U.S. Introduces Iraq Resolution

UNITED NATIONS -- The United States formally introduced a tough resolution on Iraqi disarmament to the 15-member Security Council on Wednesday, though the measure still faces strong opposition from veto-holding Russia, France and China.

Losing patience after six weeks of negotiation among the five permanent council members, Washington decided to seek the support of the rest of the body and push toward a vote on the measure next week.

The move ratchets up the pressure on council members who, for their own reasons, want to keep the United States engaged at the world organization without letting Washington run the show. But it also entails some risk for the Bush administration: Officials concede that a vote could go either way.

The U.S. says it has legal justification for attacking Iraq alone, but Washington would lose valuable international political support if it did.

“I think we all feel that the moment has come to give an added sense of urgency to this question,” said U.S. Ambassador to the U.N. John D. Negroponte after introducing the text of the resolution. “We’ve said from the beginning, from the time of [President Bush’s] speech to the General Assembly in September ... that we think we need a strong resolution, we need credible inspections, and it’s got to be clear that there will be consequences for Iraq if it does not comply with the resolution.”

The U.S. resolution seeks to force Iraq to allow in weapons inspectors and give up any biological, chemical or nuclear arms and the missiles that could be used to deliver them, as the regime of President Saddam Hussein agreed to do after the 1991 Persian Gulf War.

Most of the Security Council’s ambassadors agree that Iraq should face serious consequences -- even military action -- if it fails to do so. But they want clear U.N. backing for any move against Hussein’s regime and fear that the U.S. will take a resolution as a green light to use military force at the slightest provocation.

In Baghdad, Iraqi Culture Minister Hamed Yousef Hamadi on Wednesday called the U.S. draft a “declaration of war,” Associated Press reported.

In a sign of the diplomatic struggle to come, Russian Ambassador to the U.N. Sergei V. Lavrov quickly rejected the U.S. draft Wednesday. His objections centered on language that warns Iraq it is in “material breach” of past U.N. resolutions and will face “serious consequences” if it fails to cooperate with a new weapons-inspection process.

Russia and France, backed by China, argue that those terms are hidden triggers for automatic military action by the U.S. and Britain and say that the new text gives inspectors “impossible” requirements to fulfill.

“We cannot agree to unimplementable, unrealistic demands to be put in this resolution,” Lavrov said, adding that recent changes to the text after three days of intense negotiations still failed to satisfy their concerns.

U.S. Secretary of State Colin L. Powell, arriving in Los Cabos, Mexico, for a meeting of Asian-Pacific foreign ministers, said, “We have listened carefully to our friends. And we have tried to be accommodating where it’s appropriate, but we are not going to move off basic principles.” But he also said, “It is not a fiat that we have put down, it’s a circulating draft.”

To pass, the resolution needs nine votes in the 15-member Security Council, and no veto by a permanent member -- the U.S., Britain, China, France and Russia. Lavrov said his nation has not ruled out using its veto.

The 10 elected council members got their first official look at the U.S. resolution Wednesday after complaining that they were being kept out of the loop and had to find the content of the text in newspaper articles.

The entire council will meet again Friday to give the 10 elected members a chance to digest the intricate language and get feedback from their governments. On Friday, the debate will go “all day, or as long as it takes,” said British Ambassador Jeremy Greenstock.

Bush will have opportunities to persuade key leaders in the next few days. Chinese President Jiang Zemin will visit Bush’s ranch near Crawford, Texas, on Friday. Bush also will meet with leaders of Russia and other Pacific Rim nations at the economic summit in Mexico this weekend.

On Monday, the Security Council will hear from the U.N.’s chief weapons inspector, Hans Blix, to make sure its recommendations for inspections are workable. U.S. officials hope members will be ready for a vote soon after.

If the debate follows the pattern set during discussions among the five permanent members, it will be long and painstaking. Meeting at different missions Tuesday and Wednesday, the ambassadors went through the text line by line, with Lavrov voicing Russia’s objections to nearly every paragraph.

Russia’s vocal resistance has come as a surprise to the U.S. and Britain, which are co-sponsoring the resolution. Until Monday, the strongest opposition had been from France, which had proposed a two-stage approach, giving Iraq another chance to disarm and authorizing force only in a second resolution if Baghdad obstructed inspections.

Intense talks with Paris produced a compromise: The U.S. would consult the council if inspectors reported Iraq had failed to cooperate to discuss what sort of consequences Baghdad should face. But the U.S. emphasized it would not have to wait for U.N. approval before taking military action.

To other council members, that is not good enough. Syria, which holds one of the elected seats, prefers that the U.S. withdraw the resolution, Ambassador Mikhail Wehbe said Wednesday evening. “It has too many triggers for using military force against Iraq, which is not acceptable for the Arab world,” he said.

While Syria, the lone Arab voice on the council, is sure to vote against the resolution or at least abstain, other diplomats have similar concerns about the number of “triggers.”

The resolution calls for Iraq to accept its terms within seven days, and to declare its programs to develop weapons of mass destruction and ballistic missiles within 30 days -- though “false statements or omissions” from the list would not by themselves automatically constitute a breach, as in earlier U.S. drafts. Inspectors would have 45 days from the adoption of the measure to resume work and would report back to the council 60 days after the adoption.

The draft demands that U.N. inspectors be allowed to search in Iraq for weapons anywhere and at any time they choose -- including “immediate, unimpeded, unconditional and unrestricted access to presidential sites,” vast compounds that the U.S. fears could be used to hide weapons programs.

The resolution retains a clause allowing Iraqi scientists and family members to be taken out of their homeland for interviews. The move is seen as reducing possible intimidation by the Iraqi government, but Hussein’s regime regards it as a violation of citizens’ rights and an enticement to defect.

The draft would also give inspectors the right to freeze Iraqi movement in “no-drive and no-fly zones” around inspection sites to ensure that material isn’t spirited away as inspectors arrive. Iraq views that measure as an insult to its territorial integrity. But the new text dropped a controversial demand that armed guards accompany inspectors and enforce the zones.

The new draft also drops a proposal that representatives of the five permanent members of the Security Council be allowed to join inspection teams to guide them to suspect sites and receive information gleaned from inspections -- a provision that seemed to some a setup for espionage. The text does allow the chief weapons inspectors to determine their own teams, which would not preclude them from selecting experts armed with intelligence from their countries.

The U.S. and Britain hope to win agreement that an eventual resolution must be much clearer and firmer than previous resolutions that Iraq flouted.

Greenstock, the British ambassador, said, “It’s going to be a tough one, but it’s going to be a fair one under U.N. rules, and if you get it wrong, then that’s a disaster for you.”

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Times staff writers Robin Wright in Washington and Sonni Efron in Los Cabos, Mexico, contributed to this report.