U.S. Open to Compromise on Resolution

Facing the possibility of defeat at the United Nations, the Bush administration said Wednesday that it is prepared to consider compromise language for a draft resolution on Iraq to ensure its passage.

Britain as well as Mexico and Chile have been quietly working on possible revisions to the bare-bones resolution, which sets the stage for war in Iraq, possibly including giving President Saddam Hussein one final ultimatum.

“If [any proposed change] sticks to the fundamental requirement that we stand by the previous resolutions and that we face reality and make a decision because time is expiring or has almost expired, then we’d listen,” a senior State Department official said. “If there’s something someone wants changed in our draft that locks in a vote, we would consider it.”

The divide on the U.N. Security Council has become increasingly evident in the run-up to a vote, originally expected as early as next week. It is unclear whether any compromise would slightly alter that timetable.

Earlier Wednesday, even as the Bush administration revealed new intelligence about Iraq’s concealment of its deadliest weapons, France, Russia and Germany vowed to block the new resolution. The U.S. appeared to be on a collision course with the key European nations at the Security Council, where they will assemble Friday to hear a pivotal progress report by chief U.N. weapons inspectors Hans Blix and Mohammed ElBaradei.

Blix added fuel to the diplomatic fire Wednesday by announcing that he has outlined a list of remaining tasks for Iraq to prove that it is disarming, a move that could further undermine U.S. efforts to win passage of the resolution and move quickly to war.

“I would welcome more time,” Blix told reporters at the United Nations. Blix’s report will be the cornerstone of discussions that will heavily influence the outcome of the resolution, which is being sponsored by the United States, Britain and Spain.

As part of his report, Blix said, he will release a list of unresolved disarmament issues grouped into “29 clusters,” which will then have to be prioritized.

Rotating council members Chile and Mexico, building on a Canadian proposal, have suggested a compromise that would pair some of those questions with a deadline. If Iraq does not satisfactorily deal with the issues, then U.N.-sanctioned force could be used.

“The U.S. does not have the votes,” said a diplomat from a country with one of the key swing votes. “They don’t have Chile, they don’t have Mexico, Cameroon, Guinea, probably not the Angolans, and the Pakistanis say there’s been no decision. Apparently the U.S. is preparing to look for accommodation, perhaps a change in the resolution. The moment they accept amendments, it becomes something different. And we could consider that.”

After an emergency meeting in Paris on Wednesday, the French, Russian and German foreign ministers issued a joint declaration proposing accelerated inspections and a list of tasks with detailed timelines.

“In this context we will not allow the passage of a proposed resolution that would authorize the use of force,” French Foreign Minister Dominique de Villepin said. “Russia, Germany and France will assume all their responsibilities on this point.”

But De Villepin and Russian Foreign Minister Igor S. Ivanov stopped short of openly threatening to use their vetoes on the Security Council to block the resolution.

The three nations formed a common front in a last-ditch effort to prevent the United States from getting the nine votes it needs for passage of the resolution.

But the White House seemed undeterred by the escalating rhetoric from the antiwar bloc, as President Bush met with Gen. Tommy Franks, the Central Command chief who will oversee any war.

“I urge you not to leap to any conclusions about what the final outcome of the vote will be. There’s a lot of diplomacy going on involving many different people in many different countries, and you have not heard the final word from any nation,” White House Press Secretary Ari Fleischer said.

U.S. war planners also disclosed Wednesday that the opening air campaign of a war would hit Iraq with 10 times as many bombs as in the first days of Operation Desert Storm to liberate Kuwait in 1991. The goal will be to “shock and awe” Iraq, they said.

And in Turkey, the armed forces firmly endorsed a U.S. proposal to send combat troops through the country for an assault on Iraq, adding to pressure on the Turkish parliament to reconsider its refusal to authorize the deployment.

Meanwhile, the State Department said that the United States has asked governments in dozens of countries to expel about 300 Iraqi intelligence agents operating under diplomatic cover who are considered a threat to U.S. personnel and installations overseas.

The State Department also announced that two Iraqi diplomats at the United Nations are to be expelled. The two attaches at Iraq’s U.N. mission were involved in “activities outside the scope of their official functions,” a U.S. spokesman said. That is the usual diplomatic language for espionage.

