Transcript
Moderator: Ladies and gentlemen, thank you for standing by. Welcome to the response to the UN Iraq Report conference call. At this time all participants are in a listen-only mode. Later we will conduct a question and answer session. Instructions will be given at that time. As a reminder, this conference is being recorded. I would now like to turn the conference over to your host, Mr. Ken Pollack, Director of Research at the [Brookings] Saban Center for Middle East Policy. Please go ahead, sir.
K. Pollack: Thank you very much, Pat, and thank all of you for joining us. We're really delighted to be able to get in a few words this afternoon to talk about the Blix Report and what it may mean, both for the United States and for Iraq. I will speak first for maybe five or ten minutes, just to hit the high notes about what I think that it means for the United States and the road ahead for U.S. policy. Then I will be turning it over to Amatzia Baram. So he may know, we are delighted to have Professor Amatzia Baram, one of the world's leading experts on Iraq and Saddam Hussein, as a visiting fellow at the Saban Center for the next month or so, and coming back to us at different points in time over the course of the spring. Amatzia will say a few words about how he thinks Saddam is likely to respond, both to the report and to the United States' next moves.
In fact, listening to Blix I felt like, in many ways, Blix was laying out a bill of indictment against the Iraqis. If you wanted to build a case that the Iraqis were not complying, one could simply take the large middle chunk of Blix' presentation and kind of enumerate that as a bill of indictment against the Iraqis. In fact, I'd say that Blix did it much more effectively than the administration has so far, in terms of being very specific about the things that Iraq has been asked to do, the things that they have not done so far, the different pieces of evidence that are out there on the gaps between what Iraq has claimed and what they have actually done.