please god, destory the UK-US axis! I'm becoming pessimistic about the human race... let's kill everyone & start again ...

SJ

Bush has little intention of playing by the book
Saddam's gameplan may yet succeed in dividing his opponents

Richard Norton-Taylor
Monday December 9, 2002
The Guardian

By presenting the UN with a mammoth report declaring Iraq free of weapons of mass destruction, Saddam Hussein has won the opening round in his final attempt to stave off military action by the US. He is playing a long game, to break the current consensus in the UN security council, and to tie the west in knots in expectation - hope even - that new al-Qaida attacks will divert attention away from Iraq towards the global "war" on terror.

And whatever the frustration of the hawks, however deep the scepticism of the doves, American and UN experts have no choice but to plough through Iraq's 12,000-page declaration of innocence.

Some weapons-related products have been destroyed, it is likely to say; others have dual use. But a huge range of products have dual uses - bleach, pesticides, drugs, chemicals, electronic equipment and machinery, plus items used in the production of food or oil. It seems the Iraqis have taken a leaf out of Britain's book. Did not former Foreign Office minister William Waldegrave, when warned in 1989 - a year before Iraq's invasion of Kuwait - that Iraq intended to use British machine tools for "armaments and munitions factories", reply sardonically: "Screwdrivers are also required to make H-bombs"?

After the 1991 Gulf war, UN inspectors found that Iraq had weaponised anthrax and sarin, along with hundred of tons of mustard gas. Much of this was destroyed. The most worrying outstanding issue, according to some UN inspectors who left Iraq in 1998, was documentary proof of the purchase of precursor chemicals - whose location and quantities the Iraqis refused to disclose - for the production of VX, one of the most deadly nerve agents developed in recent times.

We don't know what happened to that. Perhaps the Iraqi report will explain. Perhaps Saddam will say it was all destroyed in operation Desert Fox, the 1998 onslaught of American air strikes which, as far as we know, merely gave him a bloody nose.

The US and Britain insist they have solid evidence that Iraq has restocked its pile of chemical and biological weapons. They suggest the evidence has come from spy satellites, defectors and spies. But if this intelligence is so certain and specific, why are they so desperate to get the UN inspectors to whisk Iraqi scientists out of the country for questioning, with Britain apparently offering them asylum if they spill the beans?

British and American officials say they cannot give their intelligence - or even the location of the alleged weapons products - to the UN inspectors because, if acted upon, the Iraqis would know who their secret sources were. But if it is a question of peace or war, surely the advocates of war must provide evidence of Iraqi guilt.

The British government's dossier on Iraq's chemical and biological weapons programme, produced with great fanfare in September, dwelt on the regime's capacity to produce such weapons but not its intention to use them. On the contrary, all the evidence points to Saddam being deterred from using them ever since the Iran-Iraq war, when the west did not care, and with Britain actually relaxing its controls on arms-related exports to Iraq after the gassing of the Kurds in Halabja in 1988. Indeed, the British dossier seemed to contradict confident assertions made by ministers about Iraq's weapons programmes. "Without UN weapons inspectors," it admitted, "it is very difficult to be sure about the true nature of many of Iraq's facilities."

The foreign secretary, Jack Straw, said yesterday the British government had "total confidence" in the UN inspectors. That view is not shared by Washington's hawks. In a recent speech in London, Paul Wolfowitz, the US deputy defence secretary, downplayed the role of the inspectors, saying: "It is not and cannot be [their] responsibility ... to scour every inch of Iraq. It cannot be their responsibility to search out and find every illegal weapon or programme." That, he said, was the responsibility of the Iraqi regime.

Ominously, friction has already broken out between the Bush administration and the chief inspector, Hans Blix, whom Washington considers far too soft. Blix has already questioned the practicality of "abducting" Iraqi scientists.

And Demetrius Perricos, the UN inspector responsible for the search for chemical and biological weapons in Iraq, responding last week to American criticism of the way they were carrying out their task, pointedly remarked: "The people who sent us here are the international community, the United Nations. We're not serving the US."

UN resolution 1441, agreed unanimously by the security council last month, is a source of deep dispute between the US and others. It says: "False statements or omissions in the declarations submitted by Iraq pursuant to this resolution and failure by Iraq at any time to comply with, and cooperate fully in the implementation of, this resolution shall constitute a further material breach of Iraq's obligations."

The resolution has been widely interpreted - but not by the Washington hawks - as meaning that a false declaration by Iraq would not on its own constitute a "material breach" - seen by the US and Britain as authorising military action. Certainly, in Britain's view, it would have to be accompanied by lack of cooperation with the inspectors.

Ultimately the logic of the US argument is that, whatever is in the Iraqi declaration, and regardless of whether the UN inspectors find nothing and feel the Iraqis have cooperated, there will still be a case for war - because in that case the US's own undisclosed evidence means that Iraq will have lied and the inspectors been duped. This could drive a wedge between the US and the rest of the security council, including even Britain .

There is a further source of dispute. Straw said yesterday the resolution was "silent" on exactly who would determine whether the Iraq leader had committed a material breach of its obligations. The decision could be taken, not by the 15 security council members, he said, but by "the international community at large", whatever that means.

The resolution, in fact, says UN inspectors will report to the security council "any interference by Iraq with inspection activities, as well as any failure by Iraq to comply with its disarmament obligations". It would then "convene" and "consider the situation and "the need for full [Iraqi] compliance".

All the signs, though, are that Bush is in no hurry - for a start, his military commanders are not yet ready. Meanwhile, British and US planes continue to soften up the air defence systems over southern Iraq, and Blair tries to soften up British public opinion by publishing a dossier about how brutal a dictator Saddam is. It may be argued Iraq would not have got this far without the threat of force. But the onus is now on those who want to use force to provide evidence for such a course of action.

· Richard Norton-Taylor is the Guardian's security affairs editor

richard.norton-taylor@guardian.co.uk


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