THE US: The US is going for consensus at the UN but, as Secretary of State Colin Powell told Conor O'Clery in Washington yesterday, it refuses to be "handcuffed" in its approach to Iraq.
Even as he prepared to give his daughter away at her wedding last weekend, Colin Powell was working the telephone to try to get UN Security Council agreement on a tough new resolution on disarming Iraq. He was negotiating "up to 10 minutes before my daughter's wedding on Saturday - the phone was only shut down when I started down the aisle," he said.
The US Secretary of State offered this insight into how the issue has come to dominate his time during an interview with six foreign correspondents from Security Council countries, including The Irish Times, in the State Department in Washington yesterday.
Mr Powell appeared keen to emphasise how seriously America took into account the views of other Security Council members, after six weeks of negotiations mainly with France and Russia.
"I've spent an enormous amount of time working with all of my colleagues in the international community to build bridges between different positions so I think we have demonstrated that we do have a high regard for the opinion of other nations and we try to accommodate those opinions," he said.
"At the same time we hope that our friends will try to listen to our views and try to accommodate our views".
One unshakable view held by the US, however, is that America will not feel obliged - "handcuffed" as Mr Powell put it yesterday - to wait for a second UN resolution before taking military action against Iraq, if the US considers that Baghdad is in material breach of a new inspections regime. France, in particular, in the 15-member council has argued that if weapons inspectors find Iraq in breach while carrying out a tough new inspection regime, then the matter should be referred back to the Security Council to decide on war or peace.
The draft text of the US resolution which may be tabled this week offers a compromise, an immediate meeting of the Security Council to "consider" the situation, with an option to other members to put forward new resolutions if they liked.
I asked Mr Powell what he would say to nations among the 10 elected members, such as Ireland and Mexico, with similar reservations, and whose votes could be critical for the majority of nine for a US resolution to succeed.
"The one resolution that we are working on now is not a resolution that forces the UN to take military action in the presence of Iraqi violations," he said. "Ireland, Mexico, a number of other nations in the Security Council, France, China, Russia, others, wanted an opportunity for the security council to debate what the international community or what the Security Council should do in the presence of Iraqi violations. The resolution we are working on does that.
"It says that if there is a continued show of intransigence on the part of Iraq and the inspectors are unable to do their job, this gets referred to the Security Council for the council to discuss, debate, and the council may chose to pass another resolution.
"The United States, as part of the council, will participate in that debate but we have to structure the resolution in a way that while this process is ongoing, the United States is not handcuffed. So that if at the end of whatever the Security Council decides to do, or in the process it looks like the Security Council will not chose to act, the United States is not handcuffed, if the United States feels that, with other like-minded nations, action is required.
"This is not an unprecedented scenario. Kosovo happened this way when the United States and like-minded nations believed it was necessary to act in the presence of this emergency."
As for the key question of who decides if Iraq is in material breach of new inspections, and if the United States could decide this unilaterally, Mr Powell said that this was one of the points on which agreement had not yet been reached in the UN. "What constitutes a material breach" and whether that was "an immediate trigger" for war "or just an occasion to send it to the council for discussion" was still being discussed, he said.
"We believe that Iraq now is in material breach, has been in material breach. So material breach is there. We also believe that there is a precedent for determining a new material breach or a future material breach if you look at resolution 707 in 1991. It says, in the presence at that time of Iraqi intransigence, that if Iraq fails to provide information or if Iraq is not in compliance, that is a fact which constitutes material breach. It's 11 years old. And so we think that's not a bad precedent."
While emphasising more than once that the US would not be "handcuffed", Mr Powell emphasised strongly the concern of Washington to compromise with other Security Council nations - in marked contrast to the tone struck by US President George Bush, who has threatened repeatedly that if the UN did not go along with the US its fate would be the same as that of the pre-war League of Nations. "This is a case where I think the international community is coming together," he said. "Everybody who is concerned about this issue over the summer has been wondering what the United States is going to do. We heard all sorts of commentary about unilateralism, about going off on our own, about cowboy-ism." Some nations like Germany felt the situation was bad but did not warrant military action. Others wanted the Security Council to convene again to decide. "We have tried to accommodate all those positions," he said, but "if the UN doesn't step up to its responsibility in this regard, I think it's the UN that will look bad and not the United States."
Pressed by a French correspondent about a timetable for action, Mr Powell said, "You're trying to get me to say when is the deadline to go to war. This is not a resolution for war. This is a resolution to try to resolve a crisis".
Would the present timeline mean that there would be no war this year, I asked him. "Everybody keeps looking for war, we keep looking for peace," he said. "I know that's the question on the minds of your readers, but the United States is trying to put forward a resolution that will find a peaceful solution and we will see whether or not we will have war or peace based on what Iraq does or does not do."