U.S. Miscalculation Would Throw Region into Turmoil: King Abdullah
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“It would be a tremendous mistake if U.S. officials ignored warnings from abroad against attacking Iraq” |
WASHINGTON,
August 1 (IslamOnline & News Agencies) - It would be a
“tremendous mistake” if U.S. officials ignored warnings from
abroad against attacking Iraq, Jordan’s King Abdullah said in an
interview published Thursday, August 1, in The Washington Post.
On the same day, U.N. Secretary General Koffi Annan warned U.S.
military strikes on Iraq would be unwise.
“In
all the years I have seen in the international community, everybody is
saying this is a bad idea,” the king told the daily a day ahead of
his meeting Thursday at the White House with President George W. Bush.
“If
it seems America says we want to hit Baghdad, that’s not what
Jordanians think, or the British, the French, the Russians, the
Chinese and everybody else,” he added.
Speaking
while the Senate Foreign Relations committee held hearings on
assessing the Iraqi threat, King Abdullah dismissed some U.S.
officials’ belief that a democratic Iraq would improve prospects for
a Middle East peace.
“Our
concern is exactly the opposite, that a miscalculation in Iraq would
throw the whole area into turmoil,” he said, adding that an invasion
of Iraq could splinter the country and spread across the Middle East.
He
also said he found “somewhat amusing” reports that U.S. military
planners envisioned using Jordan as a staging area for troops fighting
Iraq.
His
foreign minister said Jordan had made it clear it refuses to be a
“launching pad.”
The
king said U.S. officials were mistaking reluctance on the part of U.S.
allies to confront the Bush administration over Iraq as support for an
attack, adding that the allies may have believed the prospect of war
was distant.
“All
of the sudden this thing is moving to the horizon much closer than we
believed,” he added.
Instead
of declaring war on Iraq’s Saddam Hussein, King Abdullah said he
would rather make an all out effort to get Iraq to agree to new
weapons inspectors.
“If
we were to get a proper inspection regime, that would give us some
room to maneuver,” he said.
Meanwhile,
in Dubai, U.N. Secretary General Koffi Annan warned Thursday the
United States against military action to remove Iraqi President Saddam
Hussein saying new strikes would not be “wise”, AFP reported.
“I
think my position is very clear since I have spoken on the subject
several times,” Annan told the Arabic newspaper Al-Hayat
after the leaking of the latest in a long list of reported U.S.
military plots to overthrow the regime.
“I
have said that striking Iraq would not be wise,” Annan stressed.
The
U.S. policy of ousting Saddam “is not the U.N.’s (policy) and the
Security Council has taken no decision about this,” he said.
Annan
added that he had “neither the desire nor the mandate to prepare the
ground for military action” against Iraq.
But
he ruled out a re-run of his trip to Baghdad in February 1998 when he
negotiated a last-minute deal to allow U.N. weapons inspectors access
to sensitive “presidential” sites and avoid punitive U.S. and
British air strikes.
“I
have no plans to visit Baghdad for the time being,” the U.N. chief
said.
Iraq on Wednesday, July 31, renewed a call to the Security Council to seek a
“comprehensive settlement” of outstanding issues rather than
merely insist on the return of arms monitors, who fled on the eve of a
December 1998 air blitz on Baghdad for failing to cooperate with the
U.N. arms body.
Baghdad
resumed dialogue with the world body in March after a year-long freeze
and has demanded the lifting of the sanctions imposed in 1990 for
invading Kuwait.
However
Annan and Iraqi Foreign Minister Naji Sabri made no headway in the
last round of talks in early July.
“We
had a lot of discussion on disarmament but the Iraqi delegation did
not have a mandate to go forward. So I suggested the Iraqi delegation
hold consultations and then tell me what its government wishes to
do,” Annan told the daily.
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