US speeds tally of Iraq offenses

Like a team of trial lawyers, the Bush administration is meticulously preparing the case for war against Saddam Hussein, intent on ensuring that this time he does not get away.

Trial date: Dec. 8.

On that day, the Iraqi leader must provide the United Nations Security Council with a full listing of the weapons of mass destruction and weapons programs Iraq possesses.

The Bush White House is concerned that beginning with the list, Mr. Hussein will set in motion another round of "cheat and deceive" tactics to drag out the weapons inspections process, just now under way. Another aim, they believe, will be to drive wedges between the United States and other members of the international community.

So for the next two weeks, administration officials will continue to hammer away at what they see as constituting "material breach" of the UN resolution passed unanimously earlier this month. They will also warn that Hussein's list will of itself begin to determine if there will be war or not.

The process has already begun, with US assertions that Iraqi attacks on allied aircraft patrolling two no-fly zones over the country breach the resolution's demands.

President Bush also said last week, while on what is being seen as a successful support-building trip to Eastern Europe, that an Iraqi list not confessing to weapons possessions would mean Hussein was entering "his final stage with a lie."

The administration's intent in publicly forcing up the heat at this stage couldn't be more apparent, experts say. "The administration has a clear strategy under which it is racking up the allegations of failure to comply [with the UN], starting with the no-fly zones, and thereby raising the threshold for cooperation," says Ivo Daalder, a foreign-policy analyst at the Brookings Institution in Washington who served in President Clinton's National Security Council.

"What has [the administration] worried is that they won't get out of the inspections early on anything that's a clear violation to press the need to go to war," Mr. Daalder adds. "So what they're trying to do is build a record."

Of course, war can still be avoided if, beginning on Dec. 8, Hussein "miraculously turns over a new leaf," as one administration official says, and submits a detailed weapons listing. But US officials continue to insist they don't expect that to happen. "On Dec. 8, we will receive the declaration, and it will be the first sign of whether or not the Iraqis intend to comply," Bush National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice told CNN in Prague last week. "We remain skeptical."

Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, a skeptic of weapons inspections, told ABC News that "if a country is determined to fool the inspectors, they can do that." And he told Pentagon correspondents that "regime change" in Iraq continues to be the will of Congress and the policy of the Bush administration.

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