Iraq’s Defiance Keeps Chance of Strikes Alive

Prospects of a U.S. military strike on Iraq appeared to grow Sunday, as a leading congressional Republican declared that “we’d better be prepared” for an attack, and Iraqi officials heaped scorn on the chief U.N. weapons inspector, who is at the center of the dispute.

“It’s a very bad start, and it seems to me very clear that when the president returns home . . . we’d better be prepared for the military strike,” Sen. Richard G. Lugar (R-Ind.) said, referring to Iraq’s defiant stance since its promise to cooperate with inspectors staved off a U.S. attack.

President Clinton is scheduled to return to Washington late tonight, after a trip to Japan, South Korea and Guam. Although White House officials have been chagrined by Iraq’s posture in the week since its promise of cooperation persuaded Clinton to call off the assault, the administration has been measured in its criticism.

Before leaving Seoul, White House spokesman David Leavy said this morning that the Clinton administration needed to “wait to see” how the tense process unfolds.

Leavy noted that Richard Butler, the chief U.N. weapons inspector, complained last week that Iraq responded “inadequately” to his request for documents about its biological, chemical and missile programs. “We support that,” Leavy said of Butler’s complaint. “We need inspections on the ground.

“Our position remains clear,” he added. “If Iraq does not intend to live up to its commitments to comply and UNSCOM can’t do its job, we remain prepared to act.”

Iraqi officials maintain that most of the requested materials do not exist. Iraq’s ambassador to the United Nations said Sunday that Iraq will respond formally today at the United Nations to the request.

On Sunday, U.S. National Security Advisor Samuel R. “Sandy” Berger said the White House still hoped that Iraq would respond “positively and quickly” to Butler’s request.

“We don’t think [Iraq’s] is a reasonable objection,” said Berger, who was traveling with Clinton. Berger noted that the United States was still ready to take military action if Iraq failed to cooperate with U.N. inspectors.

“Mr. Butler has said that their response is not satisfactory,” Berger said. “He’s gone back to them and asked for further information, and we hope and expect to get that. We would hope they would respond positively and quickly.”

Butler, in an interview Sunday with CNN, cautioned that it was premature to talk of bombing raids against Iraq for not handing over documents he requested.

“Talk about [Iraq’s] shortfall in the last few days on documents leading automatically to some kind of enforcement is a bit exaggerated,” he said.

In a Baghdad news conference, Iraqi Foreign Minister Mohammed Said Sahaf said Iraq has already handed over millions of papers to monitors and asserted that no more files exist.

“Anything relevant to the work of disarmament, we had already handed over,” he said.

The ongoing tensions have once again raised the question of whether the United States and Britain will unleash a military strike in the near future.

Interviewed Sunday on ABC-TV’s “This Week,” Lugar even raised the possibility of using U.S. ground forces in a military campaign to topple Iraqi President Saddam Hussein.

Lugar, who is a senior member of the Senate Foreign Relations and Intelligence committees, suggested Sunday that the United States has various military options, some of which would specifically aim to erode Hussein’s grasp on power. The military action, he said, could come in stages.

“He [Hussein] really is not fated to