The Hindu : U.S. wary of Iraq's 'Declaration'

Online edition of India's National Newspaper
Monday, Dec 09, 2002

International

International

U.S. wary of Iraq's 'Declaration'

By Sridhar Krishnaswami

Washington dec. 8. The United States is watching warily as the United Nations tries to unfold what it is that the Saddam Hussein regime has done by meeting the deadline for the `List' of weapons and programmes of mass destruction.

For the record, Washington has maintained that Iraq has retained many of its programmes of weapons of mass destruction, perhaps even going on to accelerate some of them in the last four years after weapons inspectors left that country in 1998. Baghdad, even while turning over the latest list, is adamant that it has no weapons of mass destruction.

For his part, the U.S. President, George W Bush, has once again reminded the nation, Iraq and the international community that the regime of Saddam Hussein must come out clean and complete this time around. "We will judge the declaration's honesty and completeness only after we have thoroughly examined it, and that will take some time,'' he said in his weekly radio address. "The declaration must be credible and accurate and complete or the Iraqi dictator will have demonstrated to the world once again he has chosen not to change his behaviour.''

Unnamed officials in the administration have been quoted in various agency reports as saying that the U.S. will continue to be sceptical, for over the years "substantial evidence'' has been gathered from a number of sources that Iraqi weapons of mass destruction programmes have continued, if not accelerated.

Some sceptics are also pointing out the fact that between 1991 and 1998, Iraq had, on eight different occasions, given the United Nations "full, final and complete'' accounting of its weapons and programmes of mass destruction, but none of which turned out to be full, final or complete.

Last month's United Nations Security Council resolution 1441 demands that Baghdad come out with a full and complete listing of its weapons and programmes. Even as Iraq was in the final stages of handing over the 12,000-odd page `Declaration' of all its weapons programmes involving chemical, biological and nuclear, the Bush administration was getting ready to declare Baghdad to be in "material breach'' of the resolution 1441, but not quite ready yet to cite this as an immediate cause of war.

The administration, one view goes, may allow weapons inspections to go on using the time in the process to build up the so-called coalition to strike Iraq. But Mr. Bush and members of his Cabinet have all along maintained that while the United States would prefer working with the United Nations vis-a-vis Iraq, it was prepared to go alone to achieve the objectives. In fact, various media reports have suggested over the last several days that the United States has in fact a full complement of personnel and hardware in and around the Persian Gulf to a start a military strike at a very short notice if Mr. Bush did indeed give the go-ahead. At least four aircraft carriers are positioned in and around the Persian Gulf and a fifth is in South-East Asian waters and could be turned around to the Gulf is the need arose, it is being pointed out.

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