BAGHDAD/WASHINGTON, 4 February 2003 — Foreign diplomats in Iraq are leaving the country as the United States and Britain yesterday started a final diplomatic push to rally support for a possible war.
The Polish diplomat who acts as Washington’s sole representative in Iraq, Krzysztof Bernacki, will leave tomorrow “for long consultations in his country,” the Polish Embassy said. Other diplomatic sources in Baghdad said the representatives for Yugoslavia and Spain had already gone, citing the same reason.
The departures came as Washington and London exerted pressure on reluctant US allies to support a new UN resolution that would underpin a military assault on Iraq.
Faced with the growing threat, Iraq has said it is prepared to meet the demands of UN weapons inspectors, who have been trying to secure Baghdad’s agreement on overflights by US spy planes and private interviews with Iraqi scientists.
Chief UN weapons inspector Hans Blix is due to go to Baghdad at the weekend for talks after Iraq’s ambassador to the United Nations, Mohamed Al-Douri, said Iraq now had “no objection” to the use of U2 surveillance aircraft.
Hosam Mohammed Amin, who is in charge of Iraqi liaison with the inspectors, said: “We shall do our best to make his visit successful.”
But US President George W. Bush has warned that Iraq had “weeks, not months” to prove to UN inspectors it had no weapons of mass destruction, and insisted that he was ready to order a war and invasion if it did not do so.
B-52 and B-1 bombers have been ordered to prepare for deployment to the western Pacific to back up US forces in South Korea as the US military mobilizes for war in the Gulf, a Pentagon official said yesterday.
Bush’s closest ally, British Prime Minister Tony Blair, was believed to have underscored that message in a long telephone conversation yesterday with President Jacques Chirac of France, a veto-wielding member of the UN Security Council that has thus far opposed Bush’s stance.
Blair and Chirac are to meet face-to-face for a summit in Le Touquet, northern France, today.
US Secretary of State Colin Powell is to present the Security Council with US intelligence tomorrow purported to show Iraqi President Saddam Hussein has links to Al-Qaeda and is hiding weapons of mass destruction.
“While there will be no ‘smoking gun,’ we will provide evidence concerning the weapons programs that Iraq is working so hard to hide,” Powell wrote in an opinion piece in the Wall Street Journal newspaper.
But British and European security services are skeptical of the “evidence” due to be presented by the US secretary of state to link the Iraqi regime with Al-Qaeda.
Powell will, it is believed, claim that “links” between Saddam Hussein and Osama Bin Laden’s organization include: terrorist training and co-operation on chemical and biological weapons ; the presence of an Islamist group in northern Iraq and medical treatment for a senior Islamist operative in Baghdad.
However, security sources in London said yesterday that both they and the CIA remain unconvinced by the material the Bush administration is preparing to produce.
Iraq’s ruling Baath Party predicted that Powell’s speech would be “made up of lies and fabrications” designed to justify a conflict and urged the Security Council members to “not give in again to American blackmail.” It called on the Arabs to hold an emergency summit against US threats to unleash war.
Meanwhile, European Parliament members who met chief UN arms inspector Hans Blix in the United Nations yesterday said they gave him new evidence from Iraq that illegal weapons components were being stored in secret.
Emma Nicholson, the British vice-chair of the Parliament’s Fforeign Affairs Committee, told reporters “this information has come from inside Iraq in the past few days.” She said she had given the information to Blix after he assured her that her sources would be protected, and she said would present him with more evidence later.
In London, British Prime Minister Tony Blair appealed for strength yesterday in what he called the “final phase” of a 12-year showdown with Iraq over chemical, biological and nuclear weapons.
Speaking in the House of Commons, Britain’s lower chamber, Blair said there is “unmistakable” evidence that Saddam is still withholding vital information from UN weapons inspectors.
In Ankara, officials said yesterday the government would seek parliamentary approval this week to step up its involvement in war plans that could include allowing US forces to deploy from its territory.
But the governments of Turkey, and other US allies, face a public and political backlash for giving early backing to war without UN approval. (The Independent)
