Clinton tentatively endorses deal

WASHINGTON - President Clinton gave his tentative endorsement yesterday to a new Iraqi agreement to permit United Nations weapons inspections but said he would keep U.S. forces poised in the Persian Gulf to ensure that the Baghdad government delivers on a promise to grant inspectors "immediate, unrestricted, unconditional access."

Clinton

The agreement, signed in Baghdad yesterday by U.N. Secretary General Kofi Annan and Iraq's deputy prime minister, Tariq Aziz, stopped a countdown to what officials described as the largest military engagement of Clinton's presidency. But with several key provisions still unclear, and with U.S. intelligence assessments highly skeptical of Iraqi compliance, Clinton said he reserved "the unilateral right to respond at a time, place and manner of our own choosing" to any Iraqi breach of the new accord.

Yesterday's agreement, the text of which remained closely guarded, was the first in seven years of mandatory inspections to require special handling for a category of suspected weapons sites. The U.N. Special Commission charged with ridding Iraq of its non-conventional weapons, which has been the subject of a fierce Iraqi campaign to strip it of political legitimacy, will be permitted inside the eight named "presidential sites" only when accompanied by diplomats appointed by Annan.

The agreement did not make clear the identities and roles of the diplomats, described in the text as "observers," and gave no indication what influence they might acquire over the timing and locations of inspections. Those and other omissions, and professed uncertainty at the highest levels of the Clinton administration about exactly what the secretary general said to Iraqi President Saddam Hussein Sunday in three hours of talks, left unclear by late last night whether the Baghdad government won other concessions from Annan.

Clinton declared that "all Americans should have a positive reaction" to the new Iraqi commitments but added that there were "issues that still need to be clarified to our satisfaction and details that need to be spelled out." The first formal discussion of the accord will occur today, when Annan is scheduled to brief members of the Security Council in New York. Clinton said, "We will work with him" to "make sure the inspections are rigorous and professional."

U.S. and foreign diplomats said they also were working toward a Security Council resolution that would give legal force to Annan's accord. "If there were a resolution it would clearly need to speak to the consequences of failure to implement it," said one senior administration official.

For all their concerns about the text, and insistence that they remain prepared to launch U.S. warplanes at Iraq, some of the president's senior advisers expressed relief at the last-minute reprieve from the contemplated bombardment, which has been aimed at damaging some of the facilities that UNSCOM had been prevented from inspecting.

In meetings with Clinton and his Cabinet-level advisers, Gen. Henry Shelton, the chair of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, had conveyed "the strong sense that if there was a way for the cup to pass, that the military would like to see the cup pass," said one of Shelton's four-star uniformed contemporaries. "We had a tough time seeing where this thing was going to take us."

Clinton stressed that the accord permits the inspectors "repeat visits and no deadlines to complete their work." Each point represents abandonment of a previous Iraqi demand.

But some of the U.S. and U.N. officials most closely involved in the subject said unhappily that the new arrangement gave implicit support to Iraqi charges that the existing panel cannot be trusted to do its work without a new layer of oversight. They said they worried that Annan's apparent intention to give a new name to the expanded panel could create a bureaucratic rival to UNSCOM, as the present special panel is known, and its executive chair, the Australian diplomat Richard Butler.

"The questions one could ask are what is the role of the secretary-general, what are the roles of these characters, can you still do a no-notice inspection, do the inspections have to be approved in advance by any group, how large are the facilities these new procedures apply to, and are there new modalities to be approved on any of this?" said one official who has monitored the weapons inspection program.

"The inclination is to think that (U.N. inspectors') ability to do the job is not going to be favorably affected by this."

Among the important ambiguities of the accord, officials said, are the size and precise nature of the eight special sites. A one-page annex that names them, the officials said, includes no maps and does not distinguish Saddam Hussein's personal residences from the enormous compounds _ one as big as 10 square miles, another containing some 700 structures _ that surround them.

The eight special sites, officials said, are the Karkh Presidential Area, the Republican Palace Presidential Area and the Radmaniyah Presidential Area, all in Baghdad; the Tharthar Presidential Palace Area, north of the capital; the Tikrit and Auja Presidential Palace Areas, near the birthplace and power base of Saddam Hussein; the Mosul Presidential Palace area in the north; and a huge compound of 10 square miles called Jabal Makhul, near Samarra.

With his top national security advisers at his side, Clinton said in his televised news conference that Iraq agreed "all other areas, facilities, equipment, records and means of transportation shall be open to UNSCOM under existing procedures. Again, this includes sites that were previously closed."

But the text of the two-page agreement, according to officials who read it, also includes a U.N. undertaking to "respect legitimate concerns" of Iraq that relate to its "national security" and "sovereignty," two of the principal reasons cited in many previous episode in which Iraq blocked inspectors from entering a site.

One top adviser to Clinton, describing such language as "hortatory" and inconsequential, said "we're not going to spend a lot of time on exegesis of the text. What we're going to do is support getting the inspectors out there quickly and answering the question."

Officials would not say when they would test the Iraqi acquiescence by urging that inspectors be sent to the problematic sites. Another official, who said U.S. intelligence has forecast that Iraq will probably withhold compliance after the semi-annual renewal of UNSCOM's mandate in April, said Butler's inspectors "had better get out there quickly if they want to give the impression that they have gained from this and not lost."

Fred Eckhart, Annan's spokesman, told reporters during an overnight stopover in Paris Monday night that the secretary general is "reasonably confident" that the Security Council will accept the secretary general's text.

"There is no ambiguous language," he said. "There is a firm commitment from Iraq to accept the (Security Council) resolutions" mandating disarmament of nuclear, biological and chemical weapons and the missiles capable of delivering them.

In a Baghdad news conference Monday morning, Aziz stood next to Annan and declared the deal a "great victory" for Iraq in its quest to lift economic sanctions that have accompanied the weapons inspections since 1991. Aziz displayed irritation at the suggestion that Iraq had retreated and snapped at a reporter, "First of all, you don't know what we have agreed upon and don't rush to conclusions."

Leaders of the major Security Council powers, meanwhile, greeted the accord with jubilation.

Russian President Boris Yeltsin took credit for having pushed a political settlement. "From the very beginning, we supported a diplomatic solution of this crisis," Yeltsin said. "Tonight, the issue has been settled. (Saddam) Hussein gave his word."

"We have to have a Security Council resolution that makes it absolutely clear we're not going to be back in this position, playing some game in two or three months' time," said British Prime Minister Tony Blair, noting that reports of the agreement call for unhindered access for the arms inspectors. "This is precisely what we've been asking for," he said. "But we have to check the fine print."

AP PHOTO President Clinton meets reporters in the Oval Office of the White House yesterday to discuss the tentative United Nations agreement with Iraq. The president gave his cautious blessings to the U.N. agreement with Saddam Hussein.

02-24-98