Inspectors, US part ways on Iraq

With a possible war in the balance, United Nations weapons chiefs are taking their demands for Iraq to more actively assist inspectors directly to Baghdad this weekend.

Pressure mounted on Iraq after the discovery by weapons inspectors on Thursday of 11 unfilled chemical shells that had not been declared. UN officials said the 122mm shells were in "excellent condition," but that they do not yet constitute a "smoking gun" in terms of an Iraqi breach.

Hassam Mohamed Amin, head of the Iraqi Monitoring Directorate, said Thursday that the 122mm artillery rockets were not part of any illegal weapons of mass destruction program, and were part of a 1986 shipment to Iraq that were "expired 10 years ago." Iraqi officials say that all gaps in Iraq's weapons declarations will be addressed during the visit of Hans Blix, the top UN weapons inspector, which begins on Sunday. US officials said there would be no rush to judgment that might lead to war.

Senior UN officials make clear that this visit, and a weapons report due before the UN Security Council on Jan. 27, do not amount to a "last chance" for Iraq to come clean on any remaining weapons of mass destruction (WMD) programs.

But widely diverging timetables are emerging between the US and UN over the inspectors' work that may alter America's countdown to war. Washington wants that date to mark the start of an endgame - even as inspectors press for more time as they intensify their efforts to find evidence of WMD.

Against the backdrop of Washington's military buildup in the Persian Gulf, and tough threats to use force to disarm Iraq, Baghdad has not actively impeded inspectors. But top UN inspector Hans Blix and atomic energy chief Mohamed ElBaradei say they will press Iraq to "shift gear ... to active cooperation," by permitting private interviews with scientists, and by accounting for gaps that remain in Iraq's WMD declarations.

But they say they need more time - much more that the Pentagon's preferred winter timeframe to launch a war. Veteran inspectors say that no amount of extra time will be enough, if Iraqi strongman Saddam Hussein does not do more to exhibit a change of heart.

The open doors shown to the UN are an "illusion of cooperation," says Richard Spertzel, a former US Army germ scientist, who was the UN chief bioweapons inspector in Iraq from 1994 to 1998.

"Two hundred inspectors could spend from now until doomsday parading that desert and not find [anything]," Mr. Spertzel says. "It's pointless, absolutely pointless ... until Iraq is willing to cooperate, until it is willing to appear to make a credible declaration, there is nothing to inspect or investigate."

UN teams are rushing to boost their numbers in Iraq to 150, to utilize an increasing number of helicopters and spy planes - and to act on recently arrived US and British intelligence data.

Iraq's 12,000-page declaration on Dec. 7 - billed as Baghdad's last chance to overcome years of concealment efforts and hide-and-seek games with UN inspectors - contained fewer data on its biological programs, at least, than Iraq had already declared in 1997.

"What does that tell you?" Spertzel says. He ticks off questions that remain about programs that were examined by nine UN inspections in 1997 and 1998, then picked over again by two panels of international experts.

Their conclusion was that Iraq's biological declaration was "inaccurate and incomplete." A Chinese scientist insisted as well, Spertzel says, that the final report indicate that it "wasn't certain" the program had been ended.

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