US secretary of State Colin Powell yesterday played audio tapes of intercepted Iraqi conversations and showed satellite pictures to prove to the UN Security Council that the Iraqi military was conspiring to hide weapons of mass destruction and deceive UN inspectors. Conor O'Clery, at the United Nations, reports.
In an 80-minute, high-powered presentation, Mr Powell for the first time made a detailed American case of possible ties between al-Qaeda and Iraq, and claimed that a group affiliated with a militant Palestinian, Abu Musab Zarqawi, who had trained with al-Qaeda, had been operating freely in Baghdad for eight months.
Mr Powell was strongly supported in his case by the British Foreign Secretary, Mr Jack Straw, but the three other permanent members of the 15-member Security Council, France, Russia and China, all urged that inspections should continue.
The chief weapons inspectors, Dr Hans Blix and Dr Mahamed ElBaradei, will travel to Baghdad this weekend to give the Iraqi government a chance to respond to the charge that they are withholding pro-active co-operation with the UN, as required under resolution 1441. They will report back to the council on February 14th, a date now seen as possibly marking the end of diplomacy and the beginning of a countdown to war, unless there is a dramatic change in Baghdad.
Mr Powell, flanked by Mr George Tenet, head of the CIA, interspersed his delivery with audio tapes and slide presentations. In one exchange played to show the existence of mobile chemical weapons labs, grim-faced council members heard an Iraqi colonel say: "We have this modified vehicle ... What do we say if one of them sees it?". The reaction of the general on the other end of the line appears to be one of incredulity. "You didn't get a modified ... you don't have a modified...I'll come to see you in the morning. I'm worried. You all have something left."
The junior officer replied: "We evacuated everything. We don't have anything left."
Mr Powell said that the intelligence showed that Iraq was in "material breach" of Resolution 1441 and that serious consequences could follow, diplomatic terminology for the use of military force.
"We must not shrink from whatever is ahead of us," he said. "We must not fail in our duty and responsibility to the citizens of the countries that are represented by this body. Saddam Hussein and his regime will stop at nothing until something stops him."
Mr Powell claimed that Saddam Hussein gave orders to sanitize documents referring to "nerve agents" and to clean up chemical weapons sites.
"Our conservative estimate is that Iraq today has a stockpile of between 100 and 500 tonnes of chemical weapons agent. That is enough agent to fill 16,000 battlefield rockets," said Mr Powell.
"Saddam Hussein has investigated dozens of biological agents causing diseases such as gas gangrene, plague, typhus, tetanus, cholera, camelpox and hemorrhagic fever, and he also has the wherewithal to develop smallpox."
He enlarged on US accusations of Iraqi involvement in terrorism, saying there was a "sinister nexus" between Iraq and al-Qaeda, and that al-Qaeda had used Iraq's embassy in Pakistan as a "liaison office".
The reaction of other security council members was cautious. French Foreign Minister Mr Dominique de Villepin said that inspections must continue and Iraq must co-operate.
"Let us triple the number of inspections, open more offices," he said. "If this path fails and leads us into an impasse, we rule out no option, including, as a last resort, the use of force, as we have said all along."
Russian Foreign Minister Mr Igor Ivanov said Mr Powell's information had to be handed over to UN agencies and "the activities of the international inspectors in Iraq must be continued", while China's foreign minister, Mr Tang Jiaxuan, also called for the US intelligence to be used by the inspectors to make their work more effective, a view echoed by council members Germany, Mexico, Angola, Guinea, Syria and Cameroon.
Mr Powell did not say whether he would seek a new resolution from the security council authorising the use of force while. Mr Straw said the time was fast arriving for the Security Council to accept the "inescapable" outcome of its own resolutions.