A Later Blink Could Have Doomed Iraq

With time running out before planned military strikes on Iraq, one U.N. official cooled his heels at the nation’s Foreign Ministry, waiting for a statement signaling a break in the crisis. When it came, he phoned the U.N. chief here, who scribbled it sentence by sentence into a notebook.

A third official tore off the pages, one by one, and handed them to a secretary, who typed them into a computer and printed out the result to be faxed to New York.

By now, it is known that President Saddam Hussein blinked, that the United States reluctantly called off military action and that starting today, U.N. arms inspectors are coming back to Baghdad to test the Iraqi leader’s commitment to letting them do their job.

But that brief summary does not convey how close Iraq was to the heaviest U.S. bombardment and missile barrage since the 1991 Persian Gulf War.

Diplomatic sources say that bombers were already in the air and that Tomahawk cruise missiles were to begin raining destruction on Iraqi territory at 6:30 p.m. Saturday.

The letter signaling the initial Iraqi retreat was still being prepared and translated by the Iraqi Foreign Ministry at midafternoon Saturday. If Iraq had been an hour or two slower in drafting its message, or if U.N. officials had not scrambled to transmit it to U.N. Secretary-General Kofi Annan, history would have been very different.

As opposed to a calm Monday under cool, blue skies that saw Iraqis going about their normal business, the country might well have been in flames, with destroyed buildings, damaged electricity and water systems, and dead or wounded soldiers and civilians.

Authorized during a high-level meeting presided over by Hussein himself, and written by Deputy Prime Minister Tarik Aziz, the vital document was not faxed to Annan until after 4 p.m.

It was such a close call that many have wondered whether Iraq had hard intelligence information that let it know exactly when the strike was due or whether the leadership simply inferred, based on all the information reaching it from New York, Washington and elsewhere in the Gulf region, that there was no more time to spare.

On Monday, the French Foreign Ministry denied as “shameful and absurd” allegations that France had leaked word to the Iraqis.

One man who has had cause to ponder the events is Annan’s special envoy here, veteran Indian diplomat Prakash Shah. The secretary-general’s political ear on the ground in Iraq since March, he rushed frantically Saturday to get the message to Annan as quickly as possible.

“I didn’t know that anything was going to happen or that anything was in the air,” said Shah. “I just didn’t want to waste any time.”

The series of events that averted the military strike began late Friday in New York, after a meeting of the U.N. Security Council.

Annan, on his own initiative and using his personal stationery, decided to take one last stab at calling on Hussein to rescind his Aug. 5 and Oct. 31 decisions to first limit, and then cancel, cooperation with the U.N. Special Commission, or UNSCOM, responsible for seeing to the destruction of Iraq’s weapons of mass destruction.

According to a diplomatic source here, Annan knew that he was going out on a limb because of U.S. pressure to avoid any sort of negotiations with Hussein. The cautious text of his letter reflected that; it barely strayed from a statement he had issued earlier in the week.

Annan gave the letter to Iraq’s U.N. ambassador, Nizar Hamdoun, who faxed it to Baghdad. The time in Iraq was about 4 a.m.

Saturday afternoon, Shah returned from a late lunch to find that an urgent message to call Aziz, the deputy prime minister, had been left for him about 2:15 p.m.

He phoned immediately and reached Aziz’s deputy, Riyad Qasay, who informed Shah that a “positive” reply to Annan’s message was in the works.

“I had a sense of urgency because of the situation,” said Shah. In fact, he was so eager for the letter that he sent his assistant, Eduardo Vetterre, to wait at the Foreign Ministry while it was being prepared.

But apparently the attack seemed close enough that Iraq wanted to get the word out publicly. Iraq’s Information Ministry issued a one-sentence statement at 3:30 p.m. to scores of Western reporters in Baghdad. “I have information that the leadership will respond positively to Annan’s letter,” an official said.

As soon as Vetterre got the letter in his hand, about 3:45 p.m., he phoned Shah from the Foreign Ministry and began reading.

Shah, in turn, wrote the letter down in a small notebook. U.N. spokesman Eric Falt ripped out each page as it was filled and passed it to a secretary, who typed it into her computer.

“It was an assembly line,” one U.N. official said. Then, the letter was printed out and faxed by Shah’s direct line to the secretary-general.

Annan sent word to the White House, which, after some deliberations, aborted the attack.

The next day, as President Clinton was announcing that the U.S. had demanded and received a series of clarifications, U.N. staff in Baghdad seemed stunned at what a close call it had been, and pleased at their role in averting the strike.

U.S. officials have said that the attack that was planned for Saturday night involved B-52 bombers with air-launched Tomahawk cruise missiles, as well as sea-launched cruise missiles from eight warships. Hundreds of missiles would have been fired in the first wave.

Now that the danger has passed, at least for the time being, “the pulse level has gone back to normal in our whole group,” said Hans von Sponeck, chief of the U.N. humanitarian aid mission in Baghdad. “We only realized afterward how high the stress level was.”