U.S., Britain Still Plan a Resolution

Stung and surprised by the Security Council’s stiff opposition to stopping inspections, the United States and Britain are rethinking their strategy for disarming Iraq but say they will still present a draft resolution to the council this week.

“I haven’t seen any signs in Washington and London of less determination to see the complete disarmament of Iraq,” British Ambassador to the U.N. Jeremy Greenstock said Saturday. Britain still plans to offer the council new proposals this week, he said, after members have digested the results of a European Union meeting on Iraq scheduled for Monday and after other U.N. members have aired their views in an open debate Tuesday.

But, Greenstock added, “final decisions have not been taken on what the next steps are.”

At a special session of the Security Council on Friday, U.S. Secretary of State Colin L. Powell seemed irritated by a chorus of foreign ministers who said they weren’t convinced that Iraq is an imminent threat that must be disarmed by force. Many of the speakers echoed the sentiment passionately presented by French Foreign Minister Dominique de Villepin: that the U.N.’s ideal is to exhaust every peaceful option to neutralize Iraq before resorting to war.

Powell responded that the U.N. must not avoid a decision to use force -- “as distasteful as it may be, as reluctant as we may be.” The council must confront the decision of what to do next in “days, not weeks,” he told the 10 rotating members in a private meeting Friday afternoon.

“Some of the speeches set it up as a choice between war and peace,” a council diplomat said Saturday. “It’s not really about war or peace. It’s about how we achieve the disarmament of Iraq if inspections aren’t working. So the real ‘What do we do now?’ will really only begin next week and will only begin once there’s something on the table.”

Diplomats will be busy refining -- perhaps softening -- the proposals over the next few days.

Before the outpouring of antiwar emotion at Friday’s meeting, the option most discussed in London and Washington was a new resolution that would find Iraq in “material breach” of Resolution 1441, which was passed unanimously by the Security Council in November and required Baghdad to declare any weapons of mass destruction and cooperate with inspectors to destroy them. The new resolution would call for the means to “restore international peace and security” -- namely military force.

A new version might also remove an explicit sanction of force, diplomats said Saturday. The possibility of including a deadline for Iraqi compliance with inspections or an ultimatum for President Saddam Hussein to step down or be ousted has still not been decided, they said.

But some members of the council said the U.S. and Britain are going to have to work much harder to win council consensus than offering a “you’re with us or not” proposal for immediate military intervention. There has been talk of a compromise resolution, perhaps one that would give inspectors another month to work with Iraq on disarming before an invasion would be sanctioned.

“There’s not a lot of enthusiasm to pre-endorse the use of force,” said one ambassador who asked not to be identified. “If a resolution has ‘material breach’ in it authorizing military action, it will be very difficult to sell.”

A compromise must be reached by the council’s five deeply divided permanent members -- the U.S., Britain, France, Russia and China -- said some of the 10 rotating ambassadors, because preserving the council’s moral authority is even more important than disarming Iraq. Until that happens, Mexico, Chile, Angola, Pakistan and others said, they would abstain to prevent the U.S. and Britain from getting the nine votes needed for a resolution to pass.

“Mexico is hopeful that the inspections continue and that agreement can be reached among the countries which have been polarized,” said Mexican Ambassador to the U.N. Adolfo Aguilar Zinser. “The objective is now much more difficult for the United States. You can strike alone, but you cannot create peace and rebuild a nation alone. You will need the help of the international community.”

U.S. and British diplomats suggested Saturday that the U.S. miscalculated what the tone and effect of chief weapons inspector Hans Blix’s report would be.

In an unannounced meeting between Blix and U.S. national security advisor Condoleezza Rice on Tuesday, Rice had strongly urged Blix to emphasize Iraq’s lack of compliance, as he did in a previous report Jan. 27, according to people with knowledge of the meeting. But the attempt to influence Blix, proud of his impartiality, seemed to fail, if not backfire.

A subsequent session with the inspection body’s college of commissioners -- which includes John Wolf, the assistant secretary of State for nonproliferation -- led the White House to believe the tenor of Blix’s briefing would be quite negative. Instead, Blix was scrupulously factual, saying that no weapons of mass destruction had been found but that their existence could not be ruled out and that Iraq had made incremental improvement in its cooperation. Most significant, he said that attempts to verify or act on U.S. intelligence tips had not panned out. That bolstered members who said inspections should continue.

“The evidence evaporated,” said one diplomat. “We are still not convinced that Iraq has weapons of mass destruction.”

The potential humanitarian toll was another factor that stiffened the resolve of some of the council’s 15 members, whom U.N. Secretary-General Kofi Annan had spoken to Thursday to impress upon them the dire consequences of war.

Most of Iraq’s 22 million people depend on U.N.-provided food and medicine under the U.N.’s “oil-for-food” program. But in the case of war, U.N. staff would be pulled out and the program would be disrupted, leaving millions at a loss for food, water and sanitation.

Powell told diplomats Friday that the U.S. military would take over relief efforts until the U.N. programs could be reconstituted.

Public antiwar sentiment, evidenced Saturday by protests across the globe that included millions of people, has also made it more difficult for the U.S. and Britain to make the case that they will wage war against Iraq with a coalition of the willing if the Security Council doesn’t give its blessing.

The dispute over Iraq has split not only the U.N. but also the North Atlantic Treaty Organization. In Brussels on Saturday, Belgian Prime Minister Guy Verhofstadt said a solution was near to mend a rift caused by France, Belgium and Germany’s refusal to let the organization begin defensive planning in case of an attack on Iraq.

Verhofstadt said that at a meeting today his government would propose allowing NATO to give military aid to Turkey as long as such a move does not constitute an escalation of hostilities against Iraq.

“What our country primarily wants to prevent is that this decision would constitute the first step in the buildup to war,” he told a media briefing Saturday evening.

“It needs to be implicitly clear in this decision that it would not entail a NATO involvement in a military operation against Iraq,” he said.