WASHINGTON/NEW YORK, 11 December 2002 — Iraq yesterday accused the US of "unprecedented blackmail" after Washington forced the UN weapons inspectors to hand over an unedited copy of the 12,000-page arms dossier provided by Baghdad. At the same time, UN sources said the report appeared to contain little new information.
In a statement, the Iraqi Foreign Ministry said America’s actions were proof of the Bush administration’s wish to launch a military strike. "This American behavior aims at manipulating United Nations documents to find covers for aggression against Iraq," it said.
The comments came after Washington put intense pressure on the United Nations to grant it an uncut copy of the Iraqi report, which it immediately passed on to the CIA and other intelligence experts to carry out their own analysis. It also provided copies of the report to the four other permanent members of the UN Security Council. The 10 non-permanent members will receive an edited copy.
White House officials yesterday admitted they had been very aggressive in their lobbying of the UN to ensure they received a copy of the report, rather than having to wait until the weapons inspectors had completed their examination of the documents. Colombian Ambassador Alfonso Valdivieso, the Security Council president for December, admitted he made the decision after coming under pressure from Washington. He said he called the council members and "we did it".
In addition to angering Iraq, the decision also upset several of the non-permanent members of the 15-member council, in particular Syria — the only Arab member. "It’s in contradiction to every kind of logic in the Security Council," said Syria’s UN ambassador, Mikhail Wehbe.
Diplomats said the dossier appeared to contain the names of foreign arms suppliers — something that could prove embarrassing for the countries involved, including Security Council members, if any transactions had taken place under the sanctions regime imposed in 1990.
But sources close to Hans Blix, the chief weapons inspectors, acknowledged that a first glance at the Iraqi declaration suggested that much of its contents amounted to a recycling of information already provided by Baghdad to the UN during the 1990s.
Analysts at UN headquarters in New York, who are only just now beginning to work on pages, many of which still have to be translated from Arabic, said it was too soon to dismiss the possibility that they could contain new intelligence. They will focus very quickly, for example, on a section that promises to describe the country’s chemical industry over a period extending to 2002.
Blix is tentatively scheduled to present preliminary conclusions of his analysis to the Security Council on Dec. 19, along with Mohammed Al-Baradei, the head of the International Atomic Energy Agency, which is studying sections related to nuclear weapons.
During a trip to the Horn of Africa, US Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld said he expected American experts to take weeks to draw conclusions about the dossier. "The thing to do is to not prejudge it, be patient and expect that it will take days and weeks probably to go over, and come to some judgments about it," he said.
In Iraq, UN arms experts fanned out to inspect several new sites, including the suspected center of the country’s nuclear program. A team of inspectors drove for five hours to examine a phosphate facility near the Syrian border, 400 km northwest of Baghdad. (The Independent)
