The Hindu : Iraqi declaration full of holes: U.S.

Online edition of India's National Newspaper
Saturday, Dec 14, 2002

International

International

Iraqi declaration full of holes: U.S.

By Sridhar Krishnaswami

Washington Dec. 13. The Bush administration is taking the position that the Iraqi Declaration of its programmes in the realm of chemical, biological and nuclear weapons is full of `holes' and does not address the crux of the issue at all. In particular, Washington has taken the view that the list fails to explain what the intelligence community here believes to be purchases related to the nuclear programme.

The U.S. is of the view that the Iraqi list presented to the United Nations on December 7 merely reinforced the Iraqi President, Saddam Hussein's assertion all along that the country had no weapons or programmes of mass destruction. Washington's conclusions, according to administration officials, is still only tentative but appear to be clearly leaning in a negative direction.

Disputing the Iraqi declaration means the U. S. could challenge Baghdad by providing American intelligence data to weapons inspectors so that they could aggressively go about the process in Iraq.

The other option for the Bush administration would be to formally declare that Iraq is in "material breach'' and that only war can disarm Mr. Hussein.

With the exception of the U. S. — and perhaps Britain — no one in the Security Council is keen on rushing to this stage. And senior officials of the Bush administration have also indicated that they would be spending the next "several weeks'' in scrutinising the Iraqi declaration suggesting that no one is eager to rush to war.

In the last several weeks leading up to the passing of the Security Council resolution 1441, the U.S. President, George W Bush, has been warning the Iraqi leader that he should come away clean this time around and that the U. S. has little to no patience for "cat and mouse'' games — a message that has been continually repeated by senior Cabinet officials like the Secretaries of State and Defence and the National Security Adviser to the President.

According to one version here, the Iraqi Declaration which is being examined very closely by CIA analysts does not apparently address what happened to those quantities of chemical and biological agents that were missing when the United Nations inspectors were thrown out in 1998 — apparently hundreds of mustard gas shells remain unaccounted.

The U.S. officials have also taken the position that Iraq has not explained its purchases related to the nuclear programme such as transaction on uranium in Africa and purchase of high technology equipment needed for uranium enrichment from Western countries.

There has been no formal response to Iraq's December 7 Declaration from either the White House or the CIA but repeatedly the point is being made that the words of the Iraqi leader cannot be trusted. By today all members of the U.N. Security Council will have provided their initial assessments of the Declaration; and next week the Chief Weapons Inspector, Hans Blix, will be providing a report to the Security Council.

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