U.S. and Britain Assert No Deadline on Iraq Inspections nytimes.com
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By BRIAN KNOWLTON,
International Herald Tribune
WASHINGTON, Jan. 13 — The White House said today that the United States was "not putting any artificial timetable" on United Nations arms inspectors in Iraq, and Prime Minister Tony Blair of Britain said that the United Nations' work there should not be bound by any "arbitrary time scale."
The top United Nations nuclear inspector, Mohamed ElBaradei, said today that the inspection teams in Iraq might need a "few months" to complete their work. A lower-ranking spokesman said earlier that six months to a year could be required.
Debate over when a war might begin has swollen in recent days as some United States allies have demanded more time for inspectors to look for banned biological, chemical weapons programs in Iraq, and the American military buildup in the region has encountered problems that have slowed its pace.
In Turkey, an American team arrived on Monday to inspect bases that the United States might use in an attack on Iraq. Turkish officials face strong public opposition to any involvement in a war on Iraq and have said that they will make no final decision on the bases before late this month. Work to upgrade the bases could take weeks beyond that.
Earlier, American officials pointed to Jan. 27 as a date crucial to a decision on whether to attack Iraq. That is when Mr. ElBaradei and the chief United Nations weapons inspector, Hans Blix, are to present a major report on Iraqi compliance to the Security Council.
But the allies' resistance, delays for the Pentagon and United Nations calls for more time appear to be dovetailing. "Of course Jan. 27 is an important day," Prime Minister Blair said today. But he then added, "I don't think there is any point putting an arbitrary timescale on it." Mr. Bush and Mr. Blair are to meet soon after Jan. 27 to discuss Iraq.
Mr. ElBaradei, speaking in Paris after talks with Foreign Minister Dominique de Villepin, said inspectors of the International Atomic Energy Agency, which he heads, needed "a few months" to determine whether Iraq had a secret weapons program, Agence France-Presse reported.
"We need to give inspection a chance to run its full course," he said. Jan. 27, he added, is not a "cutoff date."
In Washington, the White House spokesman Ari Fleischer declined to speak of Jan. 27 as a deadline. The administration, he said, was not applying "any artificial timetable" for inspections.
While Mr. ElBaradei faulted Iraq for not providing "more active cooperation," he mentioned no specific obstruction by Baghdad.
Mr. ElBaradei said the pace of inspections would be further intensified and would partly depend on closer cooperation from United Nations member states to secure "as much actionable information as possible to allow us to speed up our work." The United States recently said it had begun providing intelligence data to help guide the inspectors.
Mr. ElBaradei and Mr. de Villepin, the French foreign minister, said that war with Iraq should be viewed as a last resort. "The region doesn't need a new war," Mr. de Villepin said.
Diplomatic efforts to avert war continued on several fronts. Crown Prince Abdullah of Saudi Arabia said on NBC television that he hoped a Saudi proposal presented to other Arab countries, which other Saudi sources said would involve a call for a united Arab stance against war, might resolve the crisis.
The prince offered no details but told an interviewer, "I have a strange sense that it may not come to war."
The American inspections of the Turkish bases came a day after Prime Minister Abdullah Gul of Turkey ended a trip to Syria, Jordan, Egypt, Saudi Arabia and Iran that was intended to avert war.
"The people of this region could pay the price in a possible war," the Turkish prime minister said in Tehran on Sunday. "Everyone has a responsibility to avoid this war."
The base surveys are expected to last about 10 days, The Associated Press reported from Istanbul. Turkish television said they included two ports and five bases, among them the southern air base at Incirlik used by American warplanes patrolling northern Iraq. American planners hope that if war does come, they can use Turkish bases for a strike on northern Iraq that may involve up to 80,000 soldiers.
Amid powerful public resistance in Turkey, Ankara has been reluctant to approve such an ambitious deployment, but officials there are eventually expected to approve at least a limited use of the bases. The United States would be expected to spend many millions of dollars to upgrade the bases, and might provide Turkey other assistance to offset its war-related costs. |
