The Mercury, Australia
May 21, 2003

MEMBERS of the UN Security Council have pressed the United States to set a time limit to its occupation of Iraq before they adopt a draft resolution on the country’s future, a diplomat said today.

The source spoke to reporters after the council met behind closed doors for what the US ambassador, John Negroponte, indicated he hoped would be the final consultations on the text before a vote.

The draft resolution suggests that US and British forces administer Iraq with the help of an interim administration “until an internationally recognised, representative government is established by the people of Iraq and assumes (their) responsibilities”.

The United States had originally wanted the occupation endorsed for 12 months, to be extended unless the Security Council decided otherwise – in effect giving the United States and Britain a veto over any proposal to end their authority.

US officials depicted the redrafting to the present format as an important concession to critics of the US-led invasion that toppled the regime of Saddam Hussein.

But the diplomat said council members wanted the resolution to set a time limit for an internationally recognised government to be set up.

In Washington, US State Department spokesman Richard Boucher said the new draft – the third since May 9 – “tries to address a number of the issues that we have heard raised by other governments”.

Negroponte’s spokesman Rick Grenell said “it should come as no surprise to council members that they should be prepared to vote tomorrow”.

None of the council members was prepared to indicate to reporters how they might vote on the draft, which would immediately lift UN sanctions on Iraq and put its oil revenues into a development fund to be spent “at the direction” of the occupying powers.

Boucher said Secretary of State Colin Powell had been working the phones with other foreign ministers in a bid to assure passage of the resolution.

Powell spoke twice by phone with Russia’s Igor Ivanov and once with Dominique de Villepin, of France, and Germany’s Joschka Fischer, the leading critics of the war.

He also called Spanish Foreign Minister Ana Palacio, whose country is one of the three co-sponsors of the resolution, along with Britain.

While most diplomats were tight-lipped, international financier George Soros said he hoped to persuade the council to limit the “excessive” powers of the United States in post-war Iraq.

Soros told a news conference that his Open Society Institute would set up a unit called Iraqi Revenue Watch to monitor the use of Iraq’s oil exports to finance reconstruction projects approved by the US-led occupying forces.

“There is a widespread belief that the war was fought for oil and that it was fought to benefit the Halliburtons and the Bechtels of this world,” he said.

Halliburton is an oil company once run by US Vice President Dick Cheney. Bechtel is a construction and engineering conglomerate. Former US secretary of state George Shultz was once its president and still sits on its board.

“This is an opportunity for the US to demonstrate transparency,” Soros said.

He also said he favoured cancelling at least part of Iraq’s debt, estimated by some experts at between $US350 billion and $US400 billion ($531bn to $607bn).

“I personally would not favour paying in full the debts incurred by Saddam Hussein’s regime,” he said. “It would send a very healthy signal to the financial markets that extending credit to dictators is not without risk.”

But he acknowledged that he was unlikely to get major changes to the resolution text. “A few words here or there is all one can hope for,” he said.

Amnesty International, for its part, criticised “weak and vague language on human rights” in the draft resolution, saying it was inconsistent with US claims to establish the rule of law in Iraq.

Amnesty called for “the establishment of an effective, well-funded human rights field presence … to monitor human rights throughout Iraq and to assist in the rebuilding of Iraq’s judicial and law and order institutions”.

It also said the United Nations should “establish an impartial commission of experts to examine and analyse past and recent international crimes committed in Iraq.”