UN arms inspections in Iraq are a chance for Baghdad to avoid a war that is not inevitable, UN arms inspection agency chief Hans Blix said yesterday.
"Inspections are a chance for the Iraqi government and that's what the Security Council has said," said Blix before departing for Cyprus on his last stop before arriving in the Iraqi capital today with an advance team of inspectors.
Asked whether a war against Iraq was inevitable, Blix replied, "No, it's not."
"We know what we have to do in Baghdad and we prepared ourselves for it," said the head of the UN Monitoring, Verification and Inspection Commission (UNMOVIC).
He said he hoped to meet with members of the Iraqi government today after he arrives in Baghdad with International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) director general Mohamed ElBaradei.
"This is a chance for Iraq to come clean and rid itself of the UN sanctions," ElBaradei told reporters yesterday at the Vienna airport on his way to Cyprus.
ElBaradei said the threshold for the use of force if Iraq failed to comply with the weapons inspectors was very low and that he would make this clear to the Iraqis.
Hanging on the results of inspections were both the threat of a US-led war and the prospect -- if Iraq is given the all-clear -- of a lifting of crippling 12-year-old sanctions.
Iraq's Deputy Prime Minister Tariq Aziz said Baghdad welcomed the inspections and the results would expose as lies US charges that Iraq had been arming for war.
"We are going to expose the truth. The Americans are worried because the truth is going to be exposed and their lies are going to be exposed," Aziz said in Baghdad.
Blix sent a stern message to Iraqi President Saddam Hussein not to play cat-and-mouse games like when the inspectors were last there four years ago and to reveal all.
Blix and ElBaradei will lead a group of 24 inspectors, 14 from UNMOVIC and 10 from the IAEA. They will reactivate surveillance cameras, hire helicopters, set up communication equipment to link them with UN headquarters in New York and modernize a laboratory left over from the previous UN mission which withdrew in 1998.
The lab will be used mainly to examine air and ground samples for traces of chemical weapons ingredients.
Blix says formal inspections will start on Nov. 27 and he expects to have 100 inspectors in Iraq by the end of the year.
The first significant test is a Dec. 8 deadline for Iraq to submit a full account of all its banned weapons programs, whose very existence Baghdad fervently denies. By Jan. 27, the inspectors must have given their first report to the UN Security Council.
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