The parting of the ways
www.dailytelegraph.co.uk (Filed: 16/02/2003)
For Britain and the US, war without UN backing has suddenly become a real prospect report by Julian Coman in New York and David Wastell in Brussels.
Once a week, Olivier Goulot, a diplomat at the French mission to the United Nations, takes his lunch at the Manchester Pub near his New York office. Recently he has become a little suspicious of Anglo-Saxon strangers.
Jack Straw shares a light moment with Dominique de Villepin before Colin Powell's presentation on Iraq
"We have all got direct orders from the ambassador to keep quiet about Iraq," says Mr Goulot. "Although it's not an easy task. The French are being called 'weasels' in the American press and people are even thinking about a boycott of Perrier."
Nevertheless, after a traumatic week opposing war at the United Nations Security Council and suffering the abuse of the New York Post, Mr Goulot was willing to offer a word of pity for Tony Blair and Jack Straw, the Foreign Secretary, who have had an even worse few days: "Your Government thought that there was a middle ground that could allow it to be with both Europe and America in dealing with Saddam. He [Tony Blair] thought he could rein us in and rein the Americans in. But the middle ground is giving way beneath your feet. Now we all have to choose - Mr Blair included. War with the US or inspections with the UN?"
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On Friday, at one of the most tumultuous United Nations Security Council meetings since the Cuban missile crisis, the French foreign minister, Dominique de Villepin, put a similar choice before the council's 15 member states after the second report on Iraqi disarmament by the UN chief weapons inspector, Hans Blix.
"Do we consider in good conscience that disarmament via inspections is now leading us to a dead end?" said Mr de Villepin. "Or do we consider that the possibilities regarding inspections have not been fully explored?"
One by one, as the US Secretary of State Colin Powell and Mr Straw exchanged tight-lipped smiles across the chamber, 12 of the 15 delegates expressed a desire to continue with inspections. Mr Powell threw away most of his notes and ad-libbed to no avail. He talked of "tricks" by Saddam. He told fellow Security Council members to "hold their nerve" when dealing with "a tyrant".
The German foreign minister, Joschka Fischer, and Mr de Villepin listened with folded arms. Igor Ivanov, the Russian foreign minister, invoked the spirit of St Valentine's Day as an inspiration for peace and received a round of applause. Mr Powell looked both tired and furious.
A successful second resolution, unleashing the "serious consequences" foretold by November's Resolution 1441 if Iraq fails to disarm, suddenly looks an extremely tall order. To pass a new resolution the US would require nine council votes.
On Friday, it could count on Mr Straw and Ana di Palacio of Spain. Even Bulgaria, previously a staunch ally on the council, expressed strong support for ongoing inspections. Angola, Guinea, Cameroon and Chile all said more or less the same. Russia, China and France established a 3-2 lead for continued inspections among veto-holding council members.
Outside the Security Council Chamber, in corridors where US officials have briefed and cajoled delegates for months as they urged them to get tough on Iraq, recriminations and inquests were already beginning among State Department officials.
Hans Blix had "ducked the hard language on non-compliance", according to one Bush administration official. Another said: "The news that Iraq had an illegal ballistic missile programme, confirmed by the UN, came out a day too early. It had no impact when Mr Blix said it because it was already in the papers. The way that happened was a mess."
Mr Straw failed to appear at all during the course of the day, although he made time for an urgent private meeting with Mr Powell. British officials talked confidently of a second resolution to be circulated by the middle of next week. But among both American and British diplomats, the dramatic prospect of a war with Iraq without United Nations backing had suddenly become real.
"Patience has gone and time's up," said a State Department official, "the UN has to decide whether it's coming along because a coalition of the willing, led by America and Britain, are going anyway."
In London, there is also a concerted attempt not to blanch at the prospect of war without a second resolution. "The Prime Minister is absolutely adamant that there would be no legal problem in going to war with Iraq without a second resolution," said a senior Downing Street official. "The second resolution is desirable for political and diplomatic reasons, not to give a legal back-up. Everything Britain needs to go to war is already contained in Resolution 1441, which authorises 'serious consequences' in the case of Iraqi non-compliance."
A delay in going to war can be countenanced and may even be advantageous. The American military insists that its equipment allows a war to be fought as efficiently in the spring or early summer as it could be now. Crucially, the 101st Airborne Division has only just set sail from the US and will not arrive in Kuwait for three weeks, at the end of the first week in March, at which point the complete invasion force will have been assembled.
