As America's intense military buildup in the Gulf region continues, the Bush administration confronts a world that is saying, essentially, "give inspections more of a chance."

President Bush must soon decide whether the US will agree that inspections can work and merit additional months, or that they are failing and that the solution to the threat posed by Saddam Hussein is war. And he will have to decide what weight to give the international community in making that decision.

With even the British now saying the inspections process may need more time than the next three weeks to determine whether the Iraqi regime can be successfully disarmed without war, the Iraqi crisis is far from the clearly defined place the Bush White House had hoped it would be in by this point.

If it wants broad international backing for war, the US must do more than denounce "incomplete" Iraqi cooperation in weapons inspections, experts say. They see a number of ways Bush can still bring the world in line with the US, including:

• A convincing presidential speech, along the lines of Mr. Bush's speech to the United Nations Sept. 12 that set the stage for the UN's latest resolution targeting Iraq.

• A full-court diplomatic press involving high-level administration officials hitting the tarmac of key friends and allies.

• An Anglo-American dossier forcefully laying out the case against Mr. Hussein - the way the two allies made the case against Afghanistan's Taliban regime.

• An incontrovertible piece of evidence that shocks the world into accepting that Hussein will never change his stripes.

The American "presentation" could take place the week of Jan. 27, when several sessions have been set aside at the UN in New York for hearing and debating the UN inspectors' report on Iraqi cooperation with their work.

Yet even Bush's closest foreign ally on Iraq, British Prime Minister Tony Blair, said Monday that while Jan. 27 will be important, the inspectors should be allowed to "do their task" and no "arbitrary time scale" should be put on their work. In addition, UN inspectors said Monday their work could take up to a year.

"This is one of those moments when presidents earn their salaries," says William Quandt, a member of the national security team in the Carter White House. "This is turning out to be very complex, because if we want to go to war with some degree of international cooperation, we have to be able to argue something beyond missing information."

In an initial report to the Security Council last week, UN inspectors said they had yet to find a "smoking gun" indicating a continuing weapons program in Iraq. But they also stiffly criticized an Iraqi failure to disclose information to explain glaring gaps in their Dec. 7 weapons declaration. The US quickly cited the criticism as support for its view that Iraq is failing the cooperation test.

Page: 1 | 2