Long Battle of Wills for U.N. Deal on Iraq nytimes.com
By JULIA PRESTON
UNITED NATIONS, Oct. 18 — Seemingly at the brink of a deal, the United States and other permanent Security Council powers have retreated once again to closed rooms and intense telephone calls to negotiate a resolution to force Iraq to disarm.
A discussion that American officials thought they could move smartly through the Council turned instead into a five-week round robin of talks and a pitched battle of wills with France, one of the United States' closest allies.
The fracas has vexed the patience of diplomats on all sides and has given rise to criticism by many nations that the United States has pressed its case against Iraq too hard, not only straining international law but also causing anxiety about how Washington will play its role as the lone superpower, now faced with the new threat of global terrorism.
President Jacques Chirac of France, who is traveling in the Middle East, planned to take the weekend to determine whether to accept what American officials called their final offer of compromise, French and other Council diplomats said. They said the American offer included concessions to France's demand to postpone authorizing war against Iraq until after United Nations weapons inspectors have done their work, and at the United Nations late in the week there was guarded optimism that an agreement could be reached.
The United States was not eager to compromise, but both Washington and France recognized that a rift between them could be very damaging and that there were important advantages to widening support for any American action taken against Iraq.
Bush administration officials grumbled that the protracted talks were an example of United Nations vacillation, a trait which they said made them reluctant to press their confrontation with President Saddam Hussein through the world organization in the first place.
But time and again this week, in an open debate in the Council where dozens of nations expressed their views, the members urged the Council to proceed with care, arguing that the issue included far more than Mr. Hussein's serial violation of the Council's disarmament measures.
"Even beyond Iraq, we are talking about the future of the international order," said France's United Nations ambassador, Jean-David Levitte, on Thursday, towards the end of the two-day debate. Relations among the major powers, between the rich world and the poor one, and between Arabs and other nations, were all in play, he warned.
Like France, other countries on the 15-member Council, and the United Nations as a whole, have come to regard the coming vote on Iraq as a decision on how the United States will wage its unique power in the world. They see it as the first test of the doctrine of unilateral pre-emptive self-defense that the Bush administration brandishes.
Behind the struggle over the words in a resolution drafted by the United States and Britain lies an effort by other American allies, led by France and Russia, to assert their influence, to restrain the United States from plunging alone into a war that they say could inflame the Middle East.
The Iraq debate took on such heavy implications because the Bush administration framed it that way, European diplomats said.
The negotiations started on Sept. 12 when President Bush woke up the United Nations with an ultimatum to enforce its resolutions on Iraq or stand aside and watch the United States do it with military force.
It was "a declaration of purpose, not a declaration of war," the United States ambassador, John D. Negroponte, told the Security Council in the debate on Thursday.
But most nations here were not so sure. In Washington, administration officials articulated two policies that sent shudders through the United Nations. They said that nothing short of a change in the Iraqi government would force Iraq to give up its weapons of mass destruction, while also asserting that the United States had become so powerful compared to the rest of the world that it would have to strike pre-emptively to stop an amorphous terrorist foe.
Mr. Bush cited Mr. Hussein as the leading example of the new, combined threat: a vicious dictator with weapons of mass destruction who could arm terrorists. He secured a resolution from Congress giving him broad powers to decide when to launch an attack to oust Mr. Hussein.
At the United Nations, the talk of immediate American-led war made other countries recoil, even though they broadly agreed with Washington's assessment of Mr. Hussein as a danger to peace. Even the Arab nations, which spoke passionately in the debate this week of the conflagration that premature war could cause in the Middle East, notably offered no expressions of support for Mr. Hussein.
Expressing its warnings about Mr. Hussein, the Bush administration cited his record of unabashed serial violations of Security Council resolutions requiring him to give up all chemical and biological weapons and long-range missiles and renounce any effort to make nuclear arms. But the case made by the administration and Britain did not persuade France, Russia or China, the three other permanent members of the Council, that the threat from Iraq was imminent.
France gained a tactical advantage over Washington in the negotiations with a consistent two-stage proposal conceived by Mr. Chirac. French diplomats wrote an alternative draft resolution to the American and British proposal but used it only as talking points to rebut American ideas. France was determined to force Washington to return to the Council for a second vote, after weapons inspectors had done their work, before starting a war.
The United States insisted on one resolution that would give it legal grounds to go to war with Iraq whenever Washington decided, with or without allies beyond Britain. But the United States negotiating approach seemed to shift from unmoving to flexible, as policy disputes within the administration ebbed and flowed.
Diplomats on all sides said that British officials mediated between the contending allies.
The large debate has boiled down to arguments over a few words in the American and British draft. In the most significant shift this week, the United States dropped its demand that "all necessary means" be authorized in the first resolution, the strongest diplomatic terms for all-out war.
Instead, Washington is now proposing to tell Iraq that it is in "material breach" of Security Council resolutions and has been "repeatedly warned of serious consequences" for failures to meet the Council's demands. The United States is also ready to leave open the possibility of further consultations after the weapons inspectors report from Iraq.
The American and British draft has not been formally introduced before the full Council. More negotiations are expected on the mandate for the weapons inspectors among all 15 members once the resolution is introduced, an event that diplomats expect this coming week. |
