Transcript
Moderator: Ladies and gentlemen, thank you for standing by, and welcome to the conference call on UN Arms Report from Iraq. At this time all participants are in a listen-only mode. Later there will be a question and answer session. Instructions will be given at that time. As a reminder, today's call is being recorded.
I would now like to turn the conference over to Mr. Martin Indyk. Please go ahead, sir.
Martin Indyk: Hi. Good morning, everybody. I'm Martin Indyk, the Director of the Saban Center for Middle East Policy at The Brookings Institution. Joining me for this press briefing is Ken Pollack, the Director of Research at the Saban Center at Brookings.
Both of us will speak for just a few minutes about our take on where we are at the moment and then we'll be glad to take your questions. I will start; Ken will follow. Obviously the 12,000 pages that the Iraqis have provided are there for final and complete declaration have not been released yet, so we obviously can't comment on the content, but what we can comment on is what we now know about Iraq's strategy and what the United States can or should do to counter it. I'm going to talk about the first and Ken will talk about the second question of what are the U.S. options.
My understanding of Saddam's strategy starts from the premise that he still possesses weapons of mass destruction capabilities. If that were not the case he would have long ago completed the disarmament process and had the sanctions lifted and Iraq would have been able to rejoin the international community.
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