Powers to get full Iraq dossier

UNITED NATIONS/BAGHDAD - The UN decided yesterday to give the United States, Britain, France, Russia and China an uncut copy of Iraq's arms dossier, in a reversal of an earlier Security Council decision, diplomats said.

A quiet deal was struck to override a Friday ruling of the full 15-member council, which feared that technical secrets on the manufacture of nuclear, biological or chemical weapons might pass into the wrong hands if the full document was circulated.

After weekend discussions involving UN weapons experts and diplomats of the United States and the four other permanent members of the council -- all nuclear powers already -- it was agreed to let the five have all 12,000 pages, diplomats said.

"The goal (earlier) was to keep the information out of the hands of those who might be able to use the information to make bombs. But those of us who already know how wouldn't learn anything from the full document," a diplomat from a permanent council member said.

UN experts in New York and Vienna began studying the dossier yesterday to judge whether it said enough to satisfy UN demands for disarmament and perhaps to avert war with the United States.

Hours after the arms declaration arrived at the UN headquarters in New York, UN inspectors resumed their searches of suspect sites in Iraq, returning to a complex that was at the heart of previous efforts to make a nuclear bomb.

Washington stressed it would wait to see what was in the document flown from Baghdad on Sunday.

But US officials say they have their own evidence of continuing Iraqi nuclear, biological or chemical programmes and insist Washington will take military action if necessary to rid Iraq of them.

Iraq says the dossier, not yet made public, shows it has no weapons of mass destruction -- an assertion that puts it on a collision course with Washington.

Strikes on Iraq are among the military scenarios to be tested in a major US war game that began on Monday in the Gulf Arab state of Qatar, site of General Tommy Franks' new mobile headquarters for US Central Command.

US Deputy Secretary of State Richard Armitage said however President George W. Bush had "patience".

"He would much prefer to have Iraq disarm herself," he told reporters during a visit to Tokyo. "But, as the president said, if Iraq won't disarm, then eventually, Iraq will be disarmed."

A top aide to President Saddam Hussein hinted on Sunday that Iraq once came close to making a nuclear bomb. He invited the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) to decide for itself how close.

"We have the complete documentation from design to all the other things. We haven't reached the final assembly of a bomb nor tested it," Amir al-Saadi told journalists.

"It is for the IAEA to judge how close we were," he said, adding: "If I tell you we were close, it is subjective."

IAEA spokesman Mark Gwozdecky told Reuters in Vienna on Monday that this statement "was consistent with what we found between 1991 and 1998" and was no surprise to the UN agency.

"We never speculate about how close Iraq might been to actually having a weapon," he added.

The arms inspectors, who resumed work in Iraq last month for the first time in four years, on Monday searched al-Tuweitha Nuclear Research Centre, 20km south of Baghdad, for the third time since their arrival.

Other experts inspected a military industrial complex near the town of Fallujah 90km northwest of Baghdad, repeatedly investigated by the UN and bombed by Western warplanes in the 1990s as a suspected chemical weapons centre.

Asked about estimates the inspection process could take up to a year, IAEA Director General Mohamed ElBaradei said in Tokyo: "I think that's accurate."

The UN ordered Iraq to destroy its weapons of mass destruction after Baghdad's 1990 invasion of oil-rich neighbour Kuwait. Iraqi troops were ousted in the 1991 Gulf War.

Even before Iraq's dossier was delivered or seen, the White House insisted it had evidence, not given to UN weapons inspectors, that Iraq had retained or even accelerated arms programmes in the four years since inspectors left Iraq.

Three top Iraqi opposition leaders held talks in Tehran on Monday believed intended to salvage a long-delayed meeting of opponents of Saddam due to start in London this week. It might restore the opposition's image, tarnished by internal feuding.

Ahmad Chalabi, head of the pro-Western Iraqi National Congress (INC) met Iran-based Ayatollah Mohammad Baqir Hakim, who claims to represent Iraq's Shi'ite Muslims, and Iraqi Kurdish leader Massoud Barzani.

The arms inspectors must report to the Security Council by January 26 under UN resolution 1441, which threatens Iraq with "serious consequences" if it fails to comply. They can, however, report any Iraqi violations sooner.

- REUTERS

Herald feature: Iraq