- guardian.co.uk, Sunday November 10 2002 01.48 GMT
- The Observer, Sunday November 10 2002
Then the Iraqi President will tell the council his response to the new United Nations resolution compelling him - for the eighteenth time - to disarm.
That meeting, say British diplomatic sources, will come amid quietly conflicting Iraqi views about the best way to secure the survival of Saddam's regime while retaining a future capacity to build weapons of mass destruction.
On one side are the 'realists' - ministers, diplomats and businessmen who have most contact with the outside world. They want their leader to surrender his arsenal of weapons and ensure his own survival, but squirrel away the people and the knowhow to rebuild his weapons when the international heat is off.
They will be opposed by armed forces officers and security leaders close to Saddam, who want Iraq to let in UN arms inspectors, declare the country has 'no such weapons' and hide them away, challenging Hans Blix and his team to find them.
This faction believes life for the inspectors can be made difficult to spin out the crisis well beyond the winter, when temperatures are bearable for a US-led invasion. Simultaneously, Iraq would lobby its allies at the UN to try to block an eventual war.
Ultimately, however, one man will make the decision, Saddam himself. He will base his decision on whether to go on with the deception on his own reckoning of how much hard intelligence evidence the US, Britain and other nations possess about his secret weapons laboratories.
Few doubt that he will agree to fresh inspections - or that he will try to cheat. 'He is quixotic, ruthless but astute,' said one Western diplomatic source. 'He is also enormously unpredictable. No one could have predicted he would invade Kuwait, and to some extent no one can predict what he will do now.'
The calculation of those advising President George W. Bush and Tony Blair, however, is that Saddam will give the impression of agreeing to the UN resolution while cheating and making a war inevitable.
The message being delivered to Blair and Bush is that, despite their victory at the UN last week in securing the tough, unanimous demand for disarmament, things now get very tricky.
The first challenge to all sides is to understand exactly what the world has committed itself to. For evidence emerged within hours of the passing of the resolution on Friday that the consensus forged in favour of it could as easily tear it apart again.
Far from lessening the prospect of war, say sources, it has put the world on the very brink of that conflict. The first indication that President Bush had secured a deal at the UN came in a series of phone calls he made from the White House last Thursday evening. The first was to President Vladimir Putin of Russia. The second, to France's Jacques Chirac, lasted an hour. Bush was brought his dinner while he talked, eating off the Oval Office table.
'The first call was tense but brief,' said a White House source. 'The was easier. Both gave a pretty clear indication the President could be optimistic about the outcome.'
As he made his calls Bush already knew he had the Chinese on side, following comments by Beijing's deputy UN ambassador, Zhang Yishan. 'If we can compare the differences of all sides to clouds,' he said, 'I can say the clouds are getting thinner and thinner.'
Now Bush was working on support from France to a wording worked out by the US and Paris to meet the widespread view in Europe that any resolution would simply be a pretext for America to start a war.
With Secretary of State Colin Powell leading the negotiations, Washington first dropped its insistence on calling for 'all necessary means' to enforce its terms, code for military force.
In addition, the Americans sought to accommodate the French demand for a two-stage process in which the security council would have to be convened to discuss what to do if Iraq rebuffed the inspectors, or was shown to have illegal weapons.
In return for these concessions, the US has secured what one US official called 'a lot of little triggers' for possible future action by the UN and US military action.
Powell and the French Foreign Minister Dominique Villepin 'came up with the most of the fixes', said an administration official. 'Their relationship was the glue that kept this together.'
Among the Permanent Five that left only Russia for Bush to convince. Putin was concerned about economic factors and oil contracts signed with Saddam.
At 9am on Friday morning, Powell got a message to the Russian leader about a last-minute change to the wording. Russian Foreign Minister Igor Ivanov asked Putin: 'Khorosho?' using the Russian word for OK. Then he answered himself: 'Da.'
