BAGHDAD, Iraq - Iraq delivered a 12,000-page declaration on banned weapons to United Nations weapons inspectors yesterday, documents that Iraqi officials said established that the country had no programs to develop weapons of mass destruction, in contradiction of American and British claims.
President Saddam Hussein also chose yesterday to deliver a statement on Kuwait, apologizing to the Kuwaiti people for Iraq's 1990 invasion.
At a news conference, the Iraqi official in charge of preparing the documents submitted to the United Nations, Maj. Gen. Hussam Muhammad Amin, said the documents "verified" the position Iraq had taken since the United States and Britain accused Baghdad this year of continuing its secret nuclear, biological and chemical weapons programs, and threatened to go to war. Iraq contends that it has abandoned all such projects and met long-standing demands that it disarm.
In the new report, Amin said, "We declare that Iraq is empty of any weapons of mass destruction." To hammer the point home, he told reporters summoned to see the documents at Baghdad University that Hussein, the Iraqi leader, had ordered officials to be "fair and frank" in the declaration, "and that means that when we say we have no weapons of mass destruction, we are speaking the truth."
The Iraqi report appears to set the stage for a still sharper confrontation between the United States and Iraq, with the next step left to the Security Council and the Bush administration.
Leaders of the weapons inspection team in Baghdad, which began work 11 days ago, have said that Iraq has delivered at least eight previous "full and complete" declarations of its secret weapons programs during the past 10 years, only for each to be shown later to have omitted entire programs banned under Security Council resolutions.
At 8:05 p.m. (1:05 p.m. EST), Iraqi officials delivered the latest documents and additional information on computer disks to U.N. officials at the Canal Hotel on the capital's eastern outskirts, converted for use as the U.N. headquarters in Iraq.
Several men in a beige, 4-by-4 vehicle carried two bags and four cardboard boxes into the building, where they met briefly with officials of the U.N. weapons inspection team and took a receipt. They left again in minutes.
Beating the deadline
The handover put Iraq a full day ahead of a deadline of midnight tonight that the U.N. Security Council set last month in demanding a "currently accurate, full and complete" declaration by Iraq of any banned weapons programs or related work in nonmilitary fields.
Officials of the U.N. weapons inspection team said the Iraqi report was to be flown out of Baghdad last night to a U.N. staging post in Larnaca, Cyprus, and transferred there to a long-haul jet for the flight to New York. They said the cargo of spiral-bound documents, CD-ROMs and large, snap-shut filing folders would arrive in New York today and be delivered straight to the offices of the U.N. Monitoring, Verification and Observation Commission, the agency set up to ensure the disarmament of Iraq.
A second copy of the documents will go to the International Atomic Agency in Vienna, Austria, which has responsibility for monitoring Iraqi nuclear programs. The inspection agency has the task of searching out and destroying prohibited biological or chemical warfare projects, as well as plans to develop ballistic missiles with a range longer than 94 miles. All the restrictions were imposed after Iraq invaded Kuwait in 1990, triggering the Persian Gulf war and Iraq's ouster from Kuwait the following spring.
Apology, with invective
Hussein's statement yesterday on Kuwait contrasted with his speech Thursday in which he struck a conciliatory note on the crisis with the United States, saying that Iraq should allow the weapons inspectors to do their work so as to prove to the world that Iraq has no banned weapons, and to "keep our people out of harm's way."
The new statement coupled his apology with a stream of invective, including a passage in which he appeared to congratulate Islamic militants in Kuwait who recently attacked American soldiers. But it was also his first apology for the invasion of 12 years ago.
In the days before the declaration, Bush administration officials had repeated their contention that Iraq does have the weapons programs it has now formally denied, and warned, again, that Hussein would be risking war if he returned to the patterns of the past, trying to deceive the world about his secret projects.
In his radio address yesterday, President Bush warned that the declaration must hold up to American scrutiny if Baghdad is to avoid military attack.
"We will judge the declaration's honesty and completeness only after we have thoroughly examined it, and that will take some time," he said in his weekly radio address.
The next crucial stage will come when the documents are handed over to the United States and other member states of the Security Council, a step that Hans Blix, one of the chiefs of the U.N. agencies monitoring Iraqi disarmament, has said could take several days.
Blix said the delay would be necessary to give U.N. experts time to purge the Iraqi documents of any technical information that, in the wrong hands, would lead to "proliferation"-meaning the spread of deadly weapons to rogue states or terrorists.
A senior Bush administration official said last week that American officials would take the time to analyze the Iraqi declaration both at the CIA and the national weapons laboratories. Then it will be compared, the official said, "to past lists of what was there, to previous inspection reports, and to our own intelligence."
"Eventually, we will make our assessment available," said the official, whose tone indicated that Bush was not in a hurry to use the report as a reason to go to war.
