The US and Britain edged closer to war yesterday after they judged the Iraqi president, Saddam Hussein, to have failed the crucial United Nations test by supplying a untruthful declaration about weapons of mass destruction.
After 11 days digesting the 12 000 pages of documentation related to Iraq’s biological, chemical and nuclear weapons programmes, the US and Britain delivered a preliminary verdict that there were ”omissions” and it was an ”obvious falsehood”.
That assessment is an important milestone, the halfway point in concluding that Iraq is in ”material breach” of the UN resolution on disarmament that will trigger war. Neither Britain or Washington offered any evidence to back their claim.
However, last night the defence secretary Geoff Hoon, interviewed on BBC2’s Newsnight programme, indicated that omissions in the declaration were unlikely, by themselves, to trigger military action.
Asked whether a determination by the US that there were obvious omissions in the declaration would constitute a material breach of the UN resolution, Hoon said: ”Well no. Because the resolution itself makes clear that it is not only the question of gaps in the dossier, but also deliberate obstruction by Iraq of the inspectors and of the process set out in the resolution.”
Earlier, the foreign secretary, Jack Straw, said: ”If Saddam persists in this obvious falsehood, it will become clear that he has rejected the pathway to peace laid down in [UN] resolution 1441 [on Iraqi disarmament].”
In spite of the confrontational rhetoric, neither the US nor Britain appear to be in a rush to war. Both London and Washington insisted yesterday they will allow the inspectors to continue their work. The UN chief inspector on biological and chemical weapons, Hans Blix, and the head of the International Atomic Energy Authority, Mohamed el-Baradei, are to deliver their initial assessment of the Iraqi document to the security council today.
They will insist that further inspections are necessary. ”We will report objectively to the security council, but it’s up to them to decide what constitutes a material breach, not to us,” said Blix’s representative, Ewen Buchanan.
For Iraq to be judged to be in material breach, it would need to be established that it had both made an untruthful declaration, as Britain and the US claimed yesterday, and obstructed the work of the inspectors.
France took a less bellicose approach than Britain and the US. The French foreign minister, Dominque de Villepin, told the National Assembly: ”In the event of a material breach by Baghdad of its obligations, [the inspectors] should report it to the security council and it will be up to the security council to draw all the conclusions.”
The US president, George Bush, met his security team yesterday to discuss tactics ahead of Blix’s assessment.
The US secretary of state, Colin Powell, said afterwards: ”Our analysis of the Iraqi declaration to this point … shows problems with the declaration, gaps, omissions and all of this is troublesome.”
He added: ”We are not encouraged that they [the Iraqis] have gotten the message or will cooperate based on what we have seen so far in the declaration, but we will stay within the UN process … and we will share our analysis of the declaration with other members of the council and discuss how to move forward in the weeks ahead.”
In London, Straw, in the strongest statement yet from either the US or Britain, said the Iraqi declaration failed to account for large quantities of nerve agent, chemical precursors and munitions listed in a previous report by previous weapons inspectors.
He added that it seemed President Saddam had decided to continue the pretence that Iraq has had no weapons of mass destruction programme over the last four years. He was speaking after the British joint intelligence committee gave its assessment yesterday to Straw, Tony Blair and Hoon.
In the Commons Blair was less definite in dismissing the Iraqi declaration, saying only that he treated it pretty sceptically. Denying he and the US and had pre-empted any decision, he insisted no final assessment would be made until the new year.
The shadow foreign secretary, Michael Ancram, said the more cautious words of the prime minister did not sit alongside Straw’s assessment. The Liberal Democrats called on the government to publish any information they already possessed if it showed Iraq was in material breach of the UN resolution.
Preparations on the diplomatic front were accompanied by a continued US-British military build-up. Mr Hoon formally announced naval deployment to the Middle East, though he insisted it was part of a long-planned exercise and no decision has been made on war.
Hoon told MPs: ”These are contingency preparations aimed at increasing the readiness of a range of options. This process does not lead inexorably to military action. The use of force is not inevitable.”
Blair said he was confident that the security council would agree to take military action if President Saddam was shown to be in breach. But he stressed Britain was prepared to act independently of the UN with the US. – Guardian Unlimited Â