That left only Syria, which had hinted it 'might be impossible' to support the resolution. Every foreign Minister among the Permanent Five - the US, Britain, France, Russia and China - made calls to Damascus. Syria's support came only five minutes before the security council was due to convene.
The vote of 15 to nil sets the US on exactly the course it wants. To avoid a war Iraq must now comply with both the timetable and the tough new rules on inspections.
It must accept the resolution, and pledge to comply completely by Friday. By 8 December, it must declare an inventory of all its chemical, biological and nuclear weapons. The UN inspectors must be able to resume unfettered work on 23 December, and on 21 February they must be able to demonstrate Iraq's full compliance to the security council.
Bush administration officials believe Iraq will now be disarmed, either peacefully or through a massive armed intervention led by the US and Britain.
In hawkish circles in Washington, the betting is still on war, bolstered by Bush's warning after the UN vote that Saddam's 'co-operation must be prompt and unconditional, or he will face the severest consequences'.
Barely pausing for breath, Bush told the security council it 'must not lapse into unproductive debates over whether specific instances of Iraqi non-compliance are serious'.
This is the clearest indication that even amid the euphoria in London and Washington, splits were beginning to emerge over what happens next.
American officials stress that the resolution mandates Blix to report immediately the slightest Iraqi obstruction of his inspection team, even if it falls below his personal interpretation of what interference means. The hawks in Washington believe the US can now pounce on any justification for an invasion to depose Saddam. The indications are that for inspectors to be turned away from a site or part of one would be a trigger for war.
This is not, however, a view shared by all members of the security council. Syria, whose vote was important on Friday, has insisted it cannot support an American war against Iraq.
France and Russia are likely to insist that clear evidence of any Iraqi breach of its obligations must be reported to the UN before they will support any US-led attack. The greatest tension, however, is likely to come inside the administration itself, between Powell, who has pushed for a consensual approach through the UN, and hawks such as Vice-President Dick Cheney and Defence Secretary Donald Rumsfeld.
For all the intense diplomacy of the last few weeks the biggest battle in the campaign to secure last week's new UN resolution was won by Powell in late August.
Then, from the White House Situation Room, the Secretary of State told Bush on a video link to the President's farm in Texas that the US must go to the UN for another round of weapons inspections in Iraq.
Cheney and Rumsfeld made little secret of their disdain for his suggestion, but Powell convinced Bush.
But in this first victory Powell must have been bolstered by assistance from an unexpected source - Bush's political strategy guru Karl Rove, who, sources say, has kept Bush abreast of critical polling figures showing substantial concern among Americans over America taking unilateral action.
But it was Powell that had to sell and secure the US resolution. Last Saturday he was on the phone discussing permutations of the words 'material breach' with the French Foreign Minister 20 minutes before walking his daughter down the aisle for her wedding.
The Secretary of State's reward came on Friday when Bush pointedly turned to him in the White House Rose Garden and warmly hailed his 'leadership, his good work and his determination.'
'This is a tremendous victory for Powell,' said a Republican senator. 'When you look at Rumsfeld's and Cheney's position on going to the UN, there's no doubt Powell won.'
While Powell may have won the battle to engage the UN to deliver a tough resolution, sceptics in the Bush administration insist that for all his success his approach to the problem of Iraq has yet to be tested or vindicated. Many officials say his triumph could yet turn sour.
At the heart of the tension within the Bush administration itself is the hawks' insistence that Saddam will quickly give them cause to go to war. 'There are people who think there will be no problem whatsoever to determine "material breach", that Saddam will provide ample evidence,' said one senior US official. 'I'm not so sure about that. It might be a more creeping violation, with really no smoking gun.'
Pentagon and State Department officials have become deeply suspicious of each other's motives, with the civilian military leadership pressing for immediate action and the State Department counselling a diplomatic approach.
Hawks say a month should be enough to determine whether Iraq is declaring an accurate arms inventory. This, not the inspections themselves, is the key test, they argue. It is not a view shared by Powell. He acknowledges that the inspection plan in the resolution 'is something that takes months, not weeks'.
