ELSINORE, Denmark, 31 August — EU leaders yesterday called for cool heads to resolve the mounting crisis over Iraq, amid stiffening global opposition to a unilateral US strike on the regime of Iraqi President Saddam Hussein. "I think we should all have a cool look at what’s happening," said EU external relations commissioner Chris Patten arriving at the Danish town of Elsinore, north of Copenhagen, for two days of informal talks.
"We all recognize what a threat to regional stability Saddam Hussein is, but it’s going to take some cool heads to plot the right way forward," he added. Across the globe, from Asia to Europe, Washington’s friends and foes alike have raised a chorus of concern that US President George W. Bush will seek to go it alone against Saddam, accused of developing weapons of mass destruction. The mounting concern has prompted Washington to pledge that it will consult with its allies before it takes any decision on military action. One possible way forward being considered by long-term US ally Britain is setting a deadline for Saddam to resume UN inspections of Baghdad’s alleged biochemical weapons program halted in 1998.
European Union foreign policy chief Javier Solana yesterday urged the UN chief to intervene to resolve the standoff over the UN weapons inspections and avert possible war. "We (the Europeans) have all confidence in the UN Secretary-General Kofi Annan to prevent the conflict in Iraq and we support wholeheartedly the work done by Kofi Annan," he said. "The UN must continue its work and put pressure on Iraq in order to bring back the inspectors to this country," Solana told a conference in the southern Swedish port of Helsingborg.
Iraqi Vice President Taha Yassin Ramadan also warned Washington it will not be as easy to replace Saddam as it was to get rid of the Taleban in Afghanistan, and dismissed as irrelevant Iraqi opposition groups. "Iraq is not Afghanistan, and I believe the American administration itself knows that," Ramadan told reporters in Beirut.
He rejected Bush’s charges that Baghdad has been developing chemical, biological and even nuclear weapons, and could end up supplying them to terror groups. "My country no longer possesses weapons of mass destruction and has no links with terrorism," he said several times.
Several retired US generals, in a departure from tradition, have begun speaking out publicly urging caution over the idea of unilateral US military action to topple Saddam Hussein. The dovish views have come from retired Marine Gen. Anthony Zinni, the former head of the US Central Command; former Gen. Norman Schwarzkopf, who led Operation Desert Storm against Iraq in 1991; and Wesley Clark, former NATO commander in the campaign in Kosovo in 1999.
Even as Bush and Vice President Dick Cheney sound increasingly hawkish, these military leaders are urging caution. Zinni, who is also the president’s special envoy to the Mideast, said in a recent speech to the Economic Club of Florida that Washington had other priorities besides removing Saddam.
Clark, writing in The Times of London this week, said war should be the "last resort" in Iraq, and urged that any such action be taken as part of a global consensus. Schwarzkopf earlier this month told NBC that an invasion of Iraq "would not be a cakewalk" without allies and could undermine the US-led war on terrorism.
