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...Despite differences in the alliance, NATO on Thursday issued a statement answering Bush. NATO leaders called on Saddam to comply immediately with the UN resolution and vowed to stand "united in their commitment to take effective action to assist and support the efforts of the UN to ensure full and immediate compliance by Iraq, without conditions or restrictions." The term "effective action" was a carefully chosen alternative to specifying military action, to give NATO members who do not want to go to war a little wiggle room. Although the statement didn't give the president a green light to launch...
United Nations weapons inspectors are back in Baghdad. Their return this week came almost exactly four years after their hasty departure in 1998. That exit had signaled the start of Operation Desert Fox, a four-day, U.S.-led bombing campaign to punish Iraq for failing to comply with UN disarmament resolutions. But Desert Fox was followed by a stalemate - no inspections, and no end to sanctions - until the Security Council two weeks ago adopted Resolution 1441. Now, renewed inspections are not just the route to ending sanctions; they could determine the very future of Saddam Hussein's regime...
...what's at the top of the inspectors' to-do list? Not looking under Saddam's bed for hidden nukes - at least not right away. The C-130 UN transport plane carrying chief inspector Hans Blix and his team landed at Saddam International Airport with equipment for a more urgent task: industrial vacuum cleaners, to perform some desperately needed housekeeping at the inspectors' base in Baghdad...
...Even as the dapper Swedish diplomat was beginning his meetings with Iraqi officials at the Foreign Ministry on Wednesday morning, the vacuum cleaners were blasting into action on the third floor of the former Canal Hotel, now the UN headquarters in Iraq. So thick was the layer of dust, one inspections official told me, that the rodents who had taken up temporary residence in the offices left tracks. "It is quite eerie to walk through there," says the official. "It is like a time capsule. You can tell that the inspectors left in a hurry. There's a tool...
...Iraqis are living like there's no tomorrow, that's because they seem gripped by an ever deepening sense of fatalism. This week, UN weapons inspectors, led by Swedish diplomat Hans Blix, are back in Baghdad after a four-year absence. But Iraqis see their arrival as delaying war rather than preventing it. Even Saddam himself seems to echo the anxiety. The letter from Saddam's government accepting Security Council Resolution 1441 is full of defiant rants about injustice, but its key passage cites the normally defiant Saddam's "sacred duty" to spare Iraqis from disaster...