you feel a constant obligation, a duty almost, to talk about Iraq, wish you didn't have to and then sound all the more relieved when you find something else to talk about."

Well, he's touched a nerve. But I feel no wince of guilt at the touch. He's right.

I shall try to cease feeling a duty to go on about Iraq, but Iraq is the central problem of foreign policy not only for the United States but for Western Europe and - since I am not one who shares the fashionable belief that Europe is dead or the contagious popular nonsense that under President Bush, the United States is going into the empire business - I believe also that the closest unity of principle and action between the United States, the United Kingdom, France and Germany is essential to their future both as self-respecting nations and as a powerful and influential alliance. The terrorist enemy is widely scattered in its operations but it is a worldwide alliance.

The opposition to it cannot afford for its survival to be split into two or three conflicting blocs - the US, UK, Spain, Italy and 20-odd smaller nations against France, Germany and Russia.

I was once asked in some interview what was my mission in life and I said if you have a mission you should become a bishop and not a journalist.

On government and politics, I am and continue to be, a reporter - collecting facts, however awkward or contradictory, and leaving you to arrange them into an opinion. But for once, I have to admit a secondary purpose. I mean other than reporting. It is the hope of playing a small part in the healing - which must happen - between the Anglo-American Alliance and Germany and France.

For the time being, I have two items that ought to be brought up - the first particularly because it has lain on my desk for months. I have not seen it mentioned anywhere, and it might have a bearing on the German and French votes in the UN Security Council which fired the whole uproar about the Anglo-American invasion and started the apparently unending controversy about the actual legitimacy of the war.

I am holding in my hand a map printed in the New York Times after the invasion of Iraq. The map shows the countries that in the 1980s, sold to Iraq "chemical agents, equipment and munitions which were declared by Iraq to United Nations inspectors".

Iraq had declared 17,600 tons of sensitive chemicals. Most of the sarin, tabun and mustard gas came from the Netherlands, Singapore, Egypt and India. The interesting category is "equipment". Iraq reported 340 pieces of equipment "used for making chemical weapons".

A small fraction from Spain and Austria. But from France - 21 per cent. Germany - 52 per cent. So between them, Germany and France provided - by Saddam's own declaration - 73 per cent of the then existing equipment with which to manufacture chemical weapons.

If I'd been a member of the German or French delegations, I think I should have been in a quandary - whether to want the UN inspections to go on and on fruitlessly or whether I should share the suspicion of the Americans and the British that maybe they'll never be discovered because they had very likely been hidden away in a neighbouring country. It's a puzzle still worth going into.

You must bear with me on the second item. It came as a shocker to me, even though it is a piece from my own hand and mouth. It is a Letter from America which more than suggests we were on the verge of going to war in Iraq.

The United States Secretary of State had just said, after a tour of the Middle East to recruit allies, "We should prefer to act multilaterally but if necessary we shall act unilaterally." So - which Secretary of State said that? Madeleine Albright, that's who!

I shall re-do for you the gist of this old talk - dated second weekend in February 1998 - because the other day I came on good cause to look up a five and a half year old talk.

The cause was a recent survey of popular European opinion. The simple, appalling (to me) result was that an actual majority of ordinary people in Europe (Europe of course taking in also the United Kingdom) is under the delusion that the whole problem of Saddam and chemical weapons started last autumn!

Well here is the gist of that talk - it was only one of about a dozen talks about Saddam.

"On the eve of what turned out to be a fruitless talk fest at the United Nations, President Clinton defined the problem and his policy simply and truly: all the sites of Saddam's chemical and biological weapons - the laboratories and the materials of their production - must be discovered and destroyed. If Saddam resists the UN inspection team or otherwise hampers their work, he will have to be punished by the United Nations.

The existence of these ghastly materials is known and the elements spelled out: the anthrax, botulin and the hideous muscle-paralysing gas - VX. The use of at least one of these on his own people, on the Kurds, is well authenticated."

That speech was given just before the Security Council met in November 1997 to - as President Clinton and the British hoped - go through the formality of a resolution condemning Saddam Hussein and then voting to take action against him.

However, the Council debate was hardly under way before it became painfully plain that France, Russia and China had no intention of punishing Saddam with war - a word incidentally never used then or subsequently.

So then the United States - the Secretary of Defence Cohen and Secretary Albright - went off on a recruiting tour of Europe and the Middle East looking for allies.

Saudi Arabia refused to serve as a base this time. Egypt thought things over and decided that military action would be inappropriate.

Britain alone was ready to join. From most delegations to the UN came the parrot cry: "seek a diplomatic solution". The Secretary General, one Kofi Annan, urged everybody to be "more flexible" and announced, "We should not insist on humiliating Saddam Hussein."

Still, the United States went on preparing - another aircraft carrier gone to the Gulf, tense discussion at the Pentagon about the tactics of the war - the efficacy of new, more precise, smarter aerial weapons - followed by a controversy about the peril of an air strike on a biological van or tub, releasing a nerve gas that could destroy a whole population.

The message was: "Think twice before you bomb the very materials you mean to destroy". And then the debate started about ground forces. How many hundred thousand?

So - the UN settled into a "flexible" mode. Otherwise known as wobble or "a diplomatic solution".

In this hopeless stalemate, President Clinton was ready to give up on the United Nations and go into Iraq with Britain.

So what happened? My talk was given, as I say, the second weekend in February 1998.

I didn't mention the fateful thing that had happened only three weeks before.

President Clinton had been called to testify in a long-hanging sexual harassment suit and, on television before the whole nation, he denied that he had ever been sexually intimate with a young White House intern and/or that he had ever covered it up. Within days, it became manifest that the President had lied.

By then, considered as a warrior leader or even as a President of the United States, he had lost every shred of moral authority.

So he talked on and on about Iraq and the need to act, and the United Nations blushed and settled back into an on-looking position, or what Secretary General Annan called "a more flexible mode".

THIS TRANSCRIPT WAS TYPED FROM A RECORDING OF THE ORIGINAL BBC BROADCAST (© BBC) AND NOT COPIED FROM AN ORIGINAL SCRIPT. BECAUSE OF THE RISK OF MISHEARING, THE BBC CANNOT VOUCH FOR ITS COMPLETE ACCURACY.

Letter from America audio recordings of broadcasts ©BBC. Letter from America scripts © Cooke Americas, RLLP. All rights reserved.