British Prime Minister Tony Blair will fly to the Portuguese islands of the Azores tomorrow for a meeting with George Bush to discuss plans for war as the British diplomatic push continues to flounder at the United Nations.
Among myriad proposals at the UN yesterday was one from Chile, one of the six undecided security council countries, that involves a three-week delay. It was dismissed out of hand by the White House.
It emerged too that the British government’s legal position may not be watertight. Ministers say that if a second resolution is tabled and lost, the legal position is that they can go to war under the earlier UN resolution 1441, which demanded that Saddam Hussein give up his weapons or face serious consequences.
But there was a suggestion last night that the government has been told it is not as simple as that. Any second resolution that fell would mean that Britain would have to go to war in breach of international law. This could have serious consequences for the government and the armed forces.
Amid intercontinental diplomatic manoeuvring, Bush announced in Washington that the long-awaited ”road map” agreed last December between the US, the UN, the European Union and Russia, towards an Israeli-Palestinian peace settlement, will be published soon.
Blair, who has been pushing hard for this behind the scenes with Bush, leapt on the announcement, calling a special press conference at Downing Street aimed at the Arab world, which has accused the west of double standards in dealing with Iraq but not with Israel-Palestine.
Blair told the press conference, at which London-based Arab journalists were given prominent seats, that publication of the ”road map” showed that the US and Britain were being ”even-handed”.
The publication will also help Blair on the domestic front. His ministers, as well as Labour party members, have frequently argued that Israel-Palestine is a more important issue than Iraq.
Clare Short, the international development secretary, who has threatened to resign over Iraq, pressed Blair after cabinet on Thursday to persuade Bush to publish the ”road map”.
Gordon Brown, the chancellor, last night used an interview with the Guardian to bind up the cabinet’s wounds and put a further squeeze on Saddam Hussein. Brown told the Guardian that the concerns that prompted Short’s threat to resign, including progress on the Middle East peace process and a significant UN role in postwar Iraq, are now being addressed by the US.
Brown’s intervention may help to steady dissent in Labour ranks and buy time for Blair. The prime minister and Bush will be joined at the Azores summit by Jose Maria Aznar, the Spanish prime minister, who co-sponsored the UN resolution, and by the Portuguese prime minister, who will act as host.
Downing Street insisted last night that Blair was still working to secure the second resolution; he will continue to talk to world leaders over the weekend. But he is understood to have all but given up hope of securing the resolution after a difficult telephone conversation with the French president, Jacques Chirac.
Chirac is understood to have insisted that he would still exercise the French veto at the UN if Britain attempted to put the resolution to a vote. ”France is a major stumbling block,” a government source said. ”If a country is refusing to accept an ultimatum then that makes things very difficult.”
Government sources refused to describe tomorrow’s summit as a council of war. ”No one has given up, we are still working flat out and making a lot of calls,” one source said.
But, in a sign of the gloomy prospects, the source said that the three leaders would ”review” the next steps — code for the countdown to war. ”The corridors of Downing Street are not filled with optimism, but realism,” the source said.
British officials hailed the presidential ”road map” declaration yesterday as a victory for Blair, who has long argued that pressure on President Saddam should proceed in tandem with progress in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.
A senior US administration official said the formal delivery of the seven-page ”road map” to the Israelis and Palestinians would constitute its publication, a longstanding demand of the EU.
He said he expected it to take place next week, after the formal election of a new Palestinian prime minister, but only on condition that he is given ”real power”, and is not merely a cipher for Yasser Arafat.
The Palestinians reacted with scepticism, asking whether it would be binding on the various parties or was just a departure point for more talking.
There were signs that the pressure on the three main advocates of war — the US, Britain and Spain — was leading to growing tensions. A private memo written by the Spanish ambassador to the UN, Inocencio Arias, and seen by the Guardian, accuses the British government of being ”exclusively obsessed” with swaying public opinion.
Arias, clearly exasperated by the extent of leaks from the UK, said the British government was so nervous about the lack of public support for military action it had broken a joint agreement between the three governments to keep silent about strategy .
The British, he said, were engaged in ”an attempt to show to their public opinion that London has made, right up until the last moment, a major effort to seek peace, which explains the leaks to the press”.
A US B-1 heavy bomber attacked two Iraqi radars west of Baghdad early on Staurday after Iraqi forces moved one of the systems into the ”no-fly zone” over southern Iraq, where it was a threat to US and British planes patrolling the zone.
The attack, the 34th by western planes since January, was unusual in that it was carried out by a heavy bomber. – Guardian Unlimited Â