SPEECH BY SILVIO BERLUSCONI
ITALIAN PRIME MINISTER

ITALIAN FOREIGN MINISTRY

September 25, 2002

The international crisis that broke in the wake of the tragedy of 11 September has entered a very delicate phase. Public opinion is understandably alarmed. Italians are watching this debate by their representatives with legitimate concern.

They want their leaders to tell them what is really happening. They want to know what results we have achieved so far, what the immediate future holds, and what has to be done to guarantee the highest level of global security in a framework of stability and peace. We must therefore debate the issues calmly, reasoning about what is happening, responsibly and truthfully, seeking not to widen our differences divisions when we analyse the facts, and if possible set them aside by making an effort to achieve national convergence around our country's own interests and values, against the background of European solidarity and our strategic alliance with America, which has been violated and wounded by a ferocious terrorist offensive.

A year ago, following a free vote by the Italian Parliament, Italy entered the great coalition against terrorism built up around United States of America with our European Union partners and by agreement with the Russian Federation, China and the other moderate governments in the Islamic world. The vote was carried by a very comfortable majority in both the Chamber of Deputies and the Senate, and the official Opposition helped to make Italy's position clear and authoritative in its commitment to supporting intervention in Afghanistan.

This policy has achieved important results: 1) the Taleban political regime that protected the territorial bases used by Osama bin Laden's terrorist network has been dismantled, and those bases have been destroyed; 2) an integrated intelligence network has been built up, leading to thousands of arrests throughout the world and making it possible to gather intelligence that has proven essential to preventing armed groups from proliferating, and new attacks from being perpetrated. In Afghanistan, a country that is still suffering from extreme political and military instability for obvious historical reasons, an strenuous attempt to stabilise democracy is currently being made, now that the country has been liberated from the barbarism of a regime that enslaved its women and subjected all human liberties and the enjoyment of civil rights to the spurious values of fundamentalist ideological fanaticism.

Italy has been playing her part, and continues to do so, in the peacekeeping operations, including the most arduous and complex. We are the third largest contributor in terms of the number of troops engaged worldwide on peace-keeping and peace-enforcing operations authorised by the United Nations. A contingent of Italian Alpini troops is shortly to leave for Kabul as the Defence Minister, Antonio Martino, recently announced. And we have achieved important, internationally acknowledged, results in the battle to neutralise terrorism's' recruitment and logistics centres. And we have had particularly outstanding results in blocking and freezing huge resources intended to be used to fund international subversion.

I believe that our citizens can be proud of a government and of a ruling class that has behaved with wisdom and prudence, but have not stood aside and allowed events to happen; that have addressed the emergency without fanaticism, combining efforts and diplomatic successes on the world stage to act with determination to combat and deter international terrorism. And one decisive factor in this success is the fact that the parliamentarians have not so far become embroiled in factious divisions, which are contrary to the national interest and the spirit of the alliances into which we have freely entered and confirmed during over half a century of our republican history. No-one is therefore authorised to play on collective anxieties, in an attempt to win partisan advantages. What is at stake is enormous: our security and our freedom. In games like this, cheating is strictly prohibited. The problem facing the international community today has been clearly spelt out.

We have to disarm a dictatorial political régime, the Iraqi régime, which has so far belligerently poured scorn on the United Nations' decisions regarding the control of its arms systems, including those that are suitable for producing nuclear weapons; a régime that played cat and mouse during the inspections that ended in 1998, with the withdrawal of the inspectors; a régime which threatens to use itself, to through third parties, horrendous chemical and bacteriological weapons of mass destruction. It means that we have to tackle a régime whose leader, in a letter he sent last week to the United Nations Secretary-General, has claimed that the United States is masterminding a plot to impose Zionist domination on the world, not only military but also economic and political domination.

Anyone who lived through the Second World War and who responsibly tries to learn from memory and the lessons of history, will recognise in these words an echo of the ravings that led to the disaster of Europe and Germany in the Forties. Any comparisons made with Adolf Hitler befit dictatorships and international outlaws, but certainly not the great American democracy and its President. The objective of disarming Iraq has been entrusted for over ten years to the strategy of containment, trade sanctions and a United Nations inspections régime which came to grief in 1998. This strategy has substantially failed, judging from the evidence which the intelligence services of the Western alliance have gathered which shows that Saddam Hussein is re-arming, some of which was made public yesterday by the British Prime Minister during the Commons debate.