Pentagon officials have been deeply sceptical of the ability and willingness of Blix to confront the Iraqis aggressively during inspections - reservations barely allayed during a presentation by the chief weapons inspector to Bush last week.
The best hope of averting war now lies in pressure on Iraq from the Arab world. If Baghdad was disappointed by the Russian and Chinese decision to back the resolution, the biggest shock came from a very different quarter.
That was Syria's decision to vote with the other 14 council members, starkly underlining the scale of Saddam's isolation in the Arab world despite furious diplomatic efforts. The surprise 'yes' from Fayssal Mekdad, the Syrian envoy at the UN, sent a clear signal to Saddam that few, if any, Arab states will back him if Iraq defies the resolution.
Although Syria remains 'vehemently opposed' to any war against Iraq, its decision not to stand in the way of unanimity on the security council to insist on Iraq's disarmament is a stunning coup for Powell and the Bush administration.
The wooing of Syria's new President, Bashar Assad, in the last few weeks by key officials from the five permanent members of the security council, including President Chirac, has been long and intense.
It is a coup, say some officials, that could tie the hands of the US hawks whose aim is simply Saddam's removal.
Having the Arab states on board is a major weapon against Saddam, but it comes at a cost. That cost was articulated last week by Nabil Fahmy, Egypt's ambassador to Washington, who said the Arab world would support Iraq's disarmament under the UN Charter, but that most nations would observe closely to see whether it was carried out peacefully.
'It is always very difficult to ascertain complete disarmament,' Fahmy said. 'Even more so when the rhetoric is high and the suspicions so intense. Hopefully this will be dealt with in a co-operative manner by the Iraqis and in an objective manner by everyone else.'
But if the pressure is on Saddam and his regime, it is also mounting on another group: Blix and his UN inspectors who return to Iraq on 18 November. Last week the latest batch of raw recruits filed through the headquarters of the International Atomic Energy Agency for their last day of training before being turned out as UN inspectors.
The 50 scientists and engineers had completed five weeks of secretive training in the raw skills required to penetrate and expose Saddam's most closely guarded secrets. In a few weeks some of them will head for Baghdad with Blix for a make-or- break confrontation with one of the world's most secret states.
So far nearly 300 people have been put through a training process that their contracts bar them disclosing. Inspectors are drawn from the defence industry, aerospace companies, chemical and pesticide manufacturers and engineering firms. Some are academics; others work for governments.
The Vienna course is designed to prepare the new inspectors for everything they may encounter, including lectures on their legal rights and a three weeks with the Austrian military, learning about chemical, biological and nuclear safety. They learn how to use and work in protective gear and to detect symptoms of exposure to toxins. The inspectors are taught to analyse documents and put through a mock inspection complete with bogus Iraqis trying to block their work.
And it is, say those familiar with previous inspections, a plodding, unglamorous business involving diplomacy, boring leg work, cunning and much analysis.
One former inspector involved in tours in both Iraq in the early Nineties and North Korea told The Observer: 'The first task will be to track down the people who might be involved. It is a laborious process of looking for people in institutions where they don't fit in, particularly at universities. You are looking for high-powered people who have been seconded from their own institutes and companies and pop up in second-rate universities which are being used to hide development projects.
'They will also look at what happened to all the scientists trained in the West in the Sixties, Seventies and Eighties.'
He is sceptical too of how well-equipped even the new inspections regime is likely to be under its 74-year-old head, Blix.
'I am not saying that he is past his sell-by date, but the issue is that you are putting up an international civil servant against people who - after years of sanctions and inspections - have had to innovate in their weapons development programmes.
'What they may be looking for may not actually be there in Iraq. There is evidence that a lot of the procurement effort may have been farmed out to third countries.'
In the end it will all comes down to a single man, Saddam, and how he rates his chances of survival.
'He will co-operate; he has no other choice and he has nowhere to hide,' an Arab ambassador said last week.
But that may be wishful thinking.
