U.S. urged to slow down on Iraq
Fri Jan 10, 7:38 AM ET Add Top Stories - USA TODAY to My Yahoo!
John Diamond and Bill Nichols USA TODAY
As U.S. warships, planes and troops converge on the Persian Gulf, the message to the Bush administration from U.S. allies Thursday was clear: Slow down.
Ambassadors from Germany, Britain and Russia, among others, emerged from a Security Council meeting agreeing with the chief United Nations (news - web sites) arms inspectors who had just briefed them. The inspectors would need more time beyond a reporting deadline of Jan. 27 to uncover evidence of suspected Iraqi chemical and biological weapons programs.
Though the Bush administration says it will act alone against Iraq if necessary, the prospect that emerged from Thursday's U.N. meeting was of hundreds of inspectors continuing to fan out across Iraq well into February, inspectors who would be in harm's way if the United States attacked.
Up to now, the question at the Pentagon (news - web sites) has been how quickly U.S. forces could be ready for war. U.N. briefings set for the week of Jan. 27 have been viewed as the likely time for making a decision to go to war, which could then begin as soon as early to mid-February. That could still happen. But a growing question is, how long can troops remain massed in the region, poised for war?
The absence of any hard evidence that Iraq still has banned weapons has left allies concerned that the United States is on the verge of leading them into a war against Saddam Hussein (news - web sites)'s regime based on suspicion rather than proof.
Administration officials privately expressed frustration Thursday over this view, arguing that it is up to Iraq to prove it has gotten rid of weapons the world knows it had when the last set of inspections ended in 1998, and not up to the United Nations to prove Iraq still has them.
But even British Prime Minister Tony Blair (news - web sites), a staunch supporter of President Bush (news - web sites)'s Iraq policy, voiced a willingness to slow down.
''We are in the middle of a process. The U.N. inspectors have just, at the beginning of the year, got their full complement of inspectors there,'' Blair told his ministers in London. Blair's U.N. ambassador, Jeremy Greenstock, said, ''My advice is, calm down on the 27th of January.''
British officials said privately that the additional time would enable inspectors to act on new intelligence being given to inspectors by U.S. and British intelligence agencies, and could lead to the breakthrough proof that Iraq has weapons of mass destruction. But with crucial council meetings the week of Jan. 27, allies are growing nervous that based on the evidence available now, Washington's case for an invasion will not be persuasive.
''In terms of showing there's evidence of weapons of mass destruction, neither the Bush administration or the inspectors have shown that,'' says former U.N. weapons inspector David Albright, who heads the Institute for Science and International Policy. ''It would be a big mistake for the United States to move ahead politically without showing Iraq has weapons of mass destruction.''
As one ambassador after another came to the press stakeout at U.N. headquarters and urged extending the inspections beyond Jan. 27, the Bush administration reacted cautiously.
''The president has not said it's a deadline,'' White House spokesman Ari Fleischer (news - web sites) said. ''I've not heard the president put a timeline on it.''
Still, the Bush administration reiterated that the threat of force remains, and backed up words with actions, deploying B-1B bombers to the gulf region and temporarily freezing discharges from service for the entire Marine Corps.
''The military has effective influence on diplomacy and making sure that Saddam Hussein understands that he needs to comply,'' Fleischer said. ''Because if he doesn't, the United States has the means and the ability to make him comply.''
Council diplomats say they believe that shortly after chief U.N. arms inspector Hans Blix briefs the council Jan. 27 and 29, Washington is likely to ask that Iraq be found in ''material breach'' of Iraq's obligations to the U.N. That would require that Iraq then face ''serious consequences'' -- diplomatic code for military force.
Dramatic new evidence could be found in the next two weeks. But the main basis for Washington's claim is Iraq's Dec. 7 declaration of its weapons program, a 12,000-page document Secretary of State Colin Powell (news - web sites) called ''a catalog of recycled information and flagrant omissions.'' Powell and others say the document failed to account for weapons that inspectors knew Iraq had in 1998, when inspections were suspended until just recently.
In briefing the Security Council on Thursday, Blix and Mohamed ElBaradei, head of the International Atomic Energy Agency, affirmed the U.S. position that Iraq has failed to fully answer questions about past weapons programs and has stonewalled in providing inspectors access to Iraqi weapons officials. Iraq has limited its cooperation to escorting inspectors to the weapons sites they demand to see.
But will a false or incomplete statements from Baghdad be enough to convince the other 14 members of the Security Council, the American people and the world at large that war is the only option?
The sense growing from Thursday's council meeting was that the answer to that question may be no. One council diplomat said, ''Nobody was talking in trigger terms here.''
Other signs of hesitation:
* Saudi Arabia said this week that it would have to see proof from the United Nations of Iraqi weapons programs before deciding whether to back a U.S.-led war on Iraq.
* British Foreign Secretary Jack Straw told the British Broadcasting Corp. Monday that it was ''reasonably accurate'' to say the chances of war with Iraq had declined from 60-40 for war to 60-40 against.
* Sergey Lavrov, Russia's ambassador to the United Nations, said the inspections are in the ''early stages'' and there was no reason for ''political agitation'' in connection with progress reports from the inspectors. It was a thinly veiled reference to the Bush administration.
In the past two weeks, according to U.S. intelligence officials and Western diplomats, the level of U.S. cooperation has increased, with the CIA (news - web sites) and other intelligence agencies directing U.N. inspectors to specific sites to look for evidence of prohibited weapons.
Blix said that intelligence was coming in ''from several sources'' and that ''this will be helpful in the future to us.''
But administration officials acknowledged that the CIA is providing intelligence in carefully measured doses to avoid leaking sensitive information to Baghdad and to give inspectors no more information than they can absorb.
A senior U.S. intelligence official familiar with highly classified information on Iraq says there is no ''smoking gun'' proof that Saddam has an arsenal of chemical or biological weapons. The CIA has long held that Iraq is most likely years away from being able to produce a nuclear weapon. |
