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Politics : Foreign Affairs Discussion Group -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: stockman_scott who wrote (43556)	9/12/2002 5:26:08 PM
From: Nadine Carroll	Respond to of 281500

Inside the Bush administration, the Powell camp strikes back, with "coercive inspections": Last week, as the Bush administration planned for the president's speech to the United Nations and debated how to approach the issue of returning U.N. weapons inspectors to Iraq, Boyd set the insular world of Washington foreign policy alight with a new idea. Working with the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace; its president, Jessica Mathews; and a slew of arms control and Middle East experts over the last six months, Boyd came up with the idea of "coercive inspections." This time people paid attention. Before the report's release, Condoleezza Rice, George W. Bush's national security adviser, agreed to meet with Mathews and Boyd for 20 minutes. They ended up staying for an hour. This week they are scheduled to present the idea to senior U.N. officials and some European members of the Security Council. Administration opponents of the plan have become worried enough that they have moved to kill it in its crib. The plan calls for sending weapons inspectors back into Iraq accompanied by their own army. Inspectors, now known as the U.N. Monitoring, Verification, and Inspection Commission (UNMOVIC), would return with a new Inspections Implementation Force (IIF) that would be created by the U.N. Security Council. Instead of getting bogged down in the kinds of petty negotiations with obstructionist Iraqi officials that crippled the previous inspections regime, UNMOVIC would use the threat of force to gain entry into sites suspected of producing or stockpiling prohibited weapons. Failing that, it could shoot its way in or call in air strikes to destroy the site. ... the Boyd plan and proposals like it have been warmly received by moderates in the administration--and have hawks deeply worried and on the defensive. "Interest in the plan was instant and international," says one White House adviser who backs coercive inspections. "It scared the hell out of the hard-liners." A Pentagon source shoots back contemptuously: "The same people throwing up roadblocks [to military action] are backing this. People at the State Department see it as a nice compromise." thenewrepublic.com