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LONDON, March 11: The first signs of discord between the United States and Britain over measuring Iraqi compliance in disarming surfaced on Tuesday.
The difference arose over a new draft resolution seeking UN authority to disarm Iraq by force unless the Council decides by March 17 that it is cooperating fully with UN weapons inspectors.
Undecided council members have criticized the deadline, saying it is too short and does not include objective “benchmarks” for cooperation, and Britain appeared to be heading in a similar direction.
“We are examining whether a list of tests of Iraqi compliance would be a useful thing,” Britain’s ambassador to the UN, Jeremy Greenstock, said. “There are people who want greater clarity on what we are proposing in this resolution.”
Asked whether it was not an “academic” exercise to pursue wooing undecided members, Mr Greenstock replied: “My instructions at the moment are to continue working for the draft resolution, and we will continue to do that.”
While the draft seemed doomed, Britain is particularly anxious to get nine votes in order to appease public opinion at home.Diplomats at the UN recalled that, at a public meeting US Secretary of State Colin Powell had said military action could begin before March 17 if the resolution failed.
In a sign that a war may be fast approaching, US officials said the United States was poised to order most of its diplomats in nations near Iraq to leave for security reasons.
SCHROEDER: The British premier is unlikely to find any sympathy on Wednesday when German Chancellor Gerhard Schroeder, another staunch opponent of war, touches down in London for dinner and talks at Downing Street.
German officials in Berlin said Mr Schroeder would be taking with him a “clear, unchanged message” that Germany would never support a UN resolution that would legitimize an attack on Iraq.
Diplomatic analysts doubted that Blair and Schroeder would even try to reach a compromise, although they could find some common ground on other issues, such as the lessons of the Iraq crisis for European Union foreign policy.
“After Iraq, life will go on,” one analyst said.
During talks on Tuesday with another visitor, Romanian Prime Minister Adrian Nastase, Mr Blair put the crisis in transatlantic terms, saying: “Europe and America, on the big issues, should try and stand together.”
“We don’t need a world in which people are forced to choose between Europe and America... The only people who will ever gain from countries being pushed into a position where they choose either for the transatlantic alliance or for Europe, the only people who gain are the bad people.”
First Russia, then France declared on Monday they would veto any UN resolution that would give US President George Bush and Blair, his staunchest ally, a green light to invade Iraq.
The British prime minister badly needs a UN follow-up to last November’s Security Council resolution 1441 to ensure the support of the British public and his own increasingly rebellious Labour party.
In a poll published on Tuesday in the Times newspaper, 52 per cent of 1,000 adults quizzed last weekend said Britain should join a US-led attack — but only if there was first a new UN resolution to authorize it. That was down from 62 percent who felt the same way a month earlier.
Blair’s own leadership of the Labour Party was called into question on Tuesday when a veteran Labour MP, Tam Dalyell, warned there could be a special party conference to challenge his authority.
“As soon as it becomes clear that the UN is disregarded, yes, certainly a letter will go out to our colleagues asking for a special conference,” the Scottish left-winger said on BBC radio.
“I don’t think it is possible to exaggerate the degree of concern about the illegality of what is proposed,” he said.
Blair’s international development minister, Claire Short, threatened on Sunday to leave the government if a war without UN support goes ahead. Earlier this month 121 Labour MPs voted against Blair’s stance on Iraq in a parliamentary vote.
Britain — which is putting 30,000 ground troops, a naval task force and 100-plus warplanes in the Gulf to join a US-led invasion— last week suggested setting a deadline of March 17 for President Saddam to show full cooperation with UN inspectors trying to enforce UN demands for Iraq to destroy alleged weapons of mass destruction.
But Sir Jeremy Greenstock, the British ambassador to the United Nations, said there was “nothing magic” to the March 17 deadline, suggesting that it could be adjusted by a few days. —Reuters/AFP
