September 10, 2003	Wednesday	Rajab 12, 1424

MOSCOW, Sept 9: Russia said on Tuesday it would not gloat over Washington’s difficulties in chaos-gripped Iraq, but ruled out an international peacekeeping force there until Baghdad gets a new independent government.

“Neither western Europe nor Russia wants a catastrophe to develop in Iraq,” Moscow’s UN envoy, Sergei Lavrov, told the Izvestia newspaper in an interview also carried on the foreign ministry’s Internet site.

“That is why it would be politically irresponsible to tell the Americans that we warned you, you did not listen, and now you get out of this mess yourselves,” he said.

“Few want to renew such arguments at this stage — of whether there was any point in starting this war, of whether (Iraq) has weapons of mass destruction or not.”

Yet Mr Lavrov also stressed that an international peace force could not be deployed until a new independent Iraqi leadership was set up.

And he cautioned that the daily US toll in Iraq was comparable to that suffered by Moscow’s forces in their ill-fated 1980s invasion of Afghanistan — where some 13,000 Soviet troops died over a decade.

“The situation in Iraq is growing worse day by day,” Mr Lavrov said.

His comments appeared to reaffirm Moscow’s will to rebuild ties with Washington that have been strained for months over Russia’s refusal to support the invasion of Iraq — where it has massive oil interests.

President Vladimir Putin is due to meet his US counterpart at Camp David later this month for a summit that also threatens to be overshadowed by Russia’s controversial nuclear cooperation with Iran.

Russia has now hinted that it may yet decide to send peacekeeping forces into Iraq under encouragement from the United States.

But Mr Lavrov stressed such a move was contingent upon seeing a new leadership set up in Baghdad and the United Nations given a central role in overseeing Iraq’s future.

“What is most important for us now is to agree that a half-ruined Iraq that is overrun by anarchy is a threat to everyone,” he said.—AFP