Jean-Pierre Raffarin Quotes

It is high time that the international community tell Saddam Hussein and his regime that this is not an issue of negotiation with the U.N. about obligations that they undertook in 1991.

Disarming Iraq is legal under a series of U.N. resolutions. Iraq is in flagrant violation of U.N. Security Council resolutions.

Conflict is not inevitable, but disarmament is... everyone now accepts that if there is a default by Saddam the international community must act to enforce its will.

Don't invade Iraq. Inspections work, war won't.

Well, there's been plenty of ultimatums, and one thing that we better be very clear is that we can't continue to have the kind of defiance of the United Nations, the defiance of the international community that we've had.

The United Nations has become a place where many countries seek to achieve a lynching of the United States by resolution.

The United Nations Security Council is there to protect the interest of the Americans and the British.

The purposes of the United States should not be doubted. The Security Council resolutions will be enforced - the just demands of peace and security will be met - or action will be unavoidable. And a regime that has lost its legitimacy will also lose its power.

We need to use the United Nations Security Council and believe that preserving law and order in today's complex and turbulent world is one of the few ways to keep international relations from sliding into chaos. The law is still the law, and we must follow it whether we like it or not.

The U.N. can be very frustrating and at times impotent, but it can also be a valuable forum for discussion and resolution of world problems. We should not walk away from it just because it's failed to live up to its promise.

So to recap: we may or may not be going to war with Iraq because Saddam may or may not have weapons of mass destruction, which he may or may not use, or pass to other terrorists groups with whom he may or may not have links.

Resolution 1441 does not give anyone the right to an automatic use of force. Russia believes that the Iraqi problem should be regulated by the Security Council, which carries the main responsibility for ensuring international security.

I can imagine that the Iraqis undertake the destruction out of fear. If they had denied it, if they had said no, that certainly would have played into the hands of those that would like to take armed action immediately. I have no illusions in that regard.

There are big issues, like the reform of the Security Council. These kinds of questions are something the President of the General Assembly must keep his eye on.

I think the disarmament of Iraq is inevitable.

In my judgment, based on the work that has been done to this point of the Iraq Survey Group, and in fact, that I reported to you in October, Iraq was in clear violation of the terms of U.N.Resolution 1441.

No military timetable should compel war when a successful outcome, namely a disarmed Iraq may be feasible without war, for example by allowing more time to the UN inspectors.

The failure of the United Nations - My failure is maybe, in retrospective, that I was not enough aggressive with the members of the Security Council.

The need for a permanent status resolution approved by Congress is made even more clear to me because of my experience as a former Under-Secretary-General of the United Nations.

It has been, after all, 11 years, more than a decade now, of defiance of U.N. resolutions by Saddam Hussein. Every obligation that he signed onto after the Gulf War, so that he would not be a threat to peace and security, he has ignored and flaunted.

So we are disappointed that some of our closest allies, including Canada, have not agreed with us on the urgent need for this military action against Iraq.

The United Nations has become a largely irrelevant, if not positively destructive institution, and the just-released U.N. report on the atrocities in Darfur, Sudan, proves the point.

If the American people are to say yes to U. N. peace keeping, the United Nations must know when to say no.

[Describing the United Nations:] The world cockpit of propaganda.

The U.N. fiddled while Saddam slaughtered.