Anti-war popular stance is growing worldwide, will it bear fruit?

BERLIN, February 2 (IslamOnline & News Agencies) - As the U.N. chief weapons inspectors accepted an invitation to return to Iraq before they give their next report to the Security Council, German commentators are worried that when it comes to the crunch, France will ditch its cosy union with Berlin in favor of a more pragmatic relationship with Washington.

Hans Blix and Mohamed ElBaradei will travel to Baghdad on February 8 for a two-day visit. They are not expected to meet Iraqi President Saddam Hussein, the BBC’s online news service reported.

The statement came one day after U.S. President George W. Bush and U.K. Prime Minister Tony Blair warned that war was just weeks away unless Baghdad complied fully with U.N. demands to disarm.

Iraq has repeated its insistence that it has no weapons of mass destruction and no plans to produce them.

A spokeswoman for the U.N. nuclear watchdog agency, the IAEA, said Blix and ElBaradei announced the visit in a letter to the Iraqi authorities.

“They [Blix and ElBaradei] expressed their readiness to go on this visit to do everything they could to achieve disarmament through inspections,” spokeswoman Melissa Fleming said.

Iraq issued its surprise invitation to the inspectors Thursday.

Blix said he would only go to Baghdad if there was to be a prospect of making real progress in resolving the various issues surrounding the weapons inspections.

According to the BBC, key outstanding issues are the U.N.’s demand to be able to interview Iraqi scientists in private, and to bring U-2 surveillance flights into the inspection process.

The chief weapons inspectors will return to Baghdad just days before they deliver their next interim report to the U.N. Security Council on February 14.

German Worries

U.S. forces intensify preparations for invading Iraq

Meanwhile, suspicions that the promises of Franco-German cooperation on Iraq could be little more than diplomatic-speak bubbled to the surface after an open letter from eight European leaders supporting the United States.

True, French President Jacques Chirac was not among them. Nor was Germany’s Gerhard Schroeder. They had been left out in the cold, according to Agence France-Presse (AFP).

However, it still raised speculation that Berlin, which is now presiding the U.N. Security Council, may find Paris not as faithful a partner as believed.

Unlike Germany, the French government has not ruled out voting in favor of war at the Security Council, nor taking part in any military action.

It has thus left its options open - and the consensus among German analysts was that in the end, Paris will decide what to do based on its own interests, not what Berlin would like.

“I have serious doubts about the France-German entente,” said Klaus-Dieter Schwarz, of the German Institute for International and Security Affairs.

“France has not said ‘no’ (to a war on Iraq) on principle like Germany has. It has oil interests to defend,” he told AFP.

“Paris is leaving its options open,” he added, pointing to the presence in the Gulf of a French aircraft carrier and other vessels.

Other German commentators were equally wary. “When things get serious, Jacques Chirac will be at the side of the United States,” decided the conservative Die Welt, one of the few to welcome the open letter urging solidarity with Washington’s tough stance on Iraq.

It said the letter was a “stop sign” to Schroeder, who it claimed had been using anti-war rhetoric to seek domestic political advantage.

Schroeder’s center-left government scraped through last September’s general election partly thanks to his opposition to war.

Ten days ago, with two key state elections this weekend no doubt uppermost in his mind, he strengthened his position by saying Germany would not vote in favor of military action at the Security Council.

Schroeder “has shut the door and given himself no room for maneuver,” said Guy Teissier, head of the French parliament’s defense committee.

But Chirac “has never categorically ruled out” French support for military action if there was “irrefutable evidence” that Baghdad was hiding weapons of mass destruction, Teissier told AFP.

More Evidence Needed to Pull Trigger

Schroeder will not vote for war

In a separate related development, experts said Sunday, February 2, that reports by U.N. inspectors share common ground with British and U.S. assessments of Iraqi arms violations but more evidence is needed to prove that Baghdad is in material breach of U.N. resolution 1441.

“Certainly in terms of the question marks over precursor chemicals and some of the chemical and biological weapons storage I think there’s quite a lot of common ground there,” military expert Paul Beaver told AFP.

According to Blix, Baghdad failed to account for 6,500 missing chemical warfare bombs and there were “strong indications” that it was producing and storing anthrax.

ElBaradei, for his part, told the U.N. Security Council when he and Blix published their reports on Monday that he had found no evidence that Iraq had revived its nuclear weapons program.

“I think the one area which has been successfully contained is the nuclear side,” said Francis Tusa, editor of Defense Analysis.

The U.S. Central Intelligence Agency last year claimed that Iraq had an active chemical weapons program, energized its missile program, invested more heavily in biological weapons, and was possibly working again on nuclear arms.

A dossier on Iraqi weapons, published by Britain last September, said that Iraq was one or two years from building a nuclear weapon, and had tried to find “significant quantities” of uranium in Africa.

For Tusa, an expert on arms and defense, the only specific area of disagreement between the U.S. and the U.N. inspectors has been over the discovery of aluminum tubes, which could feasibly be adapted into nuclear centrifuges.

ElBaradei, who reckoned they were more likely to be for an artillery system, was “playing that one down really quite heavily,” according to the defense expert.

“I think they’ve got to have that Cuban missile moment,” Tusa said, referring to the moment of truth when the former U.S. ambassador to the U.N. Adlai Stevenson showed the security council satellite pictures of Russian missile launchers in Cuba.

“We’ve got the basic stuff, based on what the Iraqis declare they have, we still can't account for about half of it. If they’re going to persuade people they're going to need pictures or something like that,” Tusa said.

London and Washington have started beating the war-drums but some European nations, notably France and Germany, say they want more time to be given to inspections before a war course is plotted.

The European doubters are “questioning whether or not there is enough evidence to say that Iraq is in material breach of U.N. resolution 1441 and specifically I suppose to justify the U.S. going to war,” said Beaver.

U.S. Secretary of State Colin Powell said he will deliver to the Security Council on Wednesday a “comprehensive” case that Iraq is continuing to defy disarmament demands.

Newsweek magazine reported Saturday that Powell will divulge electronic intercepts made by the National Security Council (NSC) that prove that Iraq has repeatedly lied to UN inspectors and plotted to conceal weapons material.

“It’s up to the Brits and the Americans to produce the smoking gun,” Beaver said, concluding that no incontrovertible evidence of a material breach had yet been uncovered by Blix and ElBaradei.

“Obviously the U.S. and the U.K. believe that there is a smoking gun, whereas Blix is yet to be convinced. I think basically Blix needs more evidence put forward and I don’t think we’ve got that at the moment,” said Beaver.