Clinton Calls Off Attack on Iraq, Says Hussein ‘Backed Down’

After twice approaching the brink of massive bombing of Iraq, President Clinton early Sunday called off military action and accepted President Saddam Hussein’s pledge to resume cooperation with U.N. weapons inspectors.

Although administration officials said they are profoundly skeptical of Hussein’s intentions, given Baghdad’s record of repeatedly making and breaking such promises, the president decided to declare victory in this round.

“Iraq has backed down,” Clinton said. But he quickly added that the United States remains ready to take military action if Hussein again fails to keep his word.

“As I have said since this crisis began, the return of the inspectors, if they can operate in an unfettered way, is the best outcome because they have been and they remain the most effective tool to . . . prevent Iraq from rebuilding its weapons of mass destruction and the missiles to deliver them,” Clinton said.

At the United Nations, Richard Butler, the chief weapons inspector, told reporters: “I am going upstairs to order our people back [to Baghdad]. They are going back Tuesday morning.”

Clinton decided to accept Iraq’s assurances about 3:30 a.m. Sunday after nightlong strategy meetings. At that hour, a senior Clinton administration official said, the White House told the Pentagon to call off the bombing campaign that had been ready to begin since Friday night.

Critics on Sunday questioned why Clinton had offered Hussein the wiggle room to effectively escape punishment for blocking the work of U.N. arms inspectors--a move the Iraqi leader had announced two weeks earlier, on Oct. 31. White House officials acknowledged that the critics had a point, but they argued that if the United States had acted after Iraq’s stated capitulation, the international community would have focused on the bombing instead of on Hussein’s failure to comply with U.N. resolutions.

By calling off the attack while watching closely to make sure Hussein keeps his pledge, a senior official said, “we have kept the pressure on him.”

The president decided Friday to launch the attack Saturday night, officials said. Clinton put the strike on hold Saturday morning when the Iraqi government seemed to accept U.S. demands. But when the text of Iraq’s statement arrived, it contained a host of unacceptable conditions.

At that time, the operation was “repositioned,” as the senior administration official put it. In effect, the U.S. gun was re-cocked.

Baghdad subsequently withdrew the objectionable conditions--in two letters delivered to U.N. Secretary-General Kofi Annan by Iraq’s ambassador--clearing the way for Clinton to tell the Pentagon to stand down.

“Iraq capitulated,” said White House National Security Advisor Samuel R. “Sandy” Berger.

Speaking at a Sunday morning news conference, Clinton said that Iraq had caved in on all of the points the United States and its close ally, Britain, raised Saturday.

The president said the Iraqis “explicitly revoked the decisions they made in August and October to suspend cooperation with UNSCOM,” the U.N. Special Commission charged with destroying Iraq’s weapons of mass destruction. Moreover, he said, “they made it clear that they would not just let the inspectors back in to wander around in a very large country but that their cooperation with them would be unconditional and complete.”

In private briefings, officials later conceded that they had strong doubts that Hussein will keep his word. But a senior official said that going ahead with the attack after Iraq seemed to be ready to comply would not only have diverted attention from Hussein but would have destroyed an international consensus that Iraq was solely to blame for the crisis.

The officials said this international solidarity was far more important to Washington’s long-term strategy than the question of whether Iraq will keep its latest promise.

“The world spoke with one voice: Iraq must accept once and for all that the only path forward is complete compliance with its obligations to the world,” Clinton said.

But Clovis Maksoud, a former Arab League delegate to the United Nations, said the administration read too much into a statement issued last week by Egypt, Syria, Saudi Arabia and five other Arab kingdoms in the Persian Gulf region. The Arab governments opposed Iraqi intransigence, he said, but did not offer carte-blanche support for U.S. military action.

If Washington had gone ahead with the assault in the face of the Iraqi statements, he said, “it would have been a tremendous embarrassment to the Arab governments in the region.” Public reaction, he said, might have destabilized some of those governments, a development that would have been extremely damaging to U.S. interests.

Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.), a frequent critic of administration foreign policy, said that once Iraq announced it would comply with Clinton’s demands, the president “did the right thing by not launching” because of the impact that an attack would have had on U.S. allies and world opinion generally.

But McCain, interviewed on the ABC-TV program “This Week,” said Clinton never should have made demands that Hussein could so easily appear to meet. Instead, he said, Clinton should have warned the Iraqis that “next time there is a place you don’t allow us to inspect, stand by, because it will be destroyed. We have the capability with cruise missiles, and we don’t have to build coalitions or have months of delay and negotiations.”

Nevertheless, as long as Iraq appears to be coming into compliance with U.N. resolutions, the administration in effect ceded the initiative to Baghdad. When Clinton on Friday said Hussein had the key to the crisis “in his hands,” the comment was probably more revealing than the president had intended.

“We have to be able to take yes for an answer,” Berger said.

Late Sunday, the Defense Department said that some of the B-52 heavy bombers and other warplanes sent to the Gulf region last week were on their way back to their normal bases.

Pentagon officials said that if Clinton had ordered an attack, it would have been far more intensive than earlier cruise missile assaults on Iraq, which were described by critics as “pinpricks.”

Although these officials said the attack would have begun with cruise missiles, the Pentagon planned to follow up with several days of massive attacks using a variety of armaments.

Although substantial military assets are being withdrawn from the Gulf, Defense Secretary William S. Cohen said U.S. forces remain ready to act if the president gives the word.

“We have a significant force in place which can be augmented in a very short time frame,” he said.

At the United Nations, Annan called the outcome “a victory for diplomacy and resolve.”

“I hope there won’t be a next time,” Annan said. “We have been through this many, many times, and from the discussions that are going on, I am not sure that governments will tolerate a next time.”

The secretary-general praised Clinton for a “statesman-like response [that] will be welcomed by the entire international community.”

At the same time, Annan conceded that the outcome was not universally popular.

“People are frustrated. There are difficulties all around,” he said. “. . . The word ‘frustration’ has been used so much, I was telling the [Security] Council when historians write about this war, they will probably describe it as a war of frustrations.”

Hussein’s timing in defusing the crisis just before the first bombs were to drop led some observers to conclude that he must have benefited from some sort of intelligence coup. But White House officials said that was doubtful.

“You can’t prove a negative, but we have no evidence that he knew,” a senior administration official said.

Sunday’s developments underscored the role of UNSCOM and its crusty director, Butler, at a time when Washington had all but given up on the inspection regime. Although the inspectors have compiled an admirable record of destroying Iraqi weapons programs, the commission has been less effective in recent months.

“Iraq has laid a trap,” said Scott Ritter, a former inspector who resigned last summer after charging that the Clinton administration was interfering with the commission’s work. “The inspectors will go back in and be encumbered. It is a return to the game of hide and seek.”

But at his White House news conference, Clinton made clear that the United States will support Iraqi opposition groups in an effort to overturn Hussein’s repressive regime.

“Let me say again, what we want and what we will work for is a government in Iraq that represents and respects its people, not represses [them], and one committed to live in peace with its neighbors,” he said.

McCain said that was the most important part of Clinton’s statement because “we all know that the only way we’re going to rid ourselves of this problem is to rid ourselves of Saddam Hussein.”

Some Middle East experts questioned the wisdom of talking openly of a post-Hussein government, however, because that will only stiffen the Iraqi leader’s resolve to thwart the U.N. inspectors.

“If the president wants to get him out, the only way to do it is what was supposed to happen this week,” a massive military assault, said Amos Perlmutter, an American University professor of government.

“The administration doesn’t think things through.”

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Times staff writers John J. Goldman at the United Nations and Paul Richter in Washington contributed to this report.