THE ROVING EYE - Three meetings and a funeral

THE ROVING EYE
Three meetings and a funeral
By Pepe Escobar

CAIRO - The diplomatic endgame starts now. This is the ultimate question:
How long is the US willing to wait after Hans Blix's crucial January 27
report to the Security Council? Washington's verdict seems to be final:
Saddam Hussein is guilty until pronounced guilty. A few days ago, American
officials were talking about the wait in terms of "weeks", not months. Now
there's every indication that they will be talking about a few "days", not
weeks. The war against Iraq can be launched any time between mid and late
February. But there are deep fears in the Arab world that it could be
launched as early as the day after the so-called war council between George
W Bush and Tony Blair on Friday, January 31.

According to a member of a humanitarian mission now inside Iraq, the local
authorities seem to be cooperating and providing the UN inspectors with
unrestricted access to places and people. But the key problem remains that
all the protagonists in the whole mechanism - the inspectors on the ground
in Iraq and their supervisors in New York and Vienna - are under tremendous,
relentless pressure from Washington to come up with the smoking or
non-smoking gun proving Iraq is in "material breach" of Resolution 1441.
There are echoes filtering to Cairo of some dejected weapons inspectors
overdosing on their bottles of arak: they seem to be convinced that their
arduous job will amount to nothing anyway because Washington and London have
already chosen to go to war - regardless of what the UN is doing.

http://www.atimes.com/atimes/Middle_East/EA25Ak02.html