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...Zahawie, who had been Iraq's ambassador to the Vatican until 2000, President Bush's statement suggested an unlikely coincidence. The Iraq diplomat had, in 1999, visited Niger - a large-scale producer of yellowcake - during an unsuccessful tour to persuade African leaders to break the UN embargo and visit Iraq. "Could it be the same trip?" he wondered. But he tried to let it pass. After all, he had been in the Foreign Service since 1955, since the days of the monarchy, had no affiliation to any political movement and was generally respected in the diplomatic community. But al-Zahawie...
...been sent to Niger - as well as Benin, Burkina-Faso and Congo-Brazzaville - he explains, as part of an effort to convince African heads of state to visit Iraq. Such visits would break the embargo on flights to the country, and Baghdad hoped this would undermine the UN sanctions regime. The inspiration for the project, al-Zahawie suspects, had been recent visits by African leaders to Libyan leader Muammar Ghadafi, which had broken the embargo on flights to that country...
...National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice this week has been that Kay's group needs a lot more time to find WMD evidence. U.S. and British officials are also insisting that the belief that Saddam's regime maintained stocks of weapons of mass destruction had been conventional wisdom at the UN before the war - a point contested by former chief UN weapons inspector Hans Blix, who insists that what the UN inspection team maintained was not the existence of prohibited weapons per se, but rather that Iraq had failed to provide satisfactory answers to questions over its claims to have destroyed...
...fate of Iraq's WMD programs remains a mystery that Kay's group will pursue. But the absence of evidence of an imminent threat helps explain the disconnect between the U.S. and reluctant allies on Iraq. Without evidence to vindicate Washington's prewar claims, the debate at the UN is reduced to the U.S. and its coalition partners painting themselves as stewards of Iraqi liberation, while skeptics and adversaries see their presence there as an unwelcome occupation which, in the words of Indonesia's President Megawati Sukarnoputri - a key U.S. ally in the war on terrorism - "has created far many...
...President Bush told the UN that he went to war to defend its credibility. But until such time as David Kay produces concrete evidence to back the administration's prewar claims, in the UN chamber it may be Washington's own credibility that needs defending...