U.S. Stands Alone In Accusing Iraq Of "Material Breach"

by Thalif Deen

The accusations against Iraq came both from U.S. Secretary of State Colin Powell in Washington and U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations, John Negroponte, in New York.

Powell said the United States has concluded that Iraq's pattern of "non-cooperation, deception and lying" are clearly in "material breach" of a Security Council resolution that obligates its government to fully cooperate with the United Nations in its search for nuclear, biological and chemical weapons in that country.

"I will let the other members of the Security Council make their own judgments," said the secretary of state.

Speaking to reporters after a closed-door meeting of the Council, which was addressed by UN chief arms inspector Hans Blix, Negroponte said the 12,000-page report submitted by Iraq allegedly spelling out its weapons programs fell far short of its obligations to reveal all.

"We are deeply disappointed," he said, and warned Iraq that it has "spurned its last opportunity" to make a full declaration of its weapons programs.

Iraq's voluminous report, Negroponte added, is full of extraneous material and fails to answer scores of questions that have been pending since 1998. "In our view, this constitutes a material breach," he told reporters.

But the U.S. view was not shared by the other four permanent members of the Security Council -- Britain, France, China and Russia.

Despite repeated questions on whether Britain considered Iraq in "material breach," British Ambassador Jeremy Greenstock refused to respond.

He would only say that there are glaring omissions in the Iraqi report and called for "100 percent pro-active cooperation with arms inspectors and the Security Council."

But several academics and Middle East experts reacted strongly to the U.S. accusations against Iraq.

"These are Security Council resolutions that are at stake here, and it is for the Security Council to determine whether or not there has been a material breach of these resolutions," Francis A. Boyle, professor of international law at the University of Illinois College of Law, told IPS.

The administration of President George W. Bush "has no right to deputize itself as the judge, jury and lord high executioner of international law," Boyle added.

Stephen Zunes, associate professor of politics at the University of San Francisco, said that no single member of the Security Council has the authority to declare a government in "material breach" of a Council resolution.

"Only the Security Council as a whole has the authority, as specified in articles 41 and 42 of the UN charter," he added.

Zunes, who is also Middle East editor of the "Foreign Policy in Focus" project, said that authority is reiterated in article 14 of Security Council resolution 1441, adopted in November, which sent arms inspectors back into Iraq for the first time in nearly four years.

It explicitly declares that the Security Council "decides to remain seized of the matter", he explained.

Ambassador Mikhail Wehbe of Syria, one of 10 non-permanent members of the Security Council, told reporters that he refused to participate in Thursday's discussions because the 10 nations were given only a heavily edited version of Iraq's report.

The edited document contained no "sensitive" information from the original, including details in the manufacturing process of nuclear weapons and names of companies that provided weapons to Iraq before 1990, the year it invaded Kuwait.

Last week, Syria also protested against a unilateral decision by the president of the Security Council, Colombian Ambassador Alfonso Valdivieso, to distribute unedited copies of the Iraqi declaration first to the United States, and then to the other four permanent members.

"The U.S. took the Iraqi report after pressuring the Colombian ambassador, and spirited it off to Washington," Phyllis Bennis, fellow at the Washington-based Institute for Policy Studies, told IPS.

"The Bush administration then had sole control of the one full version of the report for almost 24 hours before it provided some version -- we don't know how complete -- to the other permanent members of the Council," she added.

Bennis also pointed out that it was more than a week before the 10 non-permanent members of the Council were provided with a heavily cut version, which amounts to less than one-third of the full report.

"What was excluded was not only the appropriately blacked out how-to-build-a-bomb information, but also all references to international procurement cooperation," she said.

Excluded from the sanitized version were the names of 80 German companies, 24 U.S. corporations, 50 plus U.S. subsidiaries and five departments of the U.S. government -- all involved in Iraq's programs of weapons of mass destruction -- she added.

Blix, head of the UN Monitoring, Verification and Inspection Commission (UNMOVIC), told reporters that "Iraq is cooperating well in terms of process but not in substance".

He said its government needs to supply additional information and clarifications to the report, and that he said he plans to brief the Security Council again by Jan. 27.