Blair Urges Action on Iraq

Declaring that inaction is no longer an option, President Bush and British Prime Minister Tony Blair met Saturday at Camp David to hammer out an allied strategy for persuading the world to join them in forcing Iraqi President Saddam Hussein to disarm or face a military strike.

With the leaders of France, Russia and Germany opposing military action against Iraq--and particularly any strike without United Nations authorization--Blair insisted that Hussein is amassing weapons of mass destruction and that the United Nations must act decisively to stop him.

The international community must learn the lesson of the Sept. 11 attacks, which is that “if there is such a threat, it’s better to confront it and deal with it,” Blair told reporters after his four-hour session with Bush at the presidential retreat in the western Maryland mountains. “How we deal with it is an open question, but the one thing that can’t be ducked is that the issue has to be dealt with.”

Bush and Blair released no specifics of the case they will make against Iraq in coming weeks, or of the U.N. resolution that officials say the allies will introduce soon.

The U.S. leadership wants the resolution to include a deadline for Iraqi disarmament in as little as six months, and an authorization for use of force if Iraq circumvents U.N. inspections as it has in the past.

The world community must demonstrate to Hussein the price of not complying with U.N. resolutions that require “unconditional, unrestricted access, any time, anywhere” to sites suspected of developing weapons of mass destruction, Blair said.

Members of Congress, as well as officials from other nations, are demanding that Bush produce evidence to back up White House assertions that Iraq is close to developing a nuclear weapon.

In a brief session with reporters before they began their meeting, Bush and Blair offered no new details to bolster their argument that Hussein must be stopped before he is capable of nuclear “blackmail” against the West.

But Blair did refer to recent satellite images showing construction work since 1999 at several Iraqi sites that U.N. disarmament inspectors have visited. An official with the International Atomic Energy Agency in Vienna quoted by Associated Press described the sites as “dual-use” facilities capable of housing either nuclear or civilian programs.

Bush said that shortly after U.N. inspectors left in 1998, the atomic energy agency released a report concluding that Iraq was six months away from producing a nuclear weapon.

“I don’t know what more evidence we need,” the president said.

Meanwhile, two U.S. officials confirmed late Saturday that in recent months Iraq has tried to obtain precision metal tubes that could be used to enrich the uranium needed to make a nuclear bomb.

“The only purpose this material would be used for would be developing nuclear weapons,” an administration official said.

That official confirmed reports by unnamed officials that the U.S. believes Iraq does not yet have the enriched uranium or plutonium it would need to make an atomic weapon.

But, the official added, “there continues to be an abundance of evidence that Saddam Hussein has been relentlessly continuing to develop weapons of mass destruction that include chemical, biological and nuclear weapons and the means to deliver them.”

Secretary of State Colin L. Powell, in the transcript of an interview to be televised today by the British Broadcasting Corp., said the U.S. does not know how close Hussein is to acquiring nuclear weapons. “You can debate whether it is one year, five years, six years or nine years; the important point is that they are still committed to pursuing that technology,” Powell said.

Iraq insists that it has no weapons of mass destruction. Its information minister charged Saturday that Bush is deceiving the world to conceal his real motive: to control Iraqi oil.

“There are continuous lies,” said Mohammed Said Sahaf during a news conference in Jordan. “We have nothing [to do] with the United States, but it takes us for an enemy, it wants to control our country. It’s a powerful nation that wants to control the oil in Iraq.”

Bush’s meeting with Blair was part of a well-orchestrated diplomatic campaign, leading up to a scheduled speech by the president to the United Nations on Thursday to round up a multilateral coalition against Iraq.

Despite allies’ vocal opposition to attacking Iraq, Bush insisted that many nations share the U.S. and British view that Hussein poses a threat that extends beyond his own neighborhood.

“A lot of people understand that this man has defied every U.N. resolution--16 U.N. resolutions he’s ignored,” Bush said. “A lot of people understand he holds weapons of mass destruction. A lot of people understand he has invaded two countries. A lot of people understand he’s gassed his own people. A lot of people understand he is unstable. So we’ve got a lot of support.”

Blair has signed on to help his American ally--at least for the first stage of the diplomatic offensive--despite stiff domestic opposition. A poll of Britons conducted for today’s editions of the Independent newspaper found that even though 55% thought Hussein posed a threat to world peace, 60% thought Britain should not help the United States in striking Iraq unless the action has United Nations backing.

But Blair’s part in the diplomatic duet with Bush places him in a familiar role.

“You’ll probably see Blair playing the role of good cop to Bush’s bad cop,” said a State Department official who requested anonymity. “Blair will reach out for support and make it clear that Bush is prepared to engage militarily if the U.N. doesn’t come up with a workable and acceptable alternative on inspections.”

The Bush-Blair talks will be followed by a whirlwind of diplomatic activity over the next few weeks by both the United States and Britain. On the world stage and in various talks with his peers in Asia, Europe and the Americas this fall, Bush will ratchet up the tough-guy talk about the dangers Iraq represents.

Blair will weigh in with other permanent members of the U.N. Security Council and the European Union and in the Middle East to emphasize that Bush means business--and that the only alternative to war is a toughened and unbreachable weapons inspection regime backed up by the threat of force.

Blair’s comments Saturday indicated that one of the main talking points will be a reminder of the dangers of inaction in the face of a known enemy. London and Washington are expected to note that, in hindsight, a direct chain of events connected Osama bin Laden’s 1998 declaration of war against the United States to the Sept. 11 attacks, which might have been averted if the world had acted in concert earlier.

Likewise, given Hussein’s attempts to develop chemical, biological and nuclear weapons, Bush and Blair are likely to ask what government wants to have to explain four or five years down the road why it didn’t act.

“We owe it to future generations to deal with this problem, and that’s what these discussions are all about,” Bush said Saturday.

Britain is expected to release a document soon outlining Iraq’s weapons development programs and current capabilities.

Bush was asked Saturday whether he would have sought the presidency had he known what it would entail, and he drew on the shock of the Sept. 11 attacks on the United States to explain his position on Iraq. “I’m a citizen of a country that has had these two vast oceans protecting us. For all these years, we were safe. People couldn’t come and attack us--so we thought,” Bush said.

“There’s no way we could have possibly envisioned that the battlefield would change. And it has.... That’s why Americans must understand that when a tyrant like Saddam Hussein possesses weapons of mass destruction, it not only threatens the neighborhood in which he lives, it not only threatens the region, it can threaten the United States of America or Great Britain....

“We are in a new kind of war, and we’ve got to recognize that.”

After Bush’s speech before the U.N., Powell will stay in New York to try to muster support for the U.S.-U.K. strategy.

Among the countries on his agenda are the key Persian Gulf nations in or near Iraq and other neighbors.

But Powell is also scheduled to hold talks with other members of the so-called Quartet--the United Nations, European Union and Russia--about the Arab-Israeli crisis.