The State Department identified the two men as Nezih Abdul Latif Rahman and Yehia Naeem Suaoud. The deadline for their departure is Friday.

The Iraqi ambassador, Mohammed Douri, said that the two men are security guards who live in the mission without their families and speak little English. During their English classes at the U.N., they had been approached by U.S. agents and asked to defect, Douri charged.

In a bid to influence the debate on Friday, Secretary of State Colin L. Powell said Wednesday that new intelligence shows that President Saddam Hussein intends to defy U.N. inspectors by handing over only some Al-Samoud 2 missiles for destruction and hiding equipment to continue production.

“Once again, he plays the double game. Even as he orders some to be destroyed, he is continuing with activities that will allow more to be produced. We can see no real improvement on substance. Iraq is far from disarming,” Powell said in a speech at the Center for Strategic and International Studies.

He charged that Iraqi intelligence has also transported chemical and biological agents to border areas near Syria and Turkey to prevent inspectors from finding them, while other banned materials were hidden in poor neighborhoods of Baghdad in mid-February to avoid detection by new U-2 spy plane overflights.

And to prevent scientists from divulging secrets, Iraqi officials have threatened them with “grave misfortune,” forced them to wear concealed recording devices and bugged the rooms in which they are interviewed, Powell said.

America’s top diplomat said the recent “dribbling out” of weapons in the form of “a warhead there or a missile there” amounts to only paltry gestures that do not substantially reduce Iraq’s deadly arsenal, constitute a change of policy or reduce the threat to the outside world.

Powell, who will attend the Friday debate along with the French, Russian, German, British and Chinese foreign ministers, said any real pledge to disarm “would not take an enormous amount of time” to carry out, as inspectors have indicated.

The debate about antiwar strategy has heated up in France. President Jacques Chirac has been increasingly aggressive in his resistance to the U.S.-led drive for military action, and Franco-American relations have deteriorated to the point that some in the French government have urged Chirac to “go all the way” and cast a veto.

Nonetheless, prominent leaders of Chirac’s center-right ruling party have begun to express concern about the repercussions of such a drastic move.

“There is a certain move to dampen the crisis rather than to aggravate it,” said Barthelemy Courmont of the Paris-based Institute of International and Strategic Relations. “There are profound divergences about the nature the opposition should take and notably about going to the extreme of the use of a veto.”

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Wright reported from Washington, Farley from the U.N. and Rotella from Paris. Times staff writers Edwin Chen in Washington and David Holley in Moscow contributed to this report.

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The declaration:

This is the official text of the joint declaration Wednesday by the foreign ministers of France, Germany and Russia setting out their position on Iraq:

Our common objective remains the full and effective disarmament of Iraq, in compliance with Resolution 1441.

We consider that this objective can be achieved by the peaceful means of the inspections.

‘Encouraging results’

We moreover observe that these inspections are producing increasingly encouraging results:

* The destruction of the Al-Samoud missiles has started and is making progress,

* Iraqis are providing biological and chemical information,

* The interviews with Iraqi scientists are continuing.

Russia, Germany and France resolutely support Messrs. Blix and ElBaradei and consider the meeting of the Council on 7 March to be an important step in the process put in place.

We firmly call for the Iraqi authorities to cooperate more actively with the inspectors to fully disarm their country. These inspections cannot continue indefinitely.

Timelines sought

We consequently ask that the inspections now be speeded up, in keeping with the proposals put forward in the memorandum submitted to the Security Council by our three countries. We must:

* Specify and prioritize the remaining issues, program by program,

* Establish, for each point, detailed timelines.

Using this method, the inspectors have to present without any delay their work program accompanied by regular progress reports to the Security Council. This program could provide for a meeting clause to enable the council to evaluate the overall results of this process.

‘At a turning point’

In these circumstances, we will not let a proposed resolution pass that would authorize the use of force.

Russia and France, as permanent members of the Security Council, will assume all their responsibilities on this point.

We are at a turning point. Since our goal is the peaceful and full disarmament of Iraq, we have today the chance to obtain through peaceful means a comprehensive settlement for the Middle East, starting with a move forward in the peace process, by:

* Publishing and implementing the road map,

Putting together a general framework for the Middle East, based on stability and security, renunciation of force, arms control and trust-building measures.

Source: Reuters