He said, they said
Concessions offered by Iraq in talks with UN inspectors seem unlikely to deter the United States from going ahead with its plans for war, Khaled Dawoud reports from Washington
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Keeping vigil: protestors gathered in front of the FBI building in Washington on Sunday, 19 January, as part of anti-war demonstrations last weekend
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US officials downplayed the significance of the deal reached on Monday between Iraq and heads of the United Nations inspection teams, and insisted that war plans will proceed as intended. Yet, the 10-point deal that would allow UN weapons inspectors to interview Iraqi scientists in private and promised enhanced Iraqi cooperation with inspectors has definitely taken US officials by surprise.
Worse was the strong opposition US Secretary of State Colin Powell faced during a meeting with members of the Security Council to Washington's insistence that all options, except for military force, were exhausted in dealing with Iraq.
France hinted that it might use its veto power to block a possible US-backed resolution seeking authorisation to launch a war against Iraq, and foreign ministers of China and Russia, two permanent members of the Security Council, who also enjoy veto power, expressed similar views. Germany, which is a non-permanent member of the council, but will be chair of the entity in February when a decision is expected to be made on the future of inspections in Iraq, also stated it would not vote for a war resolution and expressed strong opposition to US war plans.
Appeals by Powell and repeated warnings that the world "must not shrink" from its responsibility to see that Iraq is disarmed were hardly convincing for any of the other member of the Security Council. Responding to statements by German Foreign Minister Joschka Fischer that a war against Iraq would only increase the threat of terrorism, Powell said, "We cannot be shocked into impotence because we're afraid of the difficult choices ahead of us." The US secretary of state, who joined the hard-liners in Bush's administration, also downplayed the significance of the deal reached between Iraq and the United Nations on Monday, saying the agreement was "just more of the same... Only under pressure does Iraq respond."
But the rest of the world -- and even a majority of Americans, as is reflected in recent opinion polls and popular protests -- clearly sees no harm in continuing to pressure Iraq, emphasising that this is a far less costly option than a war that will certainly destabilise an already volatile Middle East. The head of the UN inspection teams looking for chemical and biological weapons, Hans Blix, and director of the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA), Mohamed El- Baradei, have also both publicly stated that they need more time -- at least two months -- in order to finish their work, a view totally unwelcome by the White House.
Statements made by top US officials this week -- Secretary of Defence Donald Rumsfeld, National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice and Powell -- concurred that next week's report by the head of the UN inspection teams to the Security Council would not be the deadline to start the war, but it would definitely be the date to start the countdown. Asked how long the United States would be willing to wait after the presentation of the report, the three officials said they were talking about "weeks" -- not months. The "weeks" deadline fits perfectly well with US plans to launch the war against Iraq sometime between mid- and late February.
The three officials, in clearly coordinated statements, also hinted for the first time they might be willing to accept a reported plan by several Arab countries to convince Iraqi President Saddam Hussein to resign and seek asylum with members of his family and top aides in another country (Algeria, Libya and Egypt are the possible host-countries mentioned) as the only way to avoid war. "To avoid a war, I would personally recommend that some provision be made so that the senior leadership in that country and their families could be provided haven in some other country," Rumsfeld said in one of several interviews he conducted on Sunday. Although Powell and Rice echoed similar sentiments, the US national security adviser was the only one to accept the widely-held view by US experts and Arab officials that the Iraqi leaders would prefer to fight to the death rather than accept such an offer. Meanwhile, US and Arab observers have expressed doubts that any Arab country would be willing to offer asylum to the notorious Iraqi leader -- irrespective of assurances given by Washington that Hussein would not be hunted down to stand trial as a war criminal.
Ahead of Monday's developments and the deal reached between Iraq and the UN, US officials said they were planning to build a "persuasive case" to prove to the world that Baghdad has not been complying with resolution 1441. Rumsfeld, Powell and Rice enumerated what they dubbed a long list of Iraqi "violations" of the resolution that would justify, in their view, resorting to force in order to get rid of the Iraqi regime. The list of "violations" included Iraq's refusal to allow UN inspectors to interview scientists in private without the presence of Iraqi minders or to spirit them abroad for questioning; the discovery of 12 empty warheads capable of conveying chemical weapons (US officials and mainstream media have ignored the fact that the warheads were empty); repeated Iraqi attacks on US and British planes in the US- imposed no-fly zones in northern and southern Iraq; and alleged omissions in Iraq's 12,000-page declaration of its weapons' programmes. US officials insist that UN inspectors were not in Baghdad to discover a "smoking gun" or weapons of mass destruction, but to test Iraq's cooperation with the resolution. Thus, if Iraq did not cooperate fully, and voluntarily expose its entire arsenal of banned weapons that would be sufficient grounds to declare that Iraq had been violating the resolution and deserved to face "severe consequences", namely, military action.
Meanwhile, reports coming from Baghdad on the deal reached with the United Nations did not hinder the US secretary of defence and his British counterpart in signing more deployment orders for troops to head towards the Gulf region. US military officials announced on Monday that they were sending a force of about 37,000 soldiers, at the forefront of which would be the Texas-based fourth Infantry Division, to the Gulf. Officials said this was the largest ground force identified among an estimated 125,000 US troops deployed since late December. Britain also announced on Monday that it would send a land force of 26,000 troops to the Gulf in preparation for a possible attack against Iraq. Military experts and observers believe that such dramatic increases in the number of US and British troops go far beyond claims by US officials that they are mainly intended to increase pressure on Iraq to give more concessions and to force it to disarm.
