A rchive Date
[ 25-01-2003 ]
Category
[ International Relations ]
sub-Categoy
[ U.S ]
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[http://www.chron.com/cs/CDA/story.hts/nation/1750641
Bush to ease pressure on U.N. over Iraq
To appease allies, administration may agree to wait awhile longer
By ELISABETH BUMILLER and STEVEN R. WEISMAN
New York Times
Jan. 24, 2003, 11:02PM
WASHINGTON - Seeking ways to defuse tensions with longtime European allies, Bush administration officials said on Friday they were considering not pressing the United Nations for a decision next week about Iraq's compliance with Security Council resolutions.
Instead, administration officials said they were were willing to wait possibly several weeks beyond Monday, the day that inspectors are to report their findings to the United Nations, for the inspections to continue. During that time, they said, the administration would try to make a more persuasive case to the allies for possible military action in Iraq.
But the officials made it clear they did not want the inspections to proceed for three or four more months.
The change in tone came after a week in which the administration found itself in a growing confrontation with traditional allies like France and Germany, and opposed in the U.N. Security Council by permanent veto-bearing members, China and Russia.
Faced with rising pressure to lay out the strongest possible case on Iraq, the administration is engaged in a fierce internal debate over how much intelligence information about Iraq's weapons to release to the public or to U.N. inspectors searching for incriminating evidence, administration officials say.
"We've battled the agency on this a dozen times over the last five years," an administration official said, referring to the CIA. "But now it's more acute because the administration is telling everybody, `We know more than you do,' and it's not enough. We just cannot get stuff declassified."
Senior officials at the Defense and State Departments are pointing out that there are severe limits on what they can release to the public, to avoid compromising the people and methods by which they obtained the information.
Officials said they did not know whether President Bush had become involved in any decisions on what to release. But their assumption was that since little intelligence information had been released, the White House had gone along with the tight clamp on sensitive information.
In pressing his case in the State of the Union address on Tuesday, White House officials said, Bush plans to make a vigorous argument against Saddam Hussein, the Iraqi leader. But they said he would stop short of announcing that he is ready to send in troops. They declined to say whether Bush would present any specific new evidence that Iraq is hiding weapons of mass destruction. Even so, they said he was mindful that he must convince Americans that war is justified if Saddam does not come clean.
"This speech is not to declare war," said Dan Bartlett, the White House communications director. "It's a speech to continue educating the public about why we're taking the course we are."
Bartlett added that Bush "will make clear to the American people his reluctance, our country's reluctance, to go to war."
Despite Bartlett's words, the White House kept up its now-daily attacks on Saddam. Ari Fleischer, the White House press secretary, said Friday that the president viewed Saddam's refusal to allow the weapons inspectors to interview Iraqi scientists privately as "unacceptable." Fleischer branded the Iraqi decision a "willful act of defiance" and said Saddam was "making the end of the line come even closer by his unacceptable behavior."
At the United Nations, Hans Blix, a chief weapons inspector, expressed frustration that Iraq had not come forward, during two days of meetings in Baghdad, with crucial evidence the inspectors need. Iraqi officials, he said, had provided only one new document that cast more light on the status of its past secret program to build prohibited weapons.
"They gave him virtually nothing, in fact," said a U.N. official with knowledge of the inspections.
Nonetheless, the head of the U.N. nuclear agency will tell the Security Council on Monday that Saddam has done a "quite satisfactory" job of cooperating with inspectors in some areas but that they need more time to complete their search, an official told the Associated Press. U.N. nuclear chief Mohamed ElBaradei is expected to say his inspectors have gotten generally good cooperation from the Iraqis.
 World Fact Book (CIA)]
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