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Bush &
Zemin
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CRAWFORD,
Texas, October 25 (IslamOnline & News Agencies) – U.S. President
George W. Bush said Friday October 25, that he would reject any U.N.
resolution that curtails his ability to take military action to disarm
Iraq if the world body fails to do so.
"We
won't accept a resolution which prevents us from doing exactly what I
have told the American people is going to happen, and that is if the
U.N. won't act, and if (Iraqi Saddam Hussein) Saddam won't disarm, we
will lead a coalition to disarm him," he told reporters after
talks here with Chinese President Jiang Zemin, reported Agence
France-Presse (AFP).
The
United States took a procedural step Friday towards putting a draft
resolution on Iraq to a vote in the U.N. Security Council, to avoid
being outflanked in maneuvers by France and Russia.
At
the request of U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations, John Negroponte,
the Council secretariat published the U.S. draft in final form as the
15-member council met for a second full round of consultations.
Diplomats
said the move "surprised and disappointed" the French
ambassador, Jean-David Levitte, and his Russian counterpart, Sergei
Lavrov, who had managed to extract important concessions from
Negroponte in earlier negotiations that were restricted to the five,
veto-carrying permanent members.
To
push the argument yet further their way, Levitte distributed a heavily
edited version of the U.S. draft late Thursday October 24, while
Lavrov circulated yet another text before consultations began.
Diplomats
noted that neither man presented his document as an alternative draft
for the Council to vote on, but they said Negroponte seemed anxious to
preempt the possibility of that happening.
Putting
a draft resolution into blue -- so-called from the color of the print
-- is usually done immediately before a vote, when the sponsors feel
they have exhausted the negotiating process, but diplomats said a vote
on the U.S. draft was still days away.
"Nobody
in that room, on this sort of subject, can move without their
capitals," one diplomat told reporters as the Council adjourned
for lunch after three hours of consultations behind closed doors.
"It's
not ultimatum day, people haven't been asked to declare their votes
and they are not declaring their votes," the diplomat added.
"The
text going into blue was just a signal that it is the focus for our
negotiations, it does not mean instant voting."
Only
nine of the 15 members spoke in Friday's morning session, and a
diplomat said the council was not expected to get into detailed
line-by-line negotiations until after it had been briefed on Monday by
the chief U.N. arms inspector, Hans Blix.
Blix
heads the U.N. Monitoring, Verification and Inspection Commission
(UNMOVIC), which is charged under a three-year-old Council resolution
with supervising the destruction of Iraq's alleged chemical and
biological weapons and its long-range missiles.
Neither
UNMOVIC nor the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA), tasked with
investigating Iraq's alleged nuclear weapons program, has been able to
carry out inspections for four years.
The
U.S. draft resolution would order Iraq to let inspections begin within
45 days and give the inspectors wider powers than before, but Lavrov
said these were "unimplementable and unrealistic".
Diplomats
said, however, that most of the discussion on Friday morning focused
on U.S. drafting which would declare Iraq "in material
breach" of its obligations under Council Resolution 687, defining
the terms of the February 1991 ceasefire which ended the Gulf War.
In
diplomatic parlance, that expression would relieve other parties to
the ceasefire of their obligations, legal experts say, and could
therefore be construed as giving a green light for an immediate
military attack on Iraq.
As
consultations got underway, U.S. diplomats handed reporters a fact
sheet recalling that eight previous Council resolutions, adopted
between August 1991 and June 1993, had found Iraq in material breach
of its obligations.
Eleven
formal statements adopted by the Council had also used the expression,
the fact sheet said.
"The
question now remains, are these past resolutions and these past
presidential statements merely words, or are we going to have a United
Nations that is willing to enforce them?" Negroponte's spokesman
Richard Grenell asked.
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