Having persuaded the Russians and the French to drop their objections, there are many provisions in the resolution which the US will be able to invoke to justify military action on grounds that the Iraqis are impeding UN arms inspections, he explains.
Baghdad may “find it hard to comply” with some of the stipulations ­ such as those providing for Iraqi scientists and officials to be removed from Iraq for interrogation; for arms inspectors to have immediate access to all sites without forewarning; for UN protection forces to accompany them; and for exclusion zones to be declared that are off-limits to the government, Atwan says.
With the US administration of President George W. Bush making no secret of its intention to install a client regime in power in Iraq to serve as its new lynch pin in the region, “we can therefore expect war to be declared at any moment and under any pretext,” according to Atwan.

“The Iraqi leadership will find itself in a difficult position by any standard,” he continues. “It has seven days to accept the new resolution, and 30 days to start implementing it. It won’t find any support from its friends in Moscow, Paris, Beijing or even the Arab capitals if it decides to reject it. Nor will they come to its aid if it sips the poisoned chalice and then cries foul at the provocations that it will face in the days to come.
“French President Jacques Chirac has advised Iraq to make use of the last chance, i.e. to accept the resolution. That means he has raised the white flag, done all he can, and has left Iraq to face its fate alone. This is a new game of nations, its victims a people who have been under siege for over a decade, and whose only crime is to be sitting on top of a lake of crude oil.”
Atwan says it is hard to second-guess the Iraqi leadership’s response to the resolution’s adoption by the Security Council. But even if it reacts “in the most positive way possible, that will perhaps postpone the war by some weeks or months, but there is no guarantee that it will prevent it.” Even if Baghdad cooperates meticulously with the arms inspectors, Washington “will not lack means and excuses for contriving a crisis.” Its agents could stage an armed attack on the inspectors in Iraq, to furnish a pretext for military intervention. Or the US could demand that Iraqi military commanders and political leaders be handed over for questioning ­ “or even Saddam Hussein himself, not to mention searching his palaces and bedrooms.” But whatever the Iraqi leadership decides to do, Atwan says it should not count on help from its Arab “brethren.”

Talal Salman, publisher of the Beirut daily As-Safir, agrees. He doubts the Arab foreign ministers, who are due to meet in Cairo on Sunday, will do anything more than “rubber stamp” the US-authored Security Council resolution.
He writes that the attitude of the Arab states explains why, in addressing the issue of weapons of mass destruction, Washington treats Iraq and North Korea so differently. When asked to explain the contrast, Bush replied diplomatically that the two cases were different, and the US was dealing quietly with the issue of North Korea’s nuclear arms program and was being assisted in its endeavors by the country’s neighbors.

“With North Korea,” Bush told a news conference, “we’re taking a different strategy initially, and it’s this: that we’re going to work with countries in the neighborhood to convince North Korea that it is not in the world’s interest that they develop a nuclear weapon.”
“In Iraq’s case, neither the assistance nor even the opinion of ‘the neighbors’ is sought,” Salman remarks, for the US only speaks to them “in the language of steel and fire.”
In one of Iraq’s Arab “neighbors,” Yemen, it has taken to assassinating the country’s citizens in broad daylight with the (possibly retroactive) approval of the government. In Kuwait, it has demanded that the authorities round up weapons held by citizens since the end of the Iraq invasion. In Saudi Arabia, it has “imposed a number of provocative police measures,” while “blackmailing” the ruling family and putting pressure on it to drop its resistance to the use of Saudi bases for an attack on Iraq.

The cooperation of Bahrain, Qatar and Oman in any war on Iraq is taken for granted by the US, Salman continues. And while two days ago Washington publicly apologized to Syria because one of its warplanes operating over Iraq violated Syrian air space, “Jordan’s air space is violated with its approval, and there is no need for apologies. As for Egypt, its opinion is not asked. When it is offered, it is ignored.
“Other than the apology to Syria, made necessary because of the war preparations, the Bush administration has shown no respect for Iraq’s Arab ‘neighbors,’ and by extension the Turks and the Iranians, whose declarations have been open to multiple interpretations and not final,” Salman writes.

