Iraqi VP Is Convinced U.S. Will Attack

21/01/2003| IslamWeb

The Iraqi government will expand its cooperation with U.N. weapons inspectors under a new agreement worked out in two days of talks, but it's sure the U.S. military will attack anyway, an Iraqi vice president said Tuesday. "It is possible any minute, any second that while the inspectors are still here, the aggression will take place," Taha Yassin Ramadan said. The United States, which does not believe Iraq's claim it has no more biological, chemical or nuclear weapons, has threatened war against Iraq if it fails to disarm voluntarily.

In the negotiations Sunday and Monday, Iraq gave ground to international arms controllers on procedural snares in the two-month-old U.N. monitoring regime. But it will be left to teams of U.N. and Iraqi experts, in the months to come, to work out more complex issues of accounting for old stocks of doomsday weapons.

The talks led by chief U.N. arms inspector Hans Blix and Mohamed ElBaradei, head of the U.N. nuclear agency, were a prelude to a crucial report they must make to the U.N. Security Council on Monday, on progress made in the U.N. effort to ensure Iraq no longer has banned weapons programs.

If the council judges Iraq's cooperation to be poor, that could set the stage for finding the Baghdad government in "material breach" of U.N. edicts, and for a move toward military action against it.

In another development Tuesday, the Syrian news agency reported that foreign ministers of Syria, Egypt, Saudi Arabia, Iran, Jordan and Turkey will meet in Istanbul this week to discuss ways of averting a U.S.-led war against Iraq.

To try to forestall threats of war, Iraqi officials in the Baghdad talks made concessions in a handful of procedural disputes, most notably an agreement to encourage Iraqi weapons scientists, engineers and other specialists to submit to private interviews with U.N. inspectors.

But Secretary of State Colin Powell  played down their significance, calling the concessions "just more of the same. ... Only under pressure does Iraq respond." The United States has threatened war even without U.N. support.

The U.N. teams have found that every potential witness approached thus far declined to be interviewed without an Iraqi official present, an arrangement inspectors believe keeps the specialists from being candid.

The Iraqis also agreed to expand the list of such potential interview subjects, with advice from the U.N. experts. The list of about 500 submitted last month was called not a "serious effort" by Blix.

Vice President Ramadan, speaking with reporters after addressing a gathering of Arab teachers' union members, said Washington wants to "create the idea that Iraq isn't cooperating," in order to accuse it of a material breach.

"We hope to increase this cooperation (with inspectors) and overcome any obstacles, so we don't give the U.S. administration any pretext," he said.

But the Bush administration will attack anyway, even with more than 100 international inspectors at work here each day, the Iraqi leader contended.

By improving cooperation with the United Nations , "we wanted to remove this cover, so the aggression would be seen as only an American-Zionist (Israeli) one," he said.

The U.N. inspectors were in the field again Tuesday, making unannounced visits to the Qa Qa Company chemical and explosives plant south of Baghdad, and the Al-Mutasim missile plant to the west, among other sites.

Among other items in a 10-point statement issued after the U.N.-Iraqi talks Monday, the two sides agreed on arrangements for helicopter-borne inspections to the "no-fly zones" over southern and northern Iraq, where Iraqi aircraft are excluded by patrolling U.S. and British warplanes. They agreed the inspectors' usual Iraqi escorts would be flown aboard U.N. helicopters on those trips.

The Iraqis also committed to responding to questions regarding their 12,000-page "declaration" on chemical, biological and nuclear programs. That document, submitted to the United Nations on Dec. 8, was criticized by both Washington and the U.N. inspectors as inadequate.

After the two days of sessions, the head of the Iraqi delegation, Lt. Gen. Amir al-Saadi, President Saddam Hussein's science adviser, called the talks "very constructive and positive."

"We have come a long way," Blix said. But the Swedish diplomat noted that not all procedural snags have been cleared. For example, Iraq is resisting allowing overflights by American U-2 reconnaissance planes - at a time when the U.S. military is massing troops near Iraq's border for a possible attack.

The deeper issues, to be dealt with long-term by experts from both sides, mostly involve complex accountability questions about old weapons programs, such as the paper "disappearance" of 550 artillery shells loaded with lethal mustard gas, and a lack of evidence to support Iraq's claim it destroyed large amounts of VX nerve agent. Such questions raise suspicions the Iraqis are concealing banned arms.

In Washington, White House spokesman Ari Fleischer  dismissed Baghdad's statement on private interviews as simply words. "We're only interested in action," he said.

At a Security Council meeting on the war on terrorism, at U.N. headquarters in New York, Secretary of State Powell encountered resistance among other members to the Bush administration's talk of war. "If Iraq does not come into full compliance," Powell said in reply, "we must not shrink from the responsibilities that we set before ourselves" - when the Security Council mandated that Iraq disarm or face "serious consequences."

PHOTO CAPTION

Chief UN weapons inspector Hans Blix speaks to reporters after meeting Greek officials in Athens on Monday, Jan. 20, 2003. Greece currently holds the presidency of the European Union . (AP Photo/Thanassis Stavraki