Transcript
Moderator: Ladies and gentlemen, thank you for standing by and welcome to the Analysis of the Hans Blix Report conference call. At this time all lines are in a listen-only mode. Later we will conduct a question and answer session and instructions will be given at that time. As a reminder, this call is being recorded.
I would now like to turn the conference over to your host, Director of Research at the Saban Center of Brookings, Mr. Ken Pollack. Please go ahead, sir.
K. Pollack: Thanks very much, Morgan, and thank all of you for joining us this afternoon. As you know, we're going to try to cover the potential fallout and the road ahead after Hans Blix's report this afternoon.
I'd like to start by turning it over to my colleague, Ivo Daalder, who I think all of you know, who is a Senior Fellow here at Brookings, the author of Winning Ugly among other works, and one of our experts on U.S. European relations. Ivo, why don't you start us off?
I. Daalder: Good afternoon. Thanks, all, for joining. I'll be very brief. Let me say, one, that I thought the report did not resolve the issues that have bedeviled both the UN Security Council and our relationship with our major allies, particularly in Europe. In many ways the report was a negative development from the administration's perspective, not so much the content, the content was not that different from the report we had two weeks ago, but the tone. Whereas on January 27th Mr. Blix's report really stressed the negative with regard to Iraqi compliance, and emphasized how much more needed to be done and how difficult the road was; here he did the opposite. He stressed the positive developments, particularly as Secretary Powell pointed out on the process side, and downplayed the negative, the fact that we still don't have a resolution of many of the issues.
The complete transcript is available in PDF form (PDF—55KB)
View Full Transcript »