Inspecting Iraq: No trouble yet

United Nations weapons inspectors examined what was once Iraq's largest chemical- weapons facility and a nuclear complex Wednesday - further signaling Iraq's willingness to permit unfettered access. But after a week of inspections, including visits to 20 sites, both Baghdad and Washington are finding different reasons to question the seriousness of the effort.

Iraq Wednesday accused UN teams of mounting a "show" inspection of a presidential palace on Tuesday, noting that a brief UN visit without gas masks and detection gear was not credible. "Unnecessary" and "unjustified" is how Gen. Hossam Mohammed Amin characterized the search of al-Sajoud Palace.

President Bush described Iraqi cooperation Monday as "not encouraging."

UN officials reply that it's too soon for either side to be drawing such conclusions. Only 17 inspectors are working in Iraq. UN facilities here are in disrepair, lab equipment is still being shipped in, and another 80 inspectors aren't expected to arrive until the end of December. Most inspection visits have been to old sites previously surveyed in the 1990s.

Wednesday, the creaking gates of the vast al-Muthanna plant - which once produced the bulk of Iraq's mustard gas. as well as sarin and VX nerve agents - swung wide open as the UN inspectors' convoy arrived. With the prospect of war or peace possibly hinging on the turn of a single lock, Iraq has so far shown an unprecedented willingness to give UN inspectors access to any location. That alone, say Western officials, gives Iraq a winning edge in the "public relations battle."

But they are skeptical that Iraq's policy of openness will continue, or that Baghdad will come clean in a full declaration of its weapons of mass destruction and dual-use capabilities that is due by Sunday. Iraqi officials suggest that it will be thousands of pages long - providing many new sites for inspectors to verify. Iraq declares that it no longer harbors any proscribed weapons

"The Iraqis would have been very obtuse to obstruct the inspections in the first week, though there have already been a couple wrinkles," says a senior Western diplomat. "The declaration is going to be difficult to get right, since they say they have nothing. Admitting they were lying will actually be compliance."

At the vast chemical facility in the desert Wednesday, inspectors checked off items that had been logged by their predecessors more than four years ago: rows of large rusted vats filled with concrete, or with holes carved out with a blowtorch, all with faded UN number tags. The site was bombed by US aircraft in the 1991 Gulf War. A recent Iraqi report said the UN teams in the late 1990s had destroyed 38,500 artillery shells and other chemical-filled weapons, almost 520,000 gallons of liquid material, 150 pieces of equipment used to make chemical weapons, and four production facilities.

But a rotting gas mask near the entrance gate still spoke of the original purpose of the facility, and inside one building were crushed aluminum aerial bombs - the same ones that can be seen to this day in the Kurdish city of Halabja, where Baghdad's gas killed 5,000 Iraqi Kurds in 1988.

A crane was ordered in to remove shipping containers blocking some buildings, so inspectors could poke around. "Nothing was wrong," says Raad Ali Manhal, the Iraqi liaison to the inspectors at the site. "Everything was all right."

A second UN team visited the al-Tuwaitha nuclear complex south of Baghdad to check on new construction and other changes since the last inspection in 1998.

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