March 27, 2003	Thursday	Muharram 23, 1424

MOSCOW, March 26: Russian Foreign Minister Igor Ivanov warned on Wednesday that the US-led war in Iraq was doomed to fail as Moscow stepped up criticism of the week-old conflict while insisting that its ties with Washington were not in jeopardy.

Attempts by the United States and its coalition allies to overthrow the regime of Iraqi President Saddam Hussein were “illegal and doomed to failure,” Ivanov told the upper house of parliament.

“This is not about democratizing Iraq, since it’s about the total destruction of the country,” he said.

Ivanov’s harsh criticism of the US-led war came amid mounting tension between the two countries, with Russia issuing repeated denials to US accusations that it had failed to crack down on Russian firms that allegedly sold arms and weapons systems to Iraq.

But the foreign minister insisted that Russia’s opposition to the war did not mark a shift in its close ties with the United States.

“We are not against America — we are against the America that launched the war in Iraq,” Ivanov said.

At the same time he admitted that the Russian parliament had put off ratification of a key nuclear disarmament treaty with the United States because of differences over the war.

“We need to ratify the treaty, but right now is not the best moment,” Ivanov said.

While the treaty is “in Russia’s interests,” parliament should put off debate on ratifaction as long as the United States continues its war in Iraq without UN approval, he said.

The treaty, which calls on both countries to reduce their nuclear warheads by two-thirds and was long sought by Russia in a bid to cut costs on maintaining its Soviet-era stockpile, was ratified by the US Senate earlier this month.

Russia was expected to soon follow, but Russian lawmakers decided to delay ratification until at least April to protest the US offensive.

A high-ranking US diplomat in Moscow, noting the treaty delay, said Washington was concerned that “substantial disagreement” over Iraq would spill over into other areas of cooperation.

Observers here have warned of a return to Cold War animosity, with increasing tension over a host of issues from the alleged arms sales to Iraq to Moscow’s protests over US spy flights over Georgia that nearly crossed into Russian territory.

The US diplomat said that the United States had noted Russia’s tough line and was seeking merely to “contain” what has become an increasingly heated disagreement and publicly fragile relationship.

Ivanov insisted Wednesday that Russia would seek to bring the Iraqi issue back to the UN Security Council, where efforts by Russia, France and Germany to avoid the US-led war failed earlier this month.—AFP