Bush: last chance to avoid war
Julian Borger in Washington and Patrick Wintour
Thursday September 5, 2002
The Guardian
President George Bush signalled yesterday that he was prepared to back a last-ditch United Nations ultimatum to Saddam Hussein to accept stringent weapons inspections or face invasion.
The president will lay out his demands in an address to the UN general assembly next Thursday, which will be portrayed as Saddam's last chance to avoid a war.
It will also define US policy on inspections and its willingness to use force after a period of deep divisions and confusion within the Bush administration.
After meeting congressional leaders yesterday to outline his plans, the president said that the UN speech, to be delivered on the day after the anniversary of the September 11 attacks, would provide the Iraqi dictator with a road map for his own survival.
"I will lay out and I will talk about ways to make sure that he fulfils his obligations," Mr Bush said.
The UN speech will be part of a sequence of steps the administration will take to prepare the ground for a showdown with Iraq.
On Saturday he will meet Tony Blair in a war summit at the presidential retreat at Camp David to hammer out a common US-British position. In the next few days he will also call the leaders of the other permanent members of the security council, France, Russia and China.
In addition, Mr Blair will fly to Moscow to meet the Russian president, Vladimir Putin, and the president of China, Jiang Zemin, will visit George Bush at his ranch in Crawford, Texas, for talks on issues including the campaign against terrorism.
British officials welcomed Mr Bush's remarks as a victory for moderates in the administration like the secretary of state, Colin Powell, who have pushed for Mr Bush to go to the UN for support before embarking on military action.
"It's all sounding very reasonable," the diplomat said. "They always come back to Powell in the end."
Mr Bush made it clear that it would be necessary to lay down very tough conditions for any new UN inspections regime, telling journalists: "The world must understand as well that its credibility is at stake".
One official said: "The administration has long said that it would be good step to get inspectors back in the country, but we can't go about it the way it has been done in the past."
After talks in Johannesburg with the UN secretary general Kofi Annan and other leaders with an interest in Iraq, Mr Powell said last night that he doubted that President Saddam would agree to an inspection system which met US requirements.
But he added: "I think it is a step that the UN will have to consider, whether or not they can get them back in, as a way of getting the UN to coalesce around any subsequent action, if the inspectors don't get back in."
US officials made it clear that Washington would not tolerate delaying tactics from Baghdad or its allies, and that US military preparations would continue apace.
A report in yesterday's Los Angeles Times said the Bush government was considering at a variety of proposals including "coercive inspections", under which inspectors would be backed up by a rapid reaction force stationed in the region and ready to step in at short notice if Baghdad attempted to block searches of suspected weapons sites.
A White House spokesman, Sean McCormack, said that the Camp David meeting on Saturday was likely to focus on the issue of inspections. He said the president was sceptical that President Saddam would ever accept a genuinely tough inspections regime, but was open to persuasion.
"Our policy is one of regime change. We have come to the conclusion that it is a regime that is not willing to achieve disarmament, but the president is going to listen to the points of view of world leaders, especially the prime minister," he added.
However, the president made it clear that his administration would continue to prepare the ground for future military action, announcing that "at the appropriate time" he would go to Congress to seek approval for measures "necessary to deal with the threat".
The White House spokesman, Ari Fleischer, said: "I think it fair to say that there will be a vote in the Congress before they leave for elections." Congress is likely to go into recess by early October.
The British defence secretary, Geoff Hoon, is due to fly to the US next week to hold talks with his US counterpart, Donald Rumsfeld, on a British contribution to any future military action. Mr Rumsfeld went to Capitol Hill yesterday to give congressmen a classified briefing on the threat of Iraq's weapons of mass destruction and US military preparations.
There were more signs yesterday that those preparations were well under way.
It was reported yesterday that the US Navy had booked a large commercial freighter to ship tanks and other heavy armour to the Gulf in late September, the third such shipment in a month. Shipping analysts said the commercial charters suggested the navy had already exhausted its transport capacity.
While it consults Britain and the other members of the permanent five in the security council, the Bush administration has begun a parallel effort to convince Congress and the US public of the need to confront Iraq, starting with yesterday's White House discussions with Congressional leaders.
Those talks appear to have been vague, and several congressmen said they wanted more detail. Richard Gephardt, the Democratic leader in the House of Representatives, said the White House had not yet made its case.
"That has not been done in a definitive way and that's what they're going to do," he said.
The administration has pledged to send its top foreign policy and security officials to give evidence to congressional hearings in the coming few weeks, to back up its case, as part of a concerted campaign to win over an increasingly sceptical US public.
An ABC poll published yesterday found that the lowest level of support for a conflict with Iraq since the "war on terror" began. Only 39% of those asked would support an attack on Iraq without the support of US allies, compared to 54% less than a month ago.
Iraq has sent mixed signals over the return of UN inspectors in recent weeks, but has been adamant that it would not accept open-ended and intrusive inspections.
In an address to a group of visiting Arab parliamentarians yesterday, President Saddam signalled his defiance saying Iraq would prefer to avoid a conflict, but added: "If God chooses that we have to fight, we won't disappoint you."
Earlier, he was quoted by Iraqi state television as calling for "a comprehensive solution that leads to the lifting of the sanctions according to the security council resolutions".
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