US ready to raise stakes on Iraq arms

The Guardian ^ | December 7, 2002 | Julian Borger

[Quilla]

The US government is planning to demand a radical overhaul of the UN weapons inspections regime if Iraq today denies in a formal declaration that it possesses weapons of mass destruction. The Bush administration will ask for the UN inspection teams to be reinforced with scores of new investigators who would be "refocused" on seizing documents and questioning Iraqi officials, spiriting some of them out of the country with their families for in-depth interviews, according to officials in Washington.

However, Washington's demands are likely to bring to a head a simmering quarrel with the UN weapons inspectors over how they should do their job, in what will be seen by US critics as an attempt to hijack the inspections process.

Iraqi officials are expected to hand over their declaration, up to 12,000 pages including annexes weighing 60 kilograms, to UN inspectors in Baghdad some time today - 24 hours ahead of a deadline laid down last month by the security council. It is expected to provide details of various civilian uses of chemical and biological agents but almost certainly deny their use in military programmes.

President Bush's war cabinet met on Tuesday and Thursday to plan its response. According to US reports and diplomats in Washington, recommendations by vice president Dick Cheney and the defence secretary, Donald Rumsfeld, that the Iraqi declaration should be treated as a trigger for military action were overruled.

Instead, the administration will take several days to analyse the declaration before issuing a point-by-point rebuttal, possibly revealing its own intelligence on President Saddam's alleged arsenal to highlight deceptions and admissions.

Washington will then declare Iraq to be in "material breach" of UN resolution 1441 demanding Baghdad's cooperation with inspections, and will go to the security council for support. However, the French and other council members have argued that the resolution requires proof of deception and omissions in the declaration as well as clear-cut evidence of deliberate Iraqi obstruction of the inspectors.

The US strategy will be to force the issue by demanding "refocused inspections" using far larger numbers of UN inspectors to chase down leads provided by US and allied intelligence, with the intention of proving the Iraqi declaration false or by provoking Baghdad into blocking the inspectors' work, thereby opening the door to US military action.

"The idea is to stress the system," said one official close to the deliberations, adding that Hans Blix, the chief inspector, will be told to go into Iraq "big time".

In a tense encounter on Monday, the US national security adviser, Condoleezza Rice, told Mr Blix about the changes Washington wanted made to the inspections regime, including the larger number of inspectors and the tactic of transporting Iraqi officials and their families out of the country for interviews on their knowledge of weapons programmes, to avoid the possibility of intimidation.

Mr Blix is believed to have objected on both issues, saying sufficient numbers of UN inspectors were already due to arrive in the next few weeks - 100 are due to be in Iraq by Christmas - and that the UN was not suited to offer witness protection programmes to Iraqis.

"We don't believe we should become an abduction agency," said an official in the UN monitoring verification and inspection commission (Unmovic), chaired by Mr Blix. "Do you really think any Iraqis are going to go for it? I mean how big is a family, do you take just the wife and children and parents? What about the extended family - the cousins? Do you leave them behind? And what if we're stopped on the way to the airport?"

There have been unconfirmed reports that Washington is seeking to recruit additional inspectors to send in to Iraq in the wake of this weekend's declaration, but it was unclear yesterday how that might be done.

An Unmovic spokesman, Ewan Buchanan, said it was unclear whether new inspectors could be signed up without going through intensive standardised training.

[Colorado Doug]

it was unclear whether new inspectors could be signed up without going through intensive standardised training.