WASHINGTON, 6 February 2003 — Secretary of State Colin Powell’s case against Iraq yesterday at the United Nations Security Council met with a mixed reaction.
Three of the Security Council’s permanent members — China, France and Russia — immediately called for inspectors to be given more time to complete their research, while Britain said Powell’s presentation proved that Iraq is in “further material breach” of UN resolutions.
The US military meanwhile continued to build up its forces in the Gulf and activated nearly 17,000 more reserve troops, bringing the reservists on active duty to more than 111,000.
Powell used tape recordings, satellite photos and intercepted phone conversations to produce what he called “irrefutable and undeniable” evidence that Saddam Hussein is continuing to conceal weapons of mass destruction.
During his 90-minute speech, Powell played a tape-recording of an intercepted phone call between two commanders in the Republican Guard, who discussed removing a reference to nerve agents from written instructions.
Powell’s aim was to persuade the UN Security Council members that Iraq is hiding its chemical, biological and nuclear weapons programs and missile activity and was deliberately misleading inspectors. The Bush administration was counting on Powell’s presentation to win a second UN Security Council resolution authorizing military force against Iraq. To underline this, CIA Director George Tenet sat next to Powell throughout the presentation.
Powell alleged that Iraq also harbored people linked to Al-Qaeda. He said Iraq maintained active links with Al-Qaeda using its embassy in Pakistan as a “liaison” office.
“From the late 1990s until 2001, the Iraqi Embassy in Pakistan played the role of liaison to the Al-Qaeda organization.”
Powell accused Iraq of harboring a variety of terrorists, including at least one senior member of Al-Qaeda, Abu Mussab Al-Zarqawi, who is accused of ordering the murder of a US diplomat in Jordan last year.
He spoke of ties between Baghdad and the Palestinian groups Hamas and Islamic Jihad, but focused primarily on Al-Qaeda.
He said senior Iraqi officials had contacts with top members of the Al-Qaeda leadership since the early 1990s, claiming at least eight such high-level meetings were held over the past 13 years.
In 1996, Osama Bin Laden himself met with a senior Iraqi intelligence officers in Khartoum and later met the director of the Iraqi intelligence, Powell said, citing information from an unnamed foreign security service.
After Bin Laden moved to Afghanistan, he said the contacts continued and that Iraqi agents had been sent there to train Al-Qaeda operatives in document forgery and had offered them help in developing chemical and biological weapons training.
Most commentators who saw the speech remained unconvinced that there was need for a war against Iraq. “Powell absolutely failed to make the case that Iraq’s neighbors feel a war is appropriate and that they would prefer a war to the status quo,” Norman Solomon, co-author of the new book “Target Iraq” which assesses Powell’s role in the Iraqi crisis since late 2002, told Arab News.
“Powell made a strong case that the US government feels that war is justified, but he made no case at all about if the governments in the Middle East feel the war is an appropriate measure,” he said.
Solomon, who spoke to Arab News by telephone from California, added that a US war against Iraq nevertheless still appears inevitable. “If the US can’t strong-arm its way for a veto-proof UN resolution, it will claim that it needs no such resolution for the war. This is a unilateral war scenario. Without Washington pushing this war, it wouldn’t happen.”
Dr. Rahul Mahajan, author of the forthcoming book, “The US War on Iraq,” told Arab News from Austin, Texas, that although it is “quite likely that Iraq is still hiding some contraband, according to the best estimates of the weapons inspectors,” it does not amount to anything significant, and certainly does not prove Iraq’s short-term ability to build weapons of mass destruction. Mahajan turned the tables on Powell’s speech, saying: “There are four major atrocities that Saddam Hussein’s regime has been involved in. These are the war with Iran, the so-called Anfal campaign against the Kurds in northern Iraq, the invasion of Kuwait, and the suppression after the Gulf war of the so-called Iraqi intifada. “In three out of four cases, Iraq had the direct support — including materiel support — of the United States. And Iraq had good reason to believe that the US was also not opposed to an invasion of Kuwait.”
In Johannesburg, former South African President Nelson Mandela said Powell’s speech at the United Nations undermined the world body. Mandela said UN disarmament chiefs Hans Blix and Mohammed El Baradei were “men of integrity” and he wanted them to be respected.
“We are going to listen to them and to them alone. We are not going to listen to the United States of America,” he was quoted as saying by ETV news. “They are not telling us how they got that information,” Mandela added, referring to the US.
But 10 Central and Eastern European nations lined up behind the United States, saying in a joint statement it was now clear Baghdad was breaching UN disarmament resolutions. “We have actively supported the international efforts to achieve a peaceful disarmament of Iraq,” the foreign ministers of NATO aspirants Albania, Bulgaria, Croatia, Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, Macedonia, Romania, Slovakia and Slovenia said.