The logistics of battle are unaffected. But it is the possible collapse of the fabled "UN route" to disarming Saddam that has darkened the mood in Washington and London. On Friday, no one in the State Department was looking forward to going back to Washington, where Donald Rumsfeld, the Secretary of Defence, and Dick Cheney, the Vice-President, who were loath to let the entire inspection process begin, are no doubt waiting to say 'I told you so'.
"This was a very bad day for us," said one senior aide, "We're at the turning point here. The Secretary of State has to go back to DC and a decision is going to be made as to whether we table a second resolution on Iraq, endorsing force, or we go another route. That's where we are now. Minds have failed to gel here."
The bad day followed a terrible week for those who wanted to sign up multinational bodies to the war effort. Warning signs of confrontation to come, and a climactic showdown with France, had been visible earlier in the week, in the drab Brussels offices of another venerable international institution - Nato.
At Nato headquarters, a converted hospital on the outskirts of Brussels, a request was made earlier this month on behalf of Turkey, a Nato member, for Patriot missiles, Acwas surveillance planes and defensive equipment against nuclear, biological and chemical weapons. It was explained that as a base for US troops during a future war with Iraq, Turkey would be vulnerable to attack during a conflict.
To the astonishment of their 16 fellow Nato members, France, Belgium and Germany said no. To say yes, said Jacques Chirac, the French president, would amount to accepting that the war with Iraq was inevitable before the UN had decided that was the case. The UN "trap" - interminable diplomatic wrangling - so feared by Washington's hawks, turned out to have been secretly laid in Nato headquarters as well.
Mr Rumsfeld said the decision not to come to the aid of a fellow member was "inexcusable" and placed the credibility of Nato on the line. In Brussels, the rows that ensued were among the most bitter in the organisation's history.
In Room 1 - the secure, windowless, beige-walled venue for gatherings of the North Atlantic Council - ambassadors from Canada, Britain, the Netherlands and Norway unleashed their anger at the "gang of three". The newly-founded "Brussels Resistance", a sister movement to the anti-war French diplomats in New York, were accused of "abject failure" to live up to their responsibilities under the Nato treaty.
Another said they were "reneging on their obligations". A third ambassador pointed to the trio and told them: "You are doing grave damage to the alliance."
Astonished eastern Europeans watched the organisation that they had fought so hard to join apparently on the verge of disintegration. "The scars will be lasting as this stand-off has gone too deep for too long," said Karel Kovada, the Czech ambassador to Nato. "We are getting dangerously near to the bone now. It will leave scars on the body of Nato, to the detriment of us all."
The French and the Germans appeared not to care. "You now have a split in Nato, not just in Europe, over Iraq," said Franois Heisberg, a former French Defence official and director of the Paris Foundation for Strategic Research. "It's being extended into the strategic realm. When the key players consider the alliance marginal, you know you have a real crisis. A crisis of indifference."
Nato argued itself to a standstill early in the week, satisfactorily delaying war preparations on the military front as far as Paris and Berlin were concerned. Franco-German attention switched to New York, where Mr Blix was due to deliver his report on progress in disarming Iraq at the end of the week.
The Bush administration was doing its utmost to ensure that the report would concentrate minds in the Security Council on continued Iraqi violations and defiance of inspectors. Drafts of a possible second resolution, authorising the use of force to disarm Iraq, flew all week between the United States and United Kingdom missions.
In response, the French circulated a so-called "non-paper" for discussion among Security Council members, advocating an expanded and strengthened inspections regime in Iraq. The battle for influence was waged daily.
According to an African diplomat the overwhelmed delegates of countries such as Guinea and Angola "just tried to keep their heads down until the big boys reached agreement".
There was no agreement to be had. On Tuesday, Condoleezza Rice, the National Security Adviser, visited Mr Blix's compact offices in the UN building to urge him to "report the facts".
"She also told him that a certain kind of language might be a problem," said a US government official. "We wanted to make sure he wasn't going to be amazingly upbeat about aspects of compliance from the Iraqis such as the agreement over U2 surveillance flights."
Yet as Ms Rice grilled Mr Blix, the rules of the latest round of the contest between hawks and doves were being subtly but significantly altered. Ms Rice was under the impression that the Friday meeting would be a closed session involving permanent UN representatives. Mr de Villepin and his ally, the German foreign minister Joschka Fischer, had developed a rather more grandiose vision of the session. Friday was to be the setting for Mr de Villepin's finest hour.
Three weeks earlier, Mr Powell had been notoriously "ambushed" by Mr de Villepin at a UN counter-terrorism meeting. The meeting, apparently innocuous, was used to make the French case against war even before Mr Blix had made his first report.
