Next moves for US on Iraq weapons list

Iraq's submission of a 12,000-page declaration of its weapons inventory presents the US with both opportunities and pitfalls as it tries to keep the pressure on Saddam Hussein to reveal everything he has and keep its own options for war open.

Tuesday US officials will start combing through the Iraqi report - a veritable Manhattan phone book in Arabic and English, clogged with information on every last chemical factory that churns out rubber sandals - to look for inconsistencies and omissions.

In theory, the Bush administration will compare what's in the declaration to its own purported "solid" intelligence of Iraq's possession of weapons of mass destruction. It could then point out these discrepancies to United Nations weapons inspectors, or even go for a dramatic return, evidence in hand, to the UN Security Council. To the extent the US finds clear and substantial contradictions, it would help buttress its case domestically and internationally for the necessity of "regime change" in Iraq.

In practice, however, the process will likely be more difficult than that. For one thing, no one knows just how much evidence the US has of Iraqi nuclear, chemical, and biological weapons, though that can be a tactical advantage for Washington. Will there be a "smoking gun" omission, for instance?

If there isn't - and many experts don't think there is - the US would have to prove a pattern of deceit. That risks getting bogged down in minutiae. By pointing out every last petri dish and aluminum tube that could be used for military purposes, the Bush administration could get involved in a PR war with Mr. Hussein over details that detract from the overall threat the US believes he represents.

"This is a delicate moment for the Bush administration, and the way they play the coming days is going to set in motion what ends up happening on this whole Iraqi crisis for the months ahead," says Lawrence Korb, a Pentagon official in the Reagan years. "They've got themselves in this situation where, before going to war, they're going to have to let the inspections play out for a while."

With the UN program accelerating - the number of inspectors may jump from 50 now to about 100 by Christmas - the US could find the months ahead more a matter of needle-in-haystack searching and technical reporting rather than warfare, some experts say.

"It's very possible Iraq could be in 'material breach' of the UN resolution and it not lead to war but to more robust inspections," says Joseph Cirincione, director of the Non-Proliferation Project at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace in Washington. The UN resolution passed Nov. 8 says that "false statements or omissions" in Iraq's declaration would constitute a "material breach" - diplomatic parlance for a justification for military action - if the problems were accompanied by a lack of Iraqi cooperation to address them.

Page: 1 | 2