Powell: “There are problems with the declaration.”

WASHINGTON, December 17 (IslamOnline & News Agencies) – Warning the document was Baghdad’s “last chance” to come clean before the military option kicks in, the United States voiced skepticism over Iraq’s U.N. weapons declaration.

“We’ve said since the very beginning that we approach it with skepticism, and the information I’ve received so far is that this skepticism is well founded,” U.S. Secretary of State Colin Powell said Monday, December 16, echoing doubts already expressed by close ally Britain.

“There are problems with the declaration,” he said, underscoring what many observers believe is a crucial part of the disarmament resolution, a provision which requires Iraq to make its scientists involved in weapons programs available for interview - outside Iraq if necessary, Agence France-Presse (AFP) reported.

Those passages are seen by some analysts as a possible trigger for a U.S. military operation against Iraq if it refuses to comply.

“The resolution, 1441, provides for those who need to be interviewed to be made available,” Powell said.

“If Iraq does not comply with that requirement of the resolution, I’m sure the international community will take note and decide what action is appropriate,” he added.

In Washington, Powell’s comments were seen as the first preliminary evaluation of the 12,000-page Iraqi declaration, filed in response to a U.N. Security Council demand for Iraq to reveal its (alleged) nuclear, chemical and biological weapons stocks.

Powell’s criticism of the declaration paralleled that of British experts who have dismissed it as “very disappointing.”

Citing a senior British official, the Financial Times of London said the document is riddled with omissions, leaving many questions unanswered.

The White House, meanwhile, insisted Iraq would not get the chance to correct any errors or omissions in its arms declaration.

“It was abundantly plain, from the will of the United Nations, that this was Iraq's last chance to inform the world in an accurate complete and full way what weapons of mass destruction they possessed,” said White House spokesman Ari Fleischer.

U.S. President George W. Bush has threatened to disarm Iraq by force if it refuses to give up alleged weapons of mass destruction peacefully, and the United States on Monday continued to beef up its military deployment in the Gulf, using the tiny emirate of Qatar as command headquarters.

Bush could announce the formal U.S. response to Iraq’s declaration of its weapons programs in a few days’ time, White House officials have said, BBC’s online news service reported.

Powell said Washington’s official response on the document would be forthcoming towards the end of this week, after the chief U.N. weapons inspector Hans Blix makes his presentation on the 12,000 page document to the Security Council.

According to the BBC, nothing has yet been set in stone, but it looks as if Bush himself will deliver America’s unfavorable verdict on the Iraqi document.

It’s understood that one of the problems that America will highlight is Iraq’s failure to account for chemical and biological agents the country still possessed when the last inspectors left in 1998.

Meanwhile, the first samples collected by inspectors in Iraq have arrived at a laboratory in Austria run by the U.N. nuclear agency, where they will be analyzed for any traces of a nuclear weapons program.

An initial analysis of the eight samples will take two to three weeks, a spokesman for the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) said. Another 20 samples are expected by the weekend.

In a separate related development, members of a U.S. team led by Washington's point man on regime change in Baghdad, Zalmay Khalilzad, prodded the disparate opposition groups to strike a deal seen as a necessary part of the U.S. campaign against Iraq.

The opposition groups, trying to forge a joint strategy on their nation's future, moved a step nearer their goal on the third day of the U.S.-brokered talks in the British capital with a decision to expand a key committee after two days of wrangling on the body’s composition.

The “follow-up and coordination committee,” designed to serve as the opposition groups’ mouthpiece in dealings with the international community, will now include at least 61 members.

However, the rivalries that continue to plague the Iraqi opposition were clear from the conflicting off-the-record explanations of the delay in forming the committee, which is supposed to liaise between dissident groups and represent them in talks with world and regional leaders.

The U.S.-backed conference of Iraqi opposition groups, due to end Tuesday, issued a “political declaration” calling for turning a post-Saddam Hussein Iraq into a democratic federal state free of weapons of mass destruction.

The declaration envisages a “democratic, parliamentary, pluralistic and federal state” calling for the participation of “all components of the Iraqi people” in the decision-making process.