UNITED NATIONS, 25 October — The UN Security Council will look into a US draft resolution on Iraq’s disarmament on Monday rather than Friday as previously announced, Interfax news agency cited chief UN disarmament inspector Hans Blix as saying in Moscow yesterday.
Blix’s announcement came after the US ambassador to the United Nations, John Negroponte, said the meeting would be held Friday, after the 15 Council members held three hours of preliminary talks Wednesday on the draft resolution offering Iraq "a last chance" to avoid a military strike.
Blix said several more days were needed to wind up the debates.
Russia has opposed the US text, which has been toned down from earlier versions, and France raised strong reservations but Britain said it would be a cosponsor.
China reserved judgment on the new draft yesterday, the day before Chinese President Jiang Zemin’s meeting with US President George W. Bush at his ranch in Texas. Bush is expected to seek China’s acquiescence for possible military action against Iraq.
The draft resolution, aimed at ridding Iraq of weapons of mass destruction, still opens the way to war. Iraq denies having weapons of mass destruction.
Wednesday’s revised text drops explicit authorization for military action if Iraq does not comply with UN arms inspections but declares Iraq in "material breach" of UN resolutions and threatens "serious consequences".
Iraqi Foreign Minister Naji Sabri said the US draft was akin to a declaration of war on both Baghdad and the United Nations. "The United States wants to create justifications for attacking Iraq with a new resolution and this draft resolution presented by the United States, which it amended for the worse, is an insult to the United Nations and the international community," he told Qatar’s Al-Jazeera television. "For when the will and decisions of the United Nations are twisted...what is meant is an attack on the venerability of the UN."
Meanwhile, Pentagon officials said yesterday that a high-level US Defense Department team is sifting through intelligence information, looking for links between Iraq and the Al-Qaeda terror network.
The team, created in the wake of the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks, is using powerful computers and other methods to analyze information about Iraq gathered by the CIA, the Defense Intelligence Agency and other spy agencies, the officials said, speaking on condition of anonymity.
Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld ordered the team to search for information which may have been overlooked that could help show Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein’s intentions and his links to terrorism, one senior defense official said.
Another defense official said the group’s function is to provide a "gut check" on various intelligence analyses. "These folks can play devil’s advocate. They can make the CIA support its findings," the second official said. Rumsfeld and other top Pentagon policymakers have taken a darker view of Saddam than that taken by the CIA and other intelligence officials.
