In this morning's NY Times:
March 8, 2003
Beyond Iraq, U.N. Is Issue
By PATRICK E. TYLER
UNITED NATIONS, March 7 — "It is quite clear that the way in which we resolve this problem will determine not just the future of Iraq," Russia's foreign minister, Igor S. Ivanov, told the Security Council today.
As foreign ministers of the Council's 15 member nations gathered in New York, on the morning after President Bush began preparing the American people for war, they seemed to be fighting for their institution as much as over Iraq.
Joschka Fischer, the German foreign minister, said, "The Security Council — in fact, we all — face an important decision, probably a historic turning point."
History will turn, he implied, on what the Council members do now, whether they hang together as a world body or splinter apart in bitter dissent over American war plans in Iraq.
No one mentioned it publicly, but some members said they were also thinking about North Korea. If the Security Council cannot play the primary authorizing role in Iraq, it might throw the international system off balance in trying to unite in preventing the Korean peninsula from becoming a zone of nuclear threat and competition.
Then comes Iran, where international concerns about a secret nuclear weapons program are rising as Tehran's leaders sharply expand their civilian nuclear industries with heavy Russian assistance and technology.
In each case, America has asserted a security interest in the potential threats. Thus the consequences for how the Iraq crisis is resolved radiate out in many directions.
After today's mixed report on Iraqi compliance delivered by Hans Blix and Dr. Mohamed ElBaradei, the chief weapons inspectors, and after two hours of debate and commentary by the foreign ministers, a sobering realization settled over the gleaming tower on the East River, some diplomats said.
Their feeling is that the Americans are certain President Saddam Hussein will never change his ways or cease being a threat. For that reason, Washington seems unwilling to wait, unwilling to negotiate more than a few days' extension or even to consider that the armies now massing to strike Iraq are a diplomatic instrument that could still produce results short of war.
Many diplomats have heard — and believe — the rumors that were set off by the visit to the White House by Gen. Tommy R. Franks, the Middle East commander: Mr. Bush has given the go-ahead; war is days away, not weeks. If the rumors are true, they might explain, they say, the tight deadlines in the offer that Washington and its allies in London and Madrid made today to extend to March 17 the deadline for Mr. Hussein to disarm.
The departure of an Arab League delegation for Baghdad, a final effort to show the Arab world that its leaders have done all they could to avert war, was for many diplomats another long-anticipated piece of the endgame.
Secretary of State Colin L. Powell, who has been in battle mode for a month as an advocate of military action, gave little hope that any more flexibility on the timing existed in Washington.
A European ambassador said that "the vast majority clearly feels that a decision to go to war" without Security Council authorization "will have a tremendous impact on the present multilateral system and in particular on the system of the United Nation."
What will happen, he asked, when the 15 nations gather next week if Washington fails to attract nine votes to pass the resolution?
"No one is able to foresee the political repercussions of a situation where the U.S. goes against the expressed will of the Security Council if the vote on the resolution fails," the ambassador said, referring to a failure to win nine votes or a veto by Russia, France or China. He added that "it is an outcome that contains a very high level of risk," and could add to the incitement of public opinion in the Middle East and Europe.
After the remarkable unity of last November's 15-0 vote on Resolution 1441, few if any members of the Council expected to be where they find themselves today. When Mr. Bush decided to press for one final authorizing resolution, there seemed little question that America could bend the Security Council to its will.
American diplomats reflected the power calculus many assumed lay beneath the decision making. But other principles have now been brought into play, along with the pull of public opinion.
Initially, American diplomats said they were pressing the vote out of loyalty to Tony Blair, the British prime minister and America's strongest ally, who is getting scourged at home by public opposition to a war.
But now the prospect of a loss has put British diplomats into a state of alarm even more intense than that of some Bush administration officials.
The British expect that the political price they pay at home and in relations with the rest of Europe for acting against the Security Council, if it comes to that, could be high.
The focus on war overtook the report by Mr. Blix, who made the case that he might be able in a matter of months to complete his mandate and pronounce Iraq either free of weapons or guilty of irrevocable stonewalling. He implied that many of the American assertions that Iraq has continued producing weapons of mass destruction in mobile or underground facilities have not been backed up with useful intelligence. He said he continued to look for underground facilities with sophisticated radar, but had yet to locate them.
And Dr. ElBaradei said some of the intelligence assertions that Iraq has continued to try to develop industries to support a nuclear weapons program have not borne up under closer scrutiny.
Still, inside the Security Council, many diplomats believe that the most important debate is over whether nations should simply bow to America's will by joining the coalition in hopes of influencing the conduct of the war that Mr. Bush appears poised to unleash. A number of nations seem determined to hold their ground, diplomats report, in the belief that no superpower can function in isolation.
"Under any circumstances, the United States will have to come back to the United Nations," the European ambassador said, explaining that no coalition will be able to shoulder all of the rebuilding and relief tasks that will arise under the most optimistic scenarios for war. |
