Chicago Tribune January 24, 2003
Powell: U.S. not alone in Iraq fight;
With opposition building, Bush team mobilizes
By Stephen J. Hedges, Washington Bureau.
The Bush administration sought Thursday to defuse growing opposition to a military attack on Iraq, with senior officials offering assurances that other countries would back a U.S. invasion if Iraq is seen as failing to disarm.
"I don't think we will have to worry about going it alone," Secretary of State Colin Powell said after a meeting with British Foreign Secretary Jack Straw. "I am sure it will be a strong coalition." Powell's comments followed suggestions by French and German leaders that more time is needed for UN weapons inspections in Iraq. France has threatened to use its veto power to block a UN Security Council resolution authorizing military action against the regime of Saddam Hussein.
Other administration officials echoed Powell's views, part of an intensifying effort to retain the diplomatic initiative on Iraq and reassure an American public that has expressed deep reservations about the United States acting alone against Iraq.
In a New York speech, Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz said: "The decision [about war] rests entirely with Saddam Hussein. So far, he has not made the fundamental decision to disarm."
At the UN, administration officials told chief weapons inspector Hans Blix that his mission was not to find a "smoking gun" but to verify whether Iraq had cooperated with Security Council demands, diplomats said.
At a session Thursday with Blix's advisory board, John Wolf, the U.S. assistant secretary of state for non-proliferation, said it was not the job of inspectors to find a "needle in the haystack," participants in the meeting told Reuters.
"The facts speak for themselves," Wolf said. "The question [is] . . . whether there has been full and immediate cooperation, whether Iraq is or is not disarming. Access to sites is not cooperation."
But in another sign of Security Council division, Yuri Fedotov, Russia's deputy foreign minister, presented an analysis showing areas in which Iraq had cooperated and complied with UN demands, according to meeting participants.
Writing in The New York Times on Thursday, National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice called Hussein's disclosure document of Iraqi weapons programs "a 12,200-page lie." She accused the Iraqis of preventing aerial reconnaissance and private interviews with weapons scientists that she said would help to find components of the weapons programs.
"By both its actions and its inactions, Iraq is proving not that it is a nation bent on disarmament but that it is a nation with something to hide," Rice wrote. "Iraq is still treating inspections as a game. It should know that time is running out."
The White House released a report titled "What Does Disarmament Look Like?" The document alleged that "thousands of personnel from Iraqi security agencies" have been "hiding documents and materiel from inspectors."
Documents confirming the existence of weapons programs are being hidden in private homes of low-level officials and in universities, the report asserted. Other materials have been buried under lakes, relocated to farms and hidden beneath hospitals and mosques, it said.
UN weapons inspectors entered Iraq for the first time in four years last November after Iraq agreed to cooperate and disclose any evidence that it possessed chemical, biological or nuclear weapons programs. Since then, the UN teams have conducted more than 150 inspections; their most significant find made public was of empty warheads designed to carry chemical weapons.
China and Russia also showed resistance Thursday to pressure from Washington for a military response in coming weeks.
Bush talked by phone with Russian President Vladimir Putin about Iraq, and Russian officials told reporters in Moscow that military action would depend on what UN inspectors say in their report Monday. The White House would not confirm the content of the call.
In Turkey, six Middle East foreign ministers met and urged Hussein to cooperate with the UN inspections but sidestepped suggestions that Hussein should leave office to avoid war.
The administration has dismissed objections that France and Germany have raised over military action, saying that many European nations--including Britain, Spain, Italy and the Czech Republic--are ready to support a U.S.-led attack.
"The president is confident that Europe and much of the rest of the world will answer the call if the call is made," White House spokesman Ari Fleischer said.
In his speech, Wolfowitz repeated an administration claim that it has specific intelligence that Iraq possesses weapons of mass destruction. He said the administration was giving weapons inspectors the names of people "whom we believe it would be productive to interview." Some of those, he said, have been threatened by Hussein's government.
GRAPHIC: (color): U.S. forces around Iraq to triple in coming weeks; Location of 60,000 troops in the region; Key bases; Sources: GlobalSecurity. Org, Center for Defense Information, Naval Open Source Intellligence, U.S. Department of Defense, USGS.; Chicago Tribune/David Constantine and Keith Claxton.;
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