U.S. Official Says Monitoring Iraq Poses New Challenge

The U.S. military commander for the Middle East said Thursday that it will now be “much more difficult” to convince the world that Iraq is advancing its banned weapons program, and urged Americans to view the regime as a long-lasting problem like Cuba or North Korea.

Since a U.S. and British air assault ended nearly a week ago, some U.S. officials have warned that the Clinton administration may need to strike Iraq once more, and perhaps soon.

But Marine Gen. Anthony Zinni, chief of the military’s Central Command, said that without United Nations weapons inspectors collecting information on Iraqi President Saddam Hussein’s efforts to rearm, it will be harder to gather proof--and more difficult to sell its validity to other nations.

He said in an interview that the United States will use “all of its resources” to gather information on Hussein’s weapons program. Even so, Zinni said, the United States “will have to do it from a distance,” which will make it much more difficult. The resources presumably will include satellites, surveillance aircraft and border monitoring.

Although some facets of Iraq’s arms program--such as missile-building facilities--can be spotted from the air, many other aspects--such as weapons labs and chemical and biological weapons stocks--are so small that they were hidden even from weapons inspectors on the ground.

Zinni said some countries’ suspicion of U.S. motives will be heightened by the absence of U.N. inspectors, whom many countries have seen as an impartial source.

In the aftermath of the 70-hour attack, Iraq has refused to permit the inspectors to reenter the country, and many observers believe that it is unlikely they will ever again be able to conduct aggressive monitoring.

When U.S. officials do seek to offer evidence that Hussein is trying to rearm, some nations “may not want to believe it’s true, and for that reason they might have difficulty accepting our unilateral confirmation,” Zinni said.

“It would be difficult, even if we have the proof, to convince others,” said Zinni, who was returning from a holiday visit with the troops in the Persian Gulf who continue to keep an eye on Hussein. “And it will be difficult even to gain the truth from our sources.”

U.S. officials believe that they are justified in striking Iraq unilaterally for violations of the U.N. ban on its weapons program.

But in practice, the administration has often gone to great lengths to convince other nations that force is justified before taking action.

Zinni, whose command oversees more than 20,000 troops in the Gulf, said he believed that Americans have unrealistic expectations of how soon the conflict with Iraq may be solved. And as a result, Americans are sometimes frustrated to find that action hasn’t budged the dictator, he said.

Too many Americans lament that the administration can’t assassinate Hussein, end his regime with airstrikes or conduct a ground attack, Zinni said.

But he said U.S. forces have contained the threat from North Korea and Fidel Castro’s regime in Cuba for many years, and can do the same with Iraq.

“The answer keeps coming down to containment,” he said. “We don’t like the word--it’s costly, it takes some time, it takes a lot of hard work to keep everybody around the world with us . . . but in my mind it’s what we’ve got to deal with.”