Now, on the occasion of Mr Blix's second report, the United States and Britain were to receive another lesson in playing the politics of an international bureaucracy.
On Wednesday, at a closed planning meeting for the Blix report, French and German representatives announced that Mr de Villepin and Mr Fischer wished to attend the Friday session. The American ambassador to the UN, John Negroponte, groaned at the prospect of the third visit by Security Council ministers in three weeks: "Here we go," said Mr Negroponte, "the weekly ministerial meeting coming to town."
In Washington, Mr Powell belatedly decided that if Mr de Villepin and Mr Fischer were going to be there, he needed to be there, too. Mr Straw made the same decision.
The determined obstructionism of France was now becoming a concern to both Britain and the US. In Washington and London, there was a growing feeling that Mr Chirac and his foreign minister might be eyeing the possibility of a "Gaullist moment", which could even go as far as a Security Council veto.
"Blair said he was struck by how hard line Chirac was when they last met," said a former White House official close to the present administration. "If France was in that mood, and Germany could tag along behind, there was always a danger that Russia could swing against the use of force as well."
The French and German foreign ministers, having ensured a prestigious turn-out of ministers, then set about organising an audience. It was suggested that half the day be taken up with an open media session.
Russia and China, both of which had sided with the earlier French call to strengthen and prolong inspections, enthusiastically endorsed the idea. "This was very clever," said a senior Security Council diplomat. "Where there are ministers there is always going to be posturing. It's not going to be the same kind of serious, sober work. And when you put the ministers on public display, with the whole world watching, you get something of a circus."
US and British officials warned that the new format would allow little time for closed debate and little opportunity for proper candour in debate. It was, said officials privately, simply a delaying tactic.
There was however, another motive. "Of course we wanted to make it public," said a French government official. "It's the public that's against the war. In London you were about to have one of the biggest anti-war demonstrations in your history. Seventy-five per cent of Spaniards are against going to war with Iraq, and so on. We let the people into the debate."
In his eventual report, Mr Blix listed aspects of the progress in Iraqi co-operation with the inspectors. He also pointedly minimised the significance of evidence presented to the Council by Mr Powell on February 5. Following Mr Powell's presentation of secret US intelligence which he claimed demonstrated Iraqi defiance of the UN, there were rumours in New York that the chief weapons inspector had resented the eagerness of the Secretary of State to prove the futility of Mr Blix's inspections regime.
On Friday, back in the chair, Mr Blix confirmed his suspicions when he delivered a public and stinging rebuttal of one of Mr Powell's major "scoops" - satellite images of alleged decontamination trucks indicating the presence of a chemical weapons factory.
Mr Blix was polite but withering, commenting: "The reported movement of munitions at the site could just as easily have been a routine activity as a movement of proscribed munitions in anticipation of imminent inspection." The packed hall murmured audibly. Mr Blix was not taking the game to Iraq. He was taking it to General Powell.
He appeared to end his presentation by calling for more time. The caustic tone of January 27, when Mr Blix had poured scorn on the idea of inspectors playing a game of "catch as catch can", had gone.
In the private afternoon session that followed, an exasperated Mr Straw challenged Mr Blix to explain why so few scientists would agree to private interviews without witnesses. He then answered his own question: "Because they are in fear of their lives!"
Mr Blix was also repeatedly asked: "Can you say that the Iraqis were showing full active compliance in accordance with 1441?". "He ducked that question," said a senior diplomat present, who added that the chief weapons inspector was simply "hoping against hope". But the damage to the Anglo-American case had already been done.
Mr de Villepin's carefully planned moment of oratory brought the house down. Calling for a further report by inspectors on March 14, he insisted that France would "never cease to stand upright in the face of history and pledged to give "priority to disarmament in peace". The audience and a sizeable section of the press corps, applauded. Mr Powell had been ambushed again.
Mr Blix is back before the UN Security Council again on March 1 at the latest, as part of a timetable linked to a previous Iraq resolution. In British and American eyes, this may well be the last chance for the UN route that began with President Bush's address to the UN on September 12.
If a second resolution is tabled at all, it will come well before the Blix meeting. If the foreign ministers are assembled yet again at that point, it will be to say yes or no to the use of force. But after a traumatic week, President Bush may not wish to wait any longer and Mr Blair may not feel that there is any point.
For now the Resistance is jubilant. Outside the Security Council meeting, a French diplomat joked: "Next we have an EU council meeting on Monday [tomorrow]. If we win the debate there, too, it will be a triple: Nato, the UN and the EU. It's a good week's work."