WASHINGTON — The Bush administration won agreement from France and other key doubters Tuesday on a new United Nations resolution demanding that Iraq scrap its nuclear, chemical and biological weapons programs, a deal clinched in a series of high-level phone calls by Secretary of State Colin Powell.
Approval of the resolution appears likely to delay, perhaps for several months, any U.S.-led military action to overthrow Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein, as the world waits to see whether Baghdad will comply with the world body’s disarmament demands.
While officials cautioned that last-minute glitches are possible, the deal appears to end, at least for now, the disagreements with other world powers and within the U.S. government over how to deal with Saddam.
The United States plans to present the resolution Wednesday at the United Nations, and senior U.S. officials predicted that after weeks of wrangling, it would win backing from all of the 15-member U.N. Security Council except for Syria.
The American position was finalized Monday afternoon at a pivotal White House “principals’ meeting” that was attended by Powell, Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld, Vice President Dick Cheney, National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice and Gen. Richard Myers, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff.
Powell’s view that the United States should continue to work diplomatically and come up with a plan its allies could accept prevailed at the meeting, several officials said. All of them spoke on the condition of anonymity.
Cheney and Rumsfeld asked for a few minor wording changes but abandoned their months-long effort to press for a U.N. resolution that Saddam was unlikely to accept and that would authorize military action without further debate.