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Legislative Assembly for the ACT: 2003 Week 1 Hansard (19 February) . . Page.. 260 ..

MR SMYTH (continuing):

What we do in the next couple of weeks or months will judge whether or not there is something good left in the world. We can throw up red herrings and ask, "What about here? What about there? What about that country? What about this resolution?"They are valid questions, but that does not justify not attempting to deal with this issue at this time.

The UN has put in place resolution 1441. Resolution 1441 did not demand partial compliance or limited compliance, it demanded full compliance. That was the resolution of the United Nations, and I believe that is what the security council should focus on.

You must reach a point where you say that the patience of the world is exhausted. Whilst we seek to find our level of exhaustion, we have to look at what Saddam Hussein is doing to his own people-the economic ruin, misery, death, destruction and violation he causes to his own people.

In 1991, the world followed the UN resolution and fought the war. As Iraq collapsed and surrendered, the UN stopped. Now, 12 years later, we are faced with exactly the same situation. Who in their right mind would think that that was a reasonable thing to do? I cannot believe we will continue to put it off, bear the pressure and say that, yes, we will always retreat from a position because that position will lead to war.

There is the concept of a "just war". I have difficulty with the words "just"and "war"in one sentence! It sounds like an oxymoron. There must be a time-and I hope the time is not reached-when it truly is the lesser of two evils. One would hope, given the technologies we have, one can minimise the impact on the civilians who are always the casualties of war.

There is no war that does not have a civilian casualty. There are very few wars that do not have casualties-and soldiers would suffer. That is shameful, as well as sad. Their burden will come back and we, as a community, will carry it. What do we do? What do we logically do?

If you look at Ms Tucker's section (2)-which I thank the Labor Party for having the commonsense to attempt to remove-we want to have a continuous program of rigorous weapons inspections. Well, we have had that, and he has not come clean.

weapons inspectors have identified further Iraqi chemical and biological weapons that are unaccounted for, including 6,500 chemical bombs, 1,000 tonnes of chemical agents, a number of 122-millimetre chemical rockets, laboratories-indications that VX agents have been weaponised.

There are two types of missiles. We know that Iraq has mustard gas, sarin VX and tabun chemical agents-and the means for delivery of them. We know they are there somewhere. We could put our heads in the sand and say, "Let's have a continuous program of rigorous weapons inspections in Iraq, and containment through a transition from original short-term inspections to long-term inspections."Well, he has laughed at us for a decade.

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