Consequently, Sunday’s meeting of Arab League foreign ministers is set to be inconsequential, “unless its purpose is to sanction the (essentially American) UN resolution, which they will henceforth be able to claim they tried to prevent but failed, although they succeeded in getting their ‘friends’ to soften it.”

Raghida Dergham, New York bureau chief of the Saudi-run pan-Arab daily Al-Hayat, writes that the “hidden trigger” for war in the resolution could be the requirement that Baghdad provide a full accounting of all its proscribed weapons programs within 30 days.
If Baghdad continues saying it has already provided such an accounting, it will not be believed. But if it “discovers” information it had concealed, that will be held up as proof of its evasive and deceitful behavior, she remarks. Moreover, UNMOVIC chief Hans Blix has placed the burden of proof on the Baghdad government to provide evidence that it has destroyed its weapons programs, and to “produce everything it has voluntarily,” rather than respond to queries from the inspections teams.

Dergham says that the resolution stipulates that if the declaration Iraq makes about its weapons programs is incomplete or unconvincing, that would constitute a “material breach” of the resolution, warranting military action. The clause could serve the purposes of the hawks in the Bush administration in another way, she writes.

Washington has indicated that serious arms inspections in Iraq will not begin until after Baghdad has made its declaration, Dergham explains. Blix may send a preliminary team to Iraq in a few weeks time, but inspections proper won’t start for 30 days. Their commencement will be contingent on the declaration being deemed satisfactory. That means that if the Bush administration decides that the account the Iraqis have given is inadequate, the arms inspectors may not go back to Iraq at all.

Dergham contends that this is “central to the thinking” of Vice-President Dick Cheney, Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld and his assistant Paul Wolfowitz. They oppose allowing the arms inspections to resume, as they fear the very presence of weapons inspectors in Iraq could jeopardize their plans to launch an invasion.

She says Blix played into their hands by appearing to agree to defer the return of the inspectors until after Baghdad makes its declaration ­ even though he had the authority to send them in immediately. Other members of the Security Council were surprised that Blix took the Americans’ side on this and other issues, thereby holding the resumption of arms inspections “hostage” to Washington’s verdict on the Iraqi declaration, “and tacitly agreeing to the hidden agenda of the hard-line current within the Bush administration.”
Dergham warns that Blix will be judged harshly if he proves to have helped block the resumption of arms inspections: “He may be accused of using the entry of arms inspectors into Iraq in the same way that Richard Butler used their withdrawal in (December) 1998 ­ namely, to facilitate Anglo-American military designs.” But if he decides not to defer to the “sequence” the Americans have in mind, he could yet “help fulfill the wishes of those who see the resumption of arms inspections with Iraq’s full and complete cooperation as the only way of averting the specter of a war.”

Some may argue that UNMOVIC doesn’t have time to resume full-scale operations in Iraq before 30 days are up, and that the dispatch of the small preliminary team amounts to the resumption of arms inspections. “But this will not be convincing,” according to Dergham, “first because UNMOVIC has been preparing its return for two years, and secondly because the political agenda behind the ‘sequencing’ demand is so obvious.”

In Baghdad, a commentator in the weekend edition of the Baath Party newspaper Al-Thawra says the US resolution is not aimed at verifying Iraq’s disarmament but at “contriving a pretext for aggression against Iraq.” Washington has sought to include clauses in it that “make cooperation between Iraq and the arms inspectors impossible, and thus give it an opportunity to resort to the so-called automatic use of force,” writes Sami Mahdi.

The US seeks to turn the arms inspectors into “armed gangs” that engage in espionage, provocation and violation of Iraq’s sovereignty, “so as to prevent any problem that arises between Iraq and UNMOVIC from being resolved through cooperation and understanding, and turn any such problem into noncompliance or defiance of Security Council resolutions, as a pretext for its attended aggression,” he says.