Al-Ahram Weekly | Opinion | Eliminated or postponed?

		21 - 27 November 2002 Issue No. 613 Opinion	Current issue Previous issue Site map
Published in Cairo by AL-AHRAM established in 1875

Eliminated or postponed?
Has Saddam Hussein succeeded in eliminating the threat of war, or merely in postponing the war to a later date? asks Mohamed Sid-Ahmed

Two days before the deadline set by the Security Council for Baghdad's acceptance of resolution 1441 ordering it to disarm or face "serious consequences", and one day after Iraq's National Assembly had unanimously rejected it, the Iraqi leadership formally accepted the resolution. The acceptance came in the form of an angry nine-page letter addressed to UN Secretary-General Kofi Annan, ostensibly by Iraqi foreign minister Naji Sabry, but which observers believe carried the clear imprint of Saddam Hussein himself, grudgingly agreeing to the return of the UN weapons inspectors.
In what was clearly a tightly scripted distribution of roles, it was left to parliament to express the Iraqi regime's discontent with the inequitable conditions imposed by the resolution and to Saddam to play the role of the saviour who was ready to go against national public opinion for the sake of peace.
Accepting the resolution on those terms may have stayed off the threat of an immediate military attack by the United States. But has it prevented war altogether, or only postponed what many fear is an inevitable war scenario? That is the central question at this fateful moment.
The US has warned Iraq not to obstruct the UN weapons inspectors. The warning came from Secretary of State Colin Powell, on the grounds that the message the Iraqi leadership sent to Kofi Annan, though accepting the resolution, carried in its concluding paragraph a statement announcing Iraq's intention to forward another letter to the UN secretary- general at a later date in which Baghdad would state its observations on the measures and procedures contained in Security Council resolution 1441 "that are contrary to international law, the UN Charter and the facts already established in previous relevant resolutions". Western analysts believe Iraq's insistence that it has not developed weapons of mass destruction could eventually precipitate the danger of war rather than remove it.
In accepting the resolution within seven days of its adoption, Iraq has complied with only the first of several deadlines. The resolution lays down a detailed time frame which Iraq must observe if it hopes to avoid war. Within 30 days, it must make "a complete declaration of all aspects of its programme to develop chemical, biological and nuclear weapons, ballistic missiles and other delivery systems such as unmanned aerial vehicles and dispersal systems designed for use on aircraft." The United States has made it clear that failure to provide a full reckoning will amount to a "material breach" of Iraq's obligations which observers say would provide a pretext for war. Within 45 days, it must allow the inspectors "immediate, unimpeded, unconditional and unrestricted access" to any and all sites they wish to inspect. The mission of the weapons inspectors began last Monday with the arrival in Iraq of an advance team led by Hans Blix, chairman of the UN Monitoring, Verification and Inspection Commission (which has replaced the former UN inspections agency, UNSCOM), and Mohamed El-Baradei, director- general of the International Atomic Agency. The inspectors have 60 days to report on their progress to the Security Council. It is not clear whether the clock runs from the day they arrive in Iraq. However, at any point the inspectors can decide that their work is being obstructed.
If the inspectors find that Iraq has failed to co- operate with their work, then the US would discuss the consequences with Security Council members, but Washington has indicated that it will not wait for another UN resolution before taking military action.
The US will have to take into account that prolonged debate at the Security Council would see conditions for troops in Iraq begin to become dangerously hot as summer approaches. Temperatures in the Iraqi desert will begin to heat up by March. In July and August, the average temperature is higher than 48 degrees Celsius. Moreover, troops will have to be dressed in chemical protection gear the whole time, which will make conditions even more unbearable. Also, April marks the beginning of Iraq's windy season, when sandstorms could severely hamper air operations. The weather will not cool down again until October.
