President George Bush last night said he was confident that the vote will be held today on a UN resolution that would disarm Saddam Hussein by seeing the return to Iraq of the weapons inspectors as early as the week after next.
The resolution would impose tough new requirements on Baghdad, giving inspectors the right to enter presidential compounds and to escort interviewees outside Iraq for questioning.
Negotiations were continuing up to the wire in New York over ”ambiguities” that Paris and Moscow feared might allow Bush to claim UN backing for a war on Iraq without the UN security council meeting again to say so.
”We want to have a vote; we’re going to try to have a vote,” one US official told the Guardian on condition of anonymity. ”We’re certainly willing to look at minor fixes to the text, but there cannot be language that ties the president’s hands.”
Foreign Office sources said the French were also still checking the draft text to examine what level of Iraqi non-cooperation with the weapons inspectors would constitute justification for military action.
Tony Blair spent 20 minutes on the phone to Vladimir Putin, the Russian President, urging him to back the resolution rather than abstain.
After two months of intense negotiations at the security council, the text presented by the US with British approval on Wednesday makes several concessions to the French, Russian and Chinese positions by stating that Iraq is being given ”a final opportunity” to comply with its obligations. It also makes clear that if Hans Blix, the UN’s chief weapons inspector, encounters Iraqi obstructions, the security council will be reconvened to assess their significance. Crucially, though, it also states that any such obstructions will automatically constitute ”material breach” — theoretically allowing Washington to use them as a trigger for war regardless of how they are interpreted by the inspectors or the council.
”If it’s considered essential to take tougher measures up to and including the use of force, then only the security council can decide,” said Russia’s foreign minister, Igor Ivanov.
Ivanov, using the unlikely forum of a question-and-answer session on his website, carefully avoided the word ”violations” in discussing potential non-compliance by President Saddam. ”If they find problems the inspectors should report to the security council which will consider the issue once again,” he said.
Putin’s only public comment over the past few days was to tell a group of new ambassadors that Russia has an unshakable interest ”in strengthening the UN as the central part of the present-day world order”. His UN ambassador, Sergei Lavrov, said: ”We don’t believe we can agree with automaticity… It’s a work in progress.”
The Bush administration says it already has the right to attack. ”What we’ve said is that this is not an issue,” the US official said. ”There is no hidden trigger. The president has all the authority he needs, should he decide to strike Iraq, thanks to the congressional resolution. But the Russians and French are concerned that, buried within the language, there is still automaticity.”
The signals from France and China yesterday were conciliatory. Jacques Chirac’s spokeswoman, Catherine Colonna, said the French president felt a ”final adjustment” to the draft would be ”useful”, particularly to ”clarify as far as possible the question of the recourse to force”. But Chirac believed ”a great many improvements had been obtained” and that ”the final phase of negotiations” had begun, Colonna said. The essential notion of a two-stage process had been retained. Officials in Paris said the new text constituted ”grounds for an agreement”.
Kong Quan, a representative for the Chinese foreign ministry, told reporters: ”On the whole, we believe the new US proposals have taken into account and considered the worries and concerns of some of us.”
The ”minor fixes” the US might yet make are understood to include the removal of a sentence giving President Saddam seven days to signal his acceptance of the resolution. Security council resolutions are legally binding anyway, so some argue that forcing the Iraqi leader to confirm would be needlessly provocative. The 30-day deadline by which Iraq must declare its arsenals could also be flexible.
Only Syria seemed to be considering voting no, although according to reports it was indicating that it might vote yes if the vote was postponed until Monday, after Ramadan. British sources said the vote could be delayed if it seemed that Syria could be brought on board to give a symbolically powerful unanimous vote.
”But only if it’s clear that they’re not messing around, and that extra time would make a serious difference to the chance of them voting yes,” the security council official said. – Guardian Unlimited (c) Guardian Newspapers Limited 2001