LONDON, 10 April 2004 — The British government raised the alarm yesterday over the deteriorating situation in Iraq as Prime Minister Tony Blair prepared to visit the United States for talks next week with ally President George W. Bush and UN Secretary-General Kofi Annan.
Foreign Minister Jack Straw said that the unrest in Iraq was the “most serious” the US-led coalition had yet faced, although a Downing Street spokesman insisted that the April 16 talks and lunch at the White House had been scheduled for some time and were “not a crisis meeting”.
Blair and Bush are set to discuss other matters besides Iraq, including Middle East peace efforts, nuclear proliferation and terrorism, he said.
Russia, meanwhile, called on US-led forces to halt their offensive against Iraqi insurgents and refrain from the “disproportionate” use of force.
“Russia calls for an end to military operations and restraint,” the Russian Foreign Ministry said in a statement. It said a key UN Security Council resolution on Iraq forbids “the indiscriminate and disproportionate use of force.”
Russia expressed particular concern about the situation in Fallujah, which has been encircled and bombed by US troops days after four civilian contractors were killed and dragged through the streets by a mob. “Hospitals, civilian buildings and religious establishments are being attacked. Completely innocent people are being killed as a result, including the elderly, women and children. We have seen hundreds of people wounded,” the ministry said.
In one of the strongest-worded recent statements on Iraq, the Russian Foreign Ministry said it was “imperative ... to halt the humanitarian catastrophe” afflicting some Iraq cities, and “not to permit an escalation in the Iraqi conflict.”
Just hours after Blair left for the talks in the US, the Foreign Ministry in London announced that a British national had been killed in the recent outbreak of fighting in Iraq, without giving further details.
“There is no doubt that the current situation is very serious and it is the most serious that we have faced,” said Straw in a BBC radio interview, a year to the day after the fall of Baghdad.
He argued, however, that this week’s unrest had to be seen in the context of Iraq emerging from years of dictatorship under Saddam Hussein.
“The lid of the pressure cooker has come off,” he said. “Some of the tensions and pressures which were there, and would have come out in any event, have to a degree been directed towards the coalition.”
Straw was the most senior British government official to comment on the ugly rash of insurgencies and kidnappings that have swept Iraq in recent days, raising grave concerns in London.
On the first anniversary yesterday of the ouster of Saddam Hussein, most Britons have long ceased to believe in the weapons of mass destruction which were invoked to justify the war and few can see an end to the conflict.
Large sections of the British press now support former members of Blair’s government and others in the Labour Party who daily condemn him for following Bush.
“The situation in Iraq is becoming blacker by the hour,” ran the headline to the editorial in yesterday’s Independent, while the Daily Mirror, a traditional Labour supporter, told its readers: “We’ve lost the peace and put world at risk.”
Parliament has recessed for Easter and Blair left London on Thursday for a brief holiday in Bermuda before he meets Annan in New York ahead of his talks with Bush in Washington.
But reports from Bermuda said he was jeered by anti-war protesters on arrival there, and left-wing Labour MPs have requested that the House of Commons be recalled on Monday.
Former minister Robin Cook, who was in charge of organizing the agenda of the Commons before he resigned in protest at the war, said “the US forces have got to stop acting like warriors and start acting like peacekeepers.”
Blair and Bush should acknowledge that “the course on which they are set is not working,” Cook said, adding that “there is no point in saying we are going to stay the course if we are on the wrong course.”
Another former MP and Cabinet minister, Mo Mowlam, said in a television interview to be broadcast tomorrow night that US-British policy in Iraq was “completely counter-productive” and the two governments were acting like a “recruitment officer for the terrorists”.
