WASHINGTON, Sept 22: The United States appeared on Sunday to be moving inexorably toward military action against Iraq, girded by Baghdad’s defiant warning that it would refuse any new UN conditions on disarmament.
The White House’s renewed push for an invasion, which had been jolted by Iraq’s decision last Monday to welcome back UN arms inspectors, stirred fresh panic among Arab leaders.
The threat of a US attack again looked real as the New York Times reported President George W. Bush is now weighing military options in Iraq since he received top secret Pentagon scenarios at the beginning of the month.
“The president has options now, and he has not made any decisions,” White House spokesman Ari Fleischer said, in stark contrast to previous assertions that Bush had “no war plan on his desk”.
Pentagon sources said that the highly detailed options were given to Bush by General Tommy Franks, the commander of US forces in the Gulf, who said on Saturday from Kuwait that US forces were ready to launch a military strike.
That talk prompted a stern chiding from Kuwaiti Defence Minister Sheikh Jaber Mubarak al-Sabah that the United States could not use his emirate as a springboard for an attack on Iraq unless the offensive comes under the blanket of a UN resolution.
Baghdad on Saturday issued a new challenge to Washington, which had been caught flat-footed by the Iraqi government’s decision to let back arms inspectors just as the US campaign to build an international coalition was paying off dividends.
An Iraqi spokesman said the government would reject any new UN Security Council resolution sought by Washington to ensure Iraqi compliance with no-holds barred arm inspections, including the threat of a military strike to intimidate Iraq into cooperating.
Still, the move could backfire as the US administration, which seeks to topple President Saddam Hussein, appears to have started to bridge the gap with Security Council members France and Russia on the need to pass a tough new resolution.
US Defence Secretary Donald Rumsfeld immediately dismissed the Iraqi stance, jeering at it as just another attempt to “jerk the United Nations around” and said that he wasn’t “surprised” at the development.
“Anyone who has watched the past decade has seen the Iraqi government defy some 16 UN resolutions and change their position depending on what they thought was tactically advantageous to them,” Rumsfeld told CNN.
The latest talk from Washington triggered a chorus of anger among Arab leaders.
US efforts to change foreign leaders is neither in line with its own “principles nor international law”, Egyptian Foreign Minister Ahmed Maher said, in remarks published in the Arabic newspaper, Al-Hayat.
Still, Arab leaders acknowledged their helplessness in the face of US plans.
“No Arab country will be able to do anything if the United States goes ahead with a military strike on Iraq,” an official in Bahrain, home to the US Navy’s Fifth Fleet, summing up the Arab world’s helplessness, said.
Iraq’s neighbour Jordan confessed it could not promise its loyalty to Baghdad in case of war.
“... if, God forbid, the situation moves toward a military strike, Jordan will ultimately take the decision that upholds its interests,” Foreign Minister Marwan Moasher told Al-Hayat.
At the United Nations, diplomats said Washington was likely to submit a draft text of a Security Council resolution on Tuesday, in the hope of having it adopted before the end of the month.
A resolution needs the support of at least nine of the 15 members of the Security Council and can be vetoed by any of the five permanent members — Britain, China, France, Russia and the United States.
Iraq has linked the unconditional return of UN arms inspectors to the lifting of all UN sanctions imposed on Iraq after the 1991 invasion.
Baghdad also fears the inspectors will again spy for the West as the UN admitted some had done before the disarmament monitors fled in Dec 1998 when Iraq came under a US-British bombing blitz for failing to cooperate with the arms experts.
Russian Defence Minister Sergei Ivanov gave his support to the return of inspectors by early October, as soon as negotiations between Baghdad and the United Nations take place in Vienna.
Chief UN arms inspector Hans Blix has said he hopes to send an advance team of UN inspectors to Iraq on Oct 15. Bush, who has sought Congressional approval to use the army against Iraq, called on Friday on Russia for greater backing.—AFP
