December 4, 2002	Wednesday	Ramazan 28,1423

CAIRO: A casual glance at Iraqi media confirms that Iraqis hold a completely different opinion to the rest of the world on the aims of the United Nations weapons inspection mission.

For the Iraqis, the mission has one objective: To disprove United States and British claims that Baghdad possesses weapons of mass destruction.

Baghdad denies having these weapons and claims the only reason it agreed to “deal with” the new UN Security Council resolution on arms inspection in the country was to strip Washington and London of an excuse to attack Iraq.

To drive the point home, the Iraqis pledged full cooperation with the mission of the UN Monitoring, Verification and Inspection Commission, and the International Atomic Energy Agency.

The pledge, made under intense pressure from the international community, appeared to be holding five days into the weapons inspections, with UNMOVIC and IAEA officials reporting no difficulties with the Iraqis.

Iraqi officials have been very forthcoming with information and the level of their cooperation so far has been “satisfactory”, according to the international inspectors.

The Iraqis have an added incentive to avoid any showdown with the inspectors — the future, maybe the life, of the Iraqi leader himself depends very much on the outcome of the current UN arms inspection mission in the country.

In fact, the Iraqis have been so proud of the level of their cooperation that they are already jumping to conclusions.

The Iraqi foreign ministry declared last Friday that the first arms inspections had proved that British Prime Minister Tony Blair was wrong with his September report about Baghdad’s alleged arms programme.

The searches carried out by the inspectors showed that Blair’s report was a collection of “false accusations and lies,” the Iraqi foreign ministry said in a statement.

Iraq’s al-Qadesiyeh newspaper followed the next day with a story claiming that the arms inspections had indeed “refuted the lies in Washington and London that Iraq is producing weapons of mass destruction.”

IAEA Director Mohammed ElBaradei gave this claims a boost on Sunday when he admitted in an interview with BBC television that inspectors had so far found no incriminating evidence of nuclear weapons in Iraq.

“We are off to a good start, but we are far from being able to reach a conclusion,” he said.

The trouble is that apart from saying that they had noticed a “few changes” at certain sites since the last inspections some four years ago, the inspectors have not publicized the results of the searches.

Samples, swabs and even documents from facilities the inspectors visited have been quietly shipped out of the country for tests at IAEA and UMOVIC laboratories in Vienna and New York.

The results of these tests will ultimately determine what sort of activity has been going on at the sites from which the samples and swabs were removed.

Negative results for traces of forbidden weapons could only mean two things: either the Iraqis have nothing as they claim or they are simply smarter and slicker than some people believe.

Two things are clear, however.

Firstly, the inspectors’ targets have to date been mostly soft targets covering sites visited by previous inspections teams — facilities where the Iraqis were obviously expecting them.

Secondly, they have not yet gone to the so-called “sensitive sites” such as Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein’s palaces that were off- limits to their predecessors.

Besides, Iraq still has to come up with a complete declaration of its weapons programme by December 8 as demanded by Security Council resolution 1441, which it accepted reluctantly in the first place.

The inspectors will present their report to the security council late February of 2003, and according to the IAEA’s ElBaradei, the inspectors might not even be able to produce anything concrete against Iraq until they have been there for at least one year.

Until then, the Iraqis say they do not want any confrontation with the inspectors. Baghdad also said it hopes that the new batch of arms inspectors will not double as agents, spying for Washington and its “waggle tail” London.

Signs of an early showdown between the two sides have, however, already began to emerge, with the Iraqis accusing Washington and London of stepping up their “aggression on Iraq” by escalating military action in the no-fly zones.

US officials confirm that their planes have fired at Iraqi air defence facilities in the area, but maintain that their action was “in response to hostile acts” on the ground.

The Iraqis disagree and argue that Washington’s real intention was to provoke Baghdad into doing something that could jeopardize the mission of the inspectors and prevent them from disproving Washington’s “lies” about Iraq’s arms programme.—dpa