Hussein's wedge between US, world

Iraq may not have deterred Washington from its campaign to depose Saddam Hussein, but its unconditional acceptance of UN weapons inspectors has driven a wedge – at least temporarily – between the United States and most other nations.

Anxious to avert war, leaders from Beijing to Berlin welcomed Baghdad's offer Tuesday as a good first step, while voicing varying degrees of skepticism about the trustworthiness of the Iraqi offer. White House spokesman Scott McClellan, on the other hand, dismissed it as "a tactic that will fail."

The move will complicate US efforts to persuade the UN Security Council to authorize the use of force if Hussein doesn't comply with past and any forthcoming UN resolutions.

Russian Foreign Minister Igor Ivanov told Russian reporters in New York that "no new resolutions are needed" to dispatch inspectors. "We managed to avert the threat of a war scenario and go back to political means of solving the Iraqi problem."

That is not how US officials see the situation. "The US has always made it clear it is demanding full compliance with a whole range of UN Security Council demands that were part of the cease-fire agreement in 1991," says John Chipman, director of the International Institute for Strategic Studies in London.

"The return of the inspectors is by no means the only requirement, and in US eyes does not remotely comprise compliance," he adds.

Indeed, it could spark new conflicts, if Iraq objects to anything the inspectors demand to do, such as visit presidential palaces which Saddam Hussein has always insisted are off-limits.

Hans Blix, head of the UN Monitoring, Verification and Inspection Commission (UNMOVIC), will be under pressure from Washington to launch quick challenges to the Iraqi government, and to be highly intrusive and aggressive.

Mr. Blix, however, "may not wish to see himself as a trigger for a war," says Professor Chipman. "He sees his orders as coming from the UN Security Council, not from one member of it, and he might not wish to go in right at the most pointed edge."

If the choice of sites to be inspected is a sensitive decision, the time taken on the inspections will offer plenty of opportunity for further controversy. Blix told a German newspaper Sunday that with 700 sites to visit, it would take at least a year to complete an inspection of Iraq's chemical, biological and nuclear weapons capacity, even if the Iraqis were fully cooperative.

"Anything can happen in a year, and judging by past form, it would be surprising if Saddam Hussein did not try to go back at least a little on what he has promised," says Georges le Guelte, head of research at the International and Strategic Relations Institute in Paris.

"Nothing in their record suggests that this is anything but a ruse to delay [US] military preparations and make them more difficult," Chipman says of the Iraqi offer. "And in case the inspections don't work, or the Americans ignore them, they will want to retain WMD [weapons of mass destruction] capacity in case there is a war."

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