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NEW YORK, Jan 31: Chief UN arms inspector Hans Blix on Friday challenged a series of accusations Washington has lobbed at Baghdad, saying inspection teams had found nothing to back them up.
In an interview with the New York Times, Mr Blix said the progress report he delivered to the UN Security Council on Monday — in which he determined that Iraq was defying international demands to disarm — did not justify going to war.
But he acknowledged that “diplomacy needs to be backed by force sometimes, and inspections need to be backed by pressure”.
The chief UN chemical and biological weapons inspector also told the daily he had not seen any hard evidence to suggest that the Iraqi government was linked to the Al Qaeda network, as President George Bush charged in his State of the Union address on Tuesday.
“There are other states where there appear to be stronger links” to Al Qaeda than in Iraq, Mr Blix said, citing Afghanistan as an example.
“It’s bad enough that Iraq may have weapons of mass destruction,” he added.
The chief inspector denied inspectors had found that Baghdad was concealing and moving outlawed material to avoid inspections, as US Secretary of State Colin Powell had said, or that Iraqi secret agents were posing as scientists, as Bush had charged.
“The world has made great progress,” Mr Blix said, noting that the world was safer now than it was during the Cold War.
“I think it would be terrible if this comes to an end by armed force, and I wish for this process of disarmament through the peaceful avenue of inspections,” he added.
USE OF NUKES: US President George Bush has signed a classified document that specifically allows for the use of nuclear weapons in response to biological or chemical attacks, reported another newspaper the Washington Times on Friday.
The document would change a decades-old U.S. nuclear weapons policy of “deliberate ambiguity”. A public version of the paper released in December said more vaguely that the United States would “resort to all of our options” if attacked.
“The United States will continue to make clear that it reserves the right to respond with overwhelming force - including potentially nuclear weapons - to the use of (weapons of mass destruction) against the United States, our forces abroad, and friends and allies,” said the document, according to the news report.
A copy of the paper - dated Sept 14, 2002, and known as National Security Presidential Directive 17 (NSPD 17), or Homeland Security Presidential Directive 4 - was shown to Times reporters by administration officials, the report said.
Recent news reports have said U.S. war planners are considering the use of a new generation of tactical nuclear warheads in a possible Iraq invasion to destroy underground military facilities.
IRAQI OFFER: Iraq on Thursday invited UN disarmament chiefs Hans Blix and Mohamed ElBaradei to return to Baghdad before Feb 10 to hold fresh talks on cooperation with the UN mission.
The written invitation was extended by presidential adviser Amer al-Saadi, a foreign ministry statement said.
Saadi called for talks on a “series of questions related to the reinforcement of cooperation and transparency between Iraq and the UN Monitoring, Verification and Inspection Commission (headed by Blix) and the International Atomic Energy Agency (headed by ElBaradei)”, the statement said.—AFP/ dpa