The fact that the Iraqi regime is a regional and global threat is something on which all agree, irrespective of their opinions on how to deal with it to remove it. We therefore have to decide what has to be done on the basis of an informed and jointly agreed judgment, and as far as we are concerned this requires all the European governments to take up their responsibilities. Ruling out the option of doing nothing, which could have incalculable costs in historical terms, the only possible alternative left is this: to build up a coalition on a multilateral basis, capable of imposing total compliance with a new, strongly worded, unambiguous and exacting United Nations Resolution which makes short shrift of any evasive, delaying or decoying tactics for which the Iraqi régime has so far demonstrated an uncommon ability.

As we reiterated at the recent Copenhagen meeting, when there is no longer any more time to be lost in defending a collective good we must free ourselves from any ambiguities and set all selfishness aside. Italy, both as a sovereign state and as a partner of the European Union, is fully committed to ensuring that the United Nations tells the Iraqi government exactly what it has to do, in the minutest detail and with the maximum clarity, to guarantee the international community, and set deadlines by which to do it. It is obvious that the authority and the credibility of the United Nations will be directly proportional to the degree of unity and determination to take the necessary decisions manifested by the leading Western democracies, and primarily the United States of America - a country which has been struck at its heart by international terrorism and, for many decades, has borne the greatest responsibility for ensuring stability and balance in relations between States through its military and political projection worldwide.

The Security Council has been working for the past ten days to find an acceptable solution in this direction, and one that will not be vetoed or be subject to too many qualifications. Italy hopes - and this is also the direction in which Italian diplomacy is moving - that we shall soon be able to come up with a single, unequivocal resolution that leaves no room for misunderstandings and which sets out the conditions for the measured use of force in the event of any new act of blatant defiance of the international community. Italy rejects war as an instrument of offence: this principle is enshrined in the Italian Constitution and is consistent with the deepest feelings of the absolute majority of the Italian people. In today's world, however, the nature of war has partly changed, and are quite palpably faced with the problem of the so-called asymmetric war, which has been analysed by governments and intelligence throughout the world, and by the leading international study centres. Traditional deterrence, that is to say the threat of a reprisal that is capable of stopping anyone toying with the idea of aggression in their tracks, served us very well indeed in the old Cold War world, when the bipolar stand-off was between States or systems of military and political alliances that were easily recognisable as a territory, a political régime, or a regular army.

But things have partly changed today, and the real and tragic novelty about the 11 September attacks was precisely the way it was able to demonstrate that a terrorist network fuelled and backed up by the complicity of governments, can strike at the very heart of a country within its own borders, and simultaneously at a whole way of life and system of freedoms which is the one that, as Europeans and as Italians, unites us to the destiny of with United States of America.

If to this we add the lethal and technologically sophisticated weapons of mass destruction and extermination, which can be used directly or be disposed of as commodities on the international terror market, we must recognise the fact that it is impossible to react to the new strategic concerns of the United States Administration with a shrug of the shoulders, whatever we may think about their merits.

The fact that the United States is currently stressing the possibility of acting alone or as part of alliances that are made-to-measure for various political and military missions, means that the multilateral decision-making system has demonstrated intolerable weaknesses for a country that bears the greatest responsibility, as well as a direct national interest, for addressing the problem of world security.

The fact that the question of political/military prevention has been broached is precisely because there is a linkage between the rise in terrorism and the threat posed by governments whose sole purpose is regional expansionism or global destabilisation through the use, or the threat, of new weapons of extermination.

Democracy is not only a value which we hold to be sacred, but it is also the framework within which peace can lay down its most solid foundations. In the modern world, democracy cannot spread with the use of weapons, except under exceptional circumstances, and it moves forward driven by a complex action of fostering growth and development: but the aim of extending free institutions for the benefit of people who have been freed from oppression must not be viewed as a neocolonial project. The task of America's loyal and independent allies, as Italy is and intends to remain, is therefore to strengthen the instruments of multilateral action, create an effective European line of action, and discuss the threats and the solutions, case-by-case, without erecting the rubber wall of doing nothing, or withholding our solidarity with the controversial, but comprehensible, new strategic doctrine of the United States.

Italy has a specific national interest involved in taking up responsible and independent stances towards this new crisis, loyally consistent with the framework of her historical alliance with the United States. And this, in our opinion, is also in the true supranational interests of the European Union. But we are living in an age in which interests and values have to be closely and rigorously combined. When the Americans donated their material and human resources, and on two occasions in the past century committed themselves to liberating our continent from the threats of totalitarian domination, they taught us something which, as Europeans, we had forgotten in the tragic months of appeasement, when in Munich, with Italian mediation, Adolf Hitler was enabled to impose the law of force and of fait accompli on the fearful European democracies that were reluctant to act. The Americans taught us, with Franklin D. Roosevelt, that the only thing to be afraid of is fear itself. Italy will therefore press forward boldly, deploying all the political, diplomatic and military efforts which the bare facts, viewed coldly and without fanaticism, impose upon us as our national duty.