War and Decision: Inside the Pentagon at the Dawn of the War on Terrorism by Douglas J. Feith

Author:Douglas J. Feith [Feith, Douglas J.]
Language: eng
Format: mobi, pdf
Publisher: HarperCollins
Published: 2009-10-12T16:00:00+00:00

The New York Times reported in some detail on this debate about the term “material breach.” After the National Security Council meeting (it wrote), some officials began considering a blander term, “material omission,” as “less likely to precipitate immediate war.” Powell and other officials stressed that “the United States would continue to work through the United Nations and support the weapons inspections under way in Iraq.” U.S. officials were trying to determine whether other members of the UN Security Council “would be antagonized” if the United States asserted that Iraq was in material breach of Resolution 1441.

The Times account reported that “American diplomats determined that there was little support for treating the flaws in the declaration as sufficient grounds to trigger the clauses in Resolution 1441…that could result in a declaration of war,” and that U.S. officials “increasingly regarded the shortcomings of the Iraqi declaration as so obvious that Iraq’s defiance of the Council would become clear without Washington’s having to insist too heavily on it.”

Powell was evidently unpersuaded by the National Security Council discussion. In a press conference the following day, he offered an assessment of the Iraqi declaration’s inadequacies—using the very language that Rumsfeld and the President himself had argued against:

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