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Broke missile limits { February 13 2003 } Original Source Link: (May no longer be active)
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A216-2003Feb12.htmlhttp://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A216-2003Feb12.html
Panel: Iraq Broke Limit on Missiles
Finding May Lead to Tough Blix Report
By Colum Lynch and Dana Priest
Washington Post Staff Writers
Thursday, February 13, 2003; Page A01
UNITED NATIONS, Feb. 12 -- A team of international missile experts assembled this week by chief U.N. weapons inspector Hans Blix has concluded that a major Iraqi ballistic missile program is in clear violation of United Nations mandates prohibiting Iraq from building medium- and long-range missiles, U.S. and U.N. officials said today.
The unanimous finding of the team, which included experts from six countries, is expected to set the stage for a confrontation between the Iraqi government and Blix over the probable destruction of Iraq's Al Samoud 2 rocket program. It is also likely to lead Blix to present a tougher assessment of Iraq's cooperation with inspectors at a critical briefing for the U.N. Security Council on Friday.
The Bush administration intends to cite Iraq's ballistic missile program as another justification for the council to declare that Iraq is in violation of its disarmament obligations and that the use of military force is justified, officials said.
Attention on Blix's presentation to the Security Council intensified today as the foreign ministers of Russia, France, China and Germany -- which have been pushing for continued inspections to ward off an early move to war -- announced that they will attend the session. Secretary of State Colin L. Powell said he, too, will travel to New York to challenge the four governments to declare that Iraq has squandered the "final opportunity" to disarm voluntarily that it was granted by the council in a Nov. 8 resolution.
"Nobody wants war, but sometimes it's necessary when you need it to maintain international order," Powell told the House International Relations Committee. "There are some of my European colleagues right now who are resisting the natural flow of this resolution. They want to have more inspectors. More inspectors aren't the issue. The question I put to them is: Why more inspectors and how much more time? Or are you just delaying for the sake of delaying in order to get Saddam Hussein off the hook?"
Powell delivered the most detailed account to date of what he said were U.S. efforts to persuade Iraqi President Saddam Hussein and his inner circle to seek political asylum outside of Iraq.
Powell said the United States is "in touch with a number of countries" in a bid to negotiate a peaceful transition in Baghdad. He suggested that any deal would ultimately require U.N. endorsement to "entice" Hussein and his senior aides to leave the country. "One way to avoid a lot of suffering is for the regime to step down -- Saddam Hussein and his cohorts," Powell said.
CIA Director George J. Tenet, meanwhile, faced a storm of criticism from Democrats on the Senate Armed Services Committee who charged that the administration has sabotaged the U.N. weapons inspections by not fully cooperating with the United Nations. They also accused Tenet of misleading them about the intelligence on Iraqi weapons that the CIA had turned over to the inspections teams.
In testimony before the Senate intelligence committee on Tuesday, Tenet surprised senators by saying that the agency had given U.N. inspectors all the information it had on weapons sites of "high" and "moderate" interest, meaning those sites that are likely to contain weapons or remnants of weapons. Today, Tenet told the Senate defense panel that he had been wrong. In fact, he said, there are "one handful of sites which may not have been known" to the U.N. inspectors.
Blix and Mohamed ElBaradei, the head of the International Atomic Energy Agency, have pressed the Bush administration to provide timely and accurate intelligence on Iraqi chemical, biological and nuclear weapons sites. U.S. officials maintain that they have, although the inspectors have raised questions about the quality of some of the U.S. intelligence.
Sen. Carl M. Levin (D-Mich.) challenged Tenet's statements in an interview after the testimony, saying the CIA director continued to mislead lawmakers on the extent of the agency's cooperation. Levin cited classified letters from the CIA dated Jan. 24 and Jan. 28 in which the CIA said it had not shared information about what he characterized as "a large number of sites" of "significant" value. Levin said the CIA informed him on Tuesday that it planned to hand over more information within the next few days. "When they've taken the position that inspections are useless, they are bound to fail," Levin said. "We have undermined the inspectors since the beginning."
Iraq admitted in a recent declaration to the weapons inspectors that it had developed two missiles, the Al Samoud 2 and the Al Fatah, and that they narrowly exceeded the U.N.-imposed limit of 150 kilometers (93 miles) in dozens of tests flights. Iraq maintains that the missiles will not exceed the limit when they are weighted down with conventional explosives and guidance systems. "Iraq declared that the missiles are of a range of less than 150 kilometers," said Mohammed Douri, Iraq's ambassador to the United Nations. "If that's the case, no one can ask us to destroy them."
Blix told the Security Council on Jan. 27 that the two missile programs "might well represent prima facie cases of proscribed systems." Blix ordered Iraq to freeze the programs until he could convene a panel of experts.
The panel, which included missile experts from the United States, Britain, France, Ukraine, Germany and China, concluded that the Al Samoud is capable of exceeding the U.N. limit. But panel members were unable to agree on whether the Al Fatah -- a solid-fuel missile that Iraq admits reached 100 miles in a test -- is in violation of U.N. resolutions.
The limit on Iraqi ballistic missiles was set under the terms of the 1991 cease-fire agreement that ended the Persian Gulf War. That agreement also barred Iraq from producing biological, chemical and nuclear weapons.
The missile limit was intended to prevent Iraq from developing missiles capable of threatening its neighbors while enabling it to defend itself from attack. U.N. diplomats and missile experts maintain that the current ranges of Iraq's missiles do not significantly alter the military balance in the region. But U.S. and U.N. officials say they are concerned that the missile programs may be part of a long-term effort to significantly extend the range of Iraqi missiles.
"My understanding is that one of the two missiles that is being analyzed definitely has a capacity that exceeds the range of 150 kilometers," said John D. Negroponte, the U.S. ambassador to the United Nations. "That is something that our own intelligence sources have been telling us for months. But, apparently, now it's a matter of agreement among the experts."
In the latest indication of Baghdad's mixed record of cooperation, U.N. inspectors were permitted today to destroy a declared stockpile of mustard gas and artillery shells at a former weapons site in Al Mutanna, 90 miles north of Baghdad. But U.N. efforts to conduct an unmonitored interview with a biologist failed after the scientist refused to be questioned without the presence of an Iraqi official.
Priest reported from Washington. Staff writer Glenn Kessler in Washington contributed to this report.
© 2003 The Washington Post Company
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