-Caveat Lector- http://www.islam-online.net/English/News/2002-10/26/article86.shtml
Bush Rejects Any U.N. Resolution Curtailing War Ability 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. <A HREF="http://www.ctrl.org/";>www.ctrl.org</A> DECLARATION & DISCLAIMER ========== CTRL is a discussion & informational exchange list. Proselytizing propagandic screeds are unwelcomed. Substance—not soap-boxing—please! 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