U.N. weapons inspectors in Baghdad have said that the Iraqi declaration will set a "baseline" of truth, and that any deceit by Iraq in the declaration could open the path to an immediate swoop by the inspectors on sites where banned programs are under way.
At the events here yesterday, Iraqi officials appeared acutely aware of the risks Iraq faces.
Even without the new intelligence that the United States says it has on secret Iraqi weapons sites, the Security Council, once it has the documents, will have an immediate benchmark for establishing whether Iraq, this time, has made a clean breast of its secret weapons work. This benchmark, these officials say, will lie in whether Iraq, in the new declaration, has accounted for the weapons and weapons materials that U.N. inspectors came to know about in the 1990s, but were never able to find.
The list includes 4,000 tons of chemical warfare "precursors," meaning materials needed to make anthrax, mustard agent and other weapons, as well as hundreds of tons of chemical warfare agents; 31,000 chemical warfare munitions, including 550 mustard agent shells; as many as 20 Soviet-made Scud missiles adapted by the Iraqis to deliver chemical and biological warheads; and 600 tons of "precursors" for the deadly VX gas, enough to make 200 tons of the gas. Western experts have said that this would be enough to wipe out the entire world population.
Answers promised
Asked at the news conference whether the declaration included these allegedly missing items, Amin said, "Generally speaking, the declaration will answer all the questions that have been raised in the past months and years."
"If the intention of the United States and Britain is to disarm Iraq, I think this declaration satisfied Chapter 3 of Resolution 1441, and this should prevent any threat of war," Amin said in reference to the measure the Security Council approved unanimously Oct. 8, under intense American pressure.
The countdown to the handover suggested that Iraqi officials, who had said they were facing serious difficulties in gathering the information needed to meet the Security Council's demands, might have had last-minute dramas in assembling the huge dossier.
At his news conference, Amin referred glancingly to the strains, saying that "tens" of Iraqi scientists and officials had worked to pull the information together. "We feel proud that we fulfilled everything in the specified time," he said.
Scenes of chaos
After announcing Thursday that the declaration would be completed and turned over to the United Nations in Baghdad yesterday, Iraqi officials repeatedly delayed Amin's news conference and a quick first sighting of the Iraqi documents that had been promised to the Western reporters in Baghdad.
The reporters were told to be ready at 8 a.m. Finally, it was past 3 p.m. when an Iraqi government car led a motorcade of reporters to the university campus, where the Iraqi weapons-monitoring agency that Amin heads, the National Monitoring Directorate, maintains its offices.
There, scenes of chaos developed as Western TV news crews and news agency reporters joined in pushing, shoving and shouting to try to get ahead in the crush.
After a senior Information Ministry official had appealed for the newsmen to behave "in a civilized manner," tensions abated. The reporters found a long wooden table laid out with sheaves of spiral-bound documents looking like university theses, with clear and blue plastic covers, and titles in English and Arabic that spelled out more than a decade of top-secret arms work.
Here, in one room, even if the Iraqis have not been fully candid about their programs, was an astonishing archive of the clandestine project to make Iraq the Arab military superpower that has been at the heart of Saddam Hussein's 23 years in power.
Hussein's apology to Kuwait
In his unexpected letter of apology for Iraq's invasion of Kuwait in 1990, Saddam Hussein couched his remarks in bitterness and complained of Kuwait's support for U.S. policies. Here are excerpts, as broadcast by Iraqi state television:
"We are saying what we are saying not out of weakness or as a tactic to an illegitimate end but to clarify facts as we see them. ... On that basis, we apologize to God for any action that may anger the Almighty if such an action took place in the past, unbeknownst to us but considered to be our responsibility, and to you [Kuwaitis] we apologize on this basis as well.
"O, you brothers, what we wish for is what we are working to achieve for your brothers in Iraq: to live free, without foreign control of your destiny, will, decisions, wealth, present and future."
"Our behavior was prompted by so many actions starting with the joint military maneuvers in October 1989 in Kuwait under the auspices of the Americans. Then [U.S.] General [Norman] Schwarzkopf, in February 1990, said that there was a need to increase the American presence in the gulf area ... and then [Kuwait's] lowering the prices of crude oil despite OPEC's warning. ...
"It was clear to us that danger for Iraq was in the offing and that it could not be solved through political channels. Therefore, under the framework of self-protection and protecting everything that is dear, the events of Aug. 2, 1990, took place."
"As you can see, the foreigners are occupying your country ... and ... when the foreigners occupy a country, they do not only desecrate the soil but the soul, the religion and the mind."
"We and the people of Iraq salute those young believers who stand up to the foreign occupier with arms and those who see or believe that it is a shame that requires the cleansing of the land, and of the people, by fire and other means."
From wire reports