JEDDAH, 9 February 2003 — Defense and foreign ministers of six Gulf states agreed yesterday to send a joint force to Kuwait “as soon as possible” to defend it against any Iraqi attack in the event of a US-led war on Baghdad.
The news came as the United States gave the all-clear for a voluntary evacuation of its nationals from several Middle Eastern countries, and shut down its interests section in Baghdad. In line with US State Department directives, “dependents and non-emergency personnel” were authorized to leave from Jordan, Syria, Israel, Lebanon and the Palestinian territories, US embassies said in statements across the region.
Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak and Jordan’s King Abdallah also met yesterday in Amman to pore over ways to avert a war.
It was not immediately clear how many troops from the “Peninsula Shield” force set up by the six Gulf Cooperation Council members more than a decade ago will be deployed in Kuwait in what was described as a “precautionary measure”.
Kuwaiti Defense Minister Sheikh Jaber Al-Hamad Al-Sabah told Kuwait’s official news agency KUNA at the end of a one-day GCC emergency ministerial meeting in Jeddah that the force would arrive in his country “as soon as possible.”
“The ministers agreed to call upon the Peninsula Shield forces to come to Kuwait as a precautionary measure in light of the developments in the region,” KUNA quoted him as saying.
On Feb. 15, Kuwait will seal off vast areas of its northern half which borders Iraq as a precautionary measure.
The Peninsula Shield, formed to protect the GCC states from external threats, failed to stop Iraqi troops from marching into Kuwait and occupying it in 1990.
The GCC comprises Saudi Arabia and Kuwait plus Bahrain, Qatar, the United Arab Emirates and Oman. The six have publicly rejected a war on Iraq.
In Damascus, Turkey and Syria signed an agreement to devise a mechanism to avert war.
In another development, UN Secretary-General Kofi Annan said yesterday that any decision to disarm Iraq through war must be taken by the UN — and only when all other alternatives have failed.
The use of military might to enforce UN Security Council resolutions “is an issue not for any one state, but for the international community as a whole,” he said in a speech to the College of William and Mary in Williamsburg, Virginia.
President Bush yesterday accused Iraq of training Al-Qaeda in the use of banned chemical and biological weapons.
“Senior members of Iraqi intelligence and Al-Qaeda have met at least eight times since the early 1990s,” Bush said in his weekly radio address.
“Iraq has sent bomb-making and document forgery experts to work with Al-Qaeda. Iraq has also provided Al-Qaeda with chemical and biological weapons training, and an Al-Qaeda operative was sent to Iraq several times in the late 1990s for help in acquiring poisons and gases,” he said.
Also yesterday, Washington padlocked the Polish-run US interest section in Baghdad — in a highly symbolic move that historically signals the onset of hostilities between countries.
Mubarak and Abdallah in Amman agreed that UN arms inspectors must be given more time in Iraq.
In Germany, US Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld said yesterday 12 years of diplomacy, economic sanctions and limited military strikes had failed to disarm Iraq and the world would know in “days or weeks” if war was needed.
Addressing a security conference in Munich, Rumsfeld sought to rally European support around the United States’ tough stand toward Baghdad.
He said Washington hoped to avoid military action, but a growing number of nations were serious about eliminating Iraq’s alleged nuclear, chemical and biological arms. Rumsfeld said the world must be “prepared to use force if necessary” to disarm Iraq and blasted NATO members for indecision and warned that North Korea was only months away from acquiring nuclear weapons.
Speaking at the same conference, German Foreign Minister Joschka Fischer made a strong defense yesterday of Germany’s opposition to war.
Fischer said that he was “simply not convinced” by the US case for strikes against the Baghdad regime and warned against any unilateral action.
In Baghdad, top UN weapons inspectors began crucial disarmament talks in Iraq.
Hans Blix and Mohamed El-Baradei opened two-day talks with Iraqi officials after flying in to Baghdad from Cyprus as they prepared to present a fresh report to the Security Council on Friday that could start a countdown to war. Blix and El-Baradei dismissed US and British pressure to portray the discussions as the final wheeze of diplomacy. “This is an important — but not the last — chance” for Iraq to show full compliance with the weapons inspections, El-Baradei told reporters. “There will be other chances.”
— Additional input from agencies
