FW: Negotiating to Succeed or Sabotage?

[Karen Watters Cole]

2nd attempt:  Below, good background on the US-led UN resolution now being debated or contorted, depending on whether you want it to fail or succeed.  First, commentary on how much political capital the White House spent getting its resolution through a wary Congress:    Oliphant/Bush Victory Cost Plenty.  Excerpt:  “Indeed, even before the votes, the issues that raise questions and doubts started popping up with disturbing frequency.  For example:  It is now a matter of official intelligence community analysis that ''imminent threat'' and Iraq do not belong in the same sentence.  The only justification for their use together would be if Iraq is invaded and Saddam Hussein is desperate enough to use chemical and biological weapons or give a few canisters to terrorists…It is also official doctrine that the Bush administration has given up figuring out how to help install a post-Saddam government mixing Iraqi dissidents from exiled and indigenous opponents.  We ourselves are going to govern Iraq for the indefinite future.  (http://www.boston.com/dailyglobe2/286/oped/Bush_s_victory_cost_plenty+.shtm) l   Also, Why Liberals Should Support the War by Jonathan Chait @ http://www.thenewrepublic.com/doc.mhtml?i=20021021&s=chait102102   Tug of War by Ryan Lizza @ http://www.thenewrepublic.com/doc.mhtml?i=20021021&s=lizza102102 (opening paragraphs) When Hans Blix--the affable septuagenarian Swede who may one day decide if the United States goes to war with Iraq--showed up in Washington last Friday for a meeting with Secretary of State Colin Powell, there were a couple of unexpected attendees in the room.  Blix, the chairman of the U.N. disarmament agency charged with ridding Iraq of its chemical and biological weapons, had come to the State Department to brief the United States on his negotiations with Iraqi officials in Vienna earlier in the week.  But in addition to Powell, Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld's deputy, Paul Wolfowitz, and Dick Cheney's chief of staff, Lewis Libby, joined the meeting as well.  The two men and their bosses are now universally regarded as the most hawkish members of the Bush administration.  And there are few people the hawks trust less these days than Powell and Blix.  So it seems that Cheney and Rumsfeld dispatched some of their own muscle to the meeting.  It may have had the desired effect: Blix announced afterward that, as the Americans requested, he would delay the return of weapons inspectors to Baghdad until the Security Council strengthened his mandate. The hawks have begun asserting control over Powell's U.N. negotiations in other ways too.  Take, for example, one seemingly innocuous line from Bush's speech in Cincinnati on Monday night.  When Bush spoke about what he wanted from a new U.N. resolution, he made the familiar and broadly supported demand that Iraq destroy all its banned weapons and give inspectors unfettered access to all sites.  But he also singled out one specific demand mentioned in the tough U.S. draft resolution, which was the administration's opening bid in negotiations at Turtle Bay.  Bush said that witnesses with knowledge of the regime's weapons programs should be allowed to leave Iraq, along with their families, for interviews with inspectors.  To some Security Council officials, this is the sort of demand that raises questions about Bush's desire to get a deal.  "Whoever put that in there doesn't know much about Mesopotamian families," jokes one Council diplomat, noting that Iraqis have lots of relatives, "or was trying to sabotage the process."  But among U.S. hard-liners, the demand was welcome.  "There were many people who thought that we could give on that," says a U.S. official.  "The president laid down the law that that was one area we're not negotiating on.  That stiffened the State Department negotiators." Still, U.S. policy is far from set.  According to American officials as well as Security Council diplomats, the administration is still debating whether the United States should seek a tough but workable inspections regime or one designed to fail and serve as a predicate for war.  "If your goal is to maximize the chance of useful inspections, you'll do one thing," says an administration official, "but if your goal is to maximize the chance of Saddam saying no so you can invade, you'll do another." Karen Watters Cole - East of Portland, West of Mt Hood Outgoing Mail Scanned by NAV 2002