Using information provided by Iraqi defectors, former UN arms inspectors and US and British intelligence agencies, the UN inspection team has created a road map of more than 1000 sites that inspectors will potentially visit. Over the next two months, they will be zeroing in on a priority list of more than 100 sites. Such a momentous task can hardly be completed within a month or two, even with the use of sophisticated new means (dogs trained to sniff out caches of chemical weapons or elaborate systems of soil, water and air sampling equipment to detect any traces of chemicals or radioactive materials). Inspectors have the right to conduct surprise searches of any site they consider necessary, including the presidential palaces covered by sovereignty prerogatives. This might become a subject of friction in future, as it has been in the past, when inspecting the palaces triggered a crisis with UNSCOM, which ended up with Iraq preventing the return of the inspectors for a period of four years.
Baghdad's letter to Kofi Annan said, in its English translation, "we hereby inform you that we will deal with resolution 1441, despite its bad content. We are prepared to receive the inspectors so they can carry out their duties, and make sure that Iraq had not developed weapons of mass destruction during their absence since 1998." No passage in the letter said plainly that Iraq would give unconditional co-operation for the inspections. Instead, it said Iraqi officials would be watching to see if the inspectors "perform their duties in compliance with international law".
US officials have indicated that they are content for now to wait until 8 December -- the deadline for Iraq to submit a complete list of its weapons programmes -- before making an issue of violations. Once that list is submitted, it will be up to chief inspector Hans Blix to check it. These officials have said that only when they pass the most sensitive American intelligence on Iraq's weapons programmes to Blix, any omissions or false statements would be the basis for "serious consequences", possibly a military attack, according to the resolution.
During the National Assembly session which voted against accepting resolution 1441, Saddam's eldest son Udayy was the only one who recommended voting for the resolution, in the aim of thwarting Bush's war plans. He also proposed that the UN inspection team include experts from Arab countries. The same proposal was advanced by Syrian President Bashar Al-Assad after Syria voted for the resolution, and also during a recent meeting of the Arab League. True, inspectors are chosen according to a technical criterion, namely, their expertise in the field of unearthing secret weapons, not a political criterion, that is, belonging to a specific nationality, but the selection of inspectors also has political connotations, if only because adding Arab inspectors is a guarantee against the presumption that the inspectors could eventually be biased.
Both Britain and France have warned that resorting to force is still a possibility if Saddam does not cooperate as required. But both have agreed that the aim is not to topple Saddam, but to eliminate Iraq's weapons of mass destruction. Arab nations, for their part, have underlined the importance of avoiding "provocation" and called for inspectors to display impartiality. Moscow welcomed the "farsightedness of the Iraqi leadership" and Paris has signalled that any party that violates the law should be punished.
Of all these statements, two are worthy of particular attention. Addressing himself to Iraq, Tony Blair declared that war could still be avoided if Saddam is candid about dismantling his chemical, biological and nuclear weapons and fully cooperates with the UN inspectors. Britain's prime minister added, however, that "Saddam is brutal and vindictive and can inflict an enormous amount of harm, but we cannot impose on the people of Iraq who their leaders should be. All we can require is that the will of the United Nations be respected".
The same theme was taken up by French Foreign Minister Dominique de Villepin, who declared that the ultimate aim of resolution 1441 is "to dismantle Iraq's banned weapons, not to change the regime". De Villepin added that France's attitude is identical to the American attitude, if the latter is correctly summarised by Colin Powell's following statement: "The Iraqi regime without weapons of mass destruction will not be the same as the one it is now". But we know that certain official American statements have described the Iraqi regime otherwise; they do not conceive Iraq's future without the disappearance of Saddam Hussein. Despite the unanimous adoption of resolution 1441, it is clear that the positions of the Western capitals towards the Iraqi regime are not identical. The question is whether these differences will deter Bush from pushing ahead with his war plans, or whether they will, on the contrary, encourage him to forego the intensive diplomatic effort required to forge an international consensus on the need for war in favour of unilateral military action. If, as many fear, the second scenario is the more likely one, the watered-down version of the draft resolution adopted by the Council will have merely postponed, not eliminated, the threat of yet another war in a region that has had more than its fair share of violent confrontations.

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