White House Dismisses Iraq Offer for Weapons Inspection
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The White House
rejected calls by Iraq for U.S. lawmakers to see whether the
regime possesses any weapons banned by U.N. resolutions
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PITTSBURGH, Pennsylvania, August 6 (IslamOnline & News Agencies) - The White House Monday, August 5, dismissed outright an invitation from Baghdad to the U.S. Congress for a fact-finding team to investigate any Iraqi development of weapons of mass destruction, following a similar rejection by the U.N. office in charge of inspections.
“There is no need for discussions,” spokesman Sean McCormack said as U.S. President George W. Bush was to address a group of miners who survived being trapped in a flooded coal mine for three days.
“What there is a need for is for Iraq to live up to its commitment to disarm. It is also important to note that inspections were never intended as an end in itself, but as a means to an end.”
Bush has repeatedly vowed to oust the regime of President Saddam Hussein and threatened military strikes if U.N. weapons inspectors are not allowed to return.
The invitation was passed to both Republican House Speaker Dennis Hastert and Democratic Senate Majority Leader Tom Daschle from Poland, which represents U.S. interests in Iraq.
Speaker Saadun Hammadi invited U.S. Congress members to come to Baghdad for a three-week visit with "nuclear, chemical and biological (NCB) experts" to check that U.S. government claims "are not true."
He promised to provide the U.S. team with “all facilities it will need” to inspect plants and workshops which, according to Washington, “produce or plan to produce chemical and biological weapons even if they [the alleged sites] are buried underground.”
The fact-finding team could “bring with it information provided by your [U.S.] government on the false claims that Iraq has produced chemical and biological weapons and is about to produce nuclear arms,” Hammadi said in the letter, carried by the official INA news agency from Baghdad.
A congressional visit would allow U.S. lawmakers to “take an objective decision” on any military campaign against Iraq, he said.
Hammadi highlighted the main problem between Baghdad and Washington as the “absence of dialogue as well as the fact that your Congress and the American people do not have the chance of knowing the truth [about Iraq] as it is.”
There was no immediate response from U.S. lawmakers about the offer from Iraq, which was included in Bush’s so-called “axis of evil,” along with Iran and North Korea.
However, members of Congress have said that Bush, who has much work to do to sell the country, allies and Iraq’s neighbors on the need to use force to oust the Iraqi leader, should make the case to them before sending the U.S. military after Saddam, reports news agencies.
But Sen. Joseph Biden (D-Del), chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, believes that, eventually, there will be a war with Iraq.
“I believe there probably will be a war with Iraq,” he said. “The only question is, is it alone, is it with others and how long and how costly will it be?”
The invitation comes on the heels of a similar offer tended to chief U.N. weapons inspector Hans Blix, who heads the U.N. Monitoring, Verification and Inspection Commission (UNMOVIC), and members of his team to discuss the possible resumption of arms monitoring in Iraq, interrupted since 1998.
Blix resoundingly rejected the invitation, but U.N. Secretary General Kofi Annan said Monday that he hoped to have an answer for Baghdad later in the day.
U.N. resolutions have explicitly barred Iraq from developing weapons of mass destruction and their delivery systems since the 1991 Gulf War, but monitoring efforts have been halted since U.N. inspectors withdrew from the country in 1998 on the eve of a punitive U.S.-British blitz.
Earlier Monday, U.S. and British warplanes monitoring a no-fly zone over Iraq bombed an air defense command and control facility in the south of the country in retaliation for Iraqi anti-aircraft fire at coalition aircraft, the U.S. military said.
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