Transcript
Mr. Ivo Daalder: Thanks for joining us all. I understand that Ari Fleischer may be briefing, but I can tell you what he says so we can just go ahead. With us here is Martin Indyk, who is the Director of the Saban Center at Brookings and a senior fellow, and I'm Ivo Daalder, myself a senior fellow in foreign policy studies.
What we thought we'd do is be very, very brief. I'll spend a minute or two just reviewing what has happened in the past couple of hours and where that leaves us. Then Martin will reflect on how that relates to what the President said yesterday at the press conference that he did in the East Room at the White House. We'll then go over to your questions.
First, of course, we had the third report from the inspectors this morning, and we have seen a trend here where the inspectors continue to say that things are improving as regards to Iraqi cooperation. On January 27th Blix basically said that the glass was half empty and on February 14th he basically said the glass was both half empty and half full. You could say that today he said that the glass was, in fact, half full. As usual, Mohamed ElBaradei, the IAEA head, was more positive still than Mr. Blix was with regard to Iraqi cooperation.
Given that set of reports, not surprising that there was no change really in the opinion that one could hear within the council one way or the other. We still clearly had four countries that wanted a new resolution and to do so quickly, five countries, including three permanent members — France, Russia, and China — that were against a new resolution and wanted to give inspectors more time, and six other countries that remain on the fence.
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