From the language coming out of Washington over the past few weeks, it has been blindingly clear that it is determined on Saddam Hussein’s removal from power, come what may. That language has just got a lot tougher.
The statement by Secretary of State Colin Powell that on the basis of the deal worked out by Iraqi and UN officials in Vienna Washington will oppose the return of arms inspectors to Iraq appears positively belligerent. Coming after last week’s dramatic but baffling accusation from National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice that Baghdad had provided training to Al-Qaeda on chemical weapons development (baffling because Baghdad and Al-Qaeda hate and fear each other as much as they hate and fear the US), it will convince many around the world that the Bush administration is out to sabotage efforts to resolve the crisis by diplomatic means and is intent on war.
Yet, Washington has a point. It is said that Iraq agreed in Vienna that arms inspectors can inspect any site they choose, without restriction or delay. But that is not the case: the deal just agreed between Baghdad and the UN simply reactivates the 1998 UN arms inspection memorandum which exempted eight Iraqi "presidential sites" from inspections. Not all these "presidential sites" are gleaming palaces. Dotted around the country, they cover hundreds of square kilometers and include hangars, military installations and building complexes. Previous arms inspectors have said these are precisely the sites they wanted to inspect, because they were precisely the places where they believed arms of mass destruction to be stored and where work on a nuclear program carried out. In which case, the dispatch of arms inspectors to Iraq in the knowledge that they cannot inspect the very areas that need to be inspected is an act of gross dishonesty. Washington and London are quite right to say that there can be no "no-go" areas; the presidential sites, like everywhere else in Iraq, must open to inspection.
Unfortunately, it is a sign of how intense is the anti-Americanism that now grips so much of the world, that large numbers of many people, instead of seeing the Vienna deal as flawed, attribute sinister designs to President Bush’s rejection of it. People have attuned themselves to believe the worst of Washington.
The Bush administration is to blame for that. It has handled the Iraqi crisis with all the adroitness of a bull in a china shop. In any event, those who desperately want a diplomatic solution to the crisis will find it difficult to see Washington’s proposed UN resolution, with its demand that Iraq admit within a month that it has weapons of mass destruction and list them all, as anything other than a ruse that renders diplomacy irrelevant and military action inevitable. But it is its aggressive attitude that most harms Washington’s case. The statement yesterday from a State Department official that the US would actively block the return of arms inspectors is a spectacular own goal. Washington cannot block the return of arms inspectors: it is the UN that decides, not the US. That its officials believe otherwise goes a long way to substantiate the accusation of arrogance. Until the US stops imagining that it alone can dictate everyone else’s fate, anti-Americanism will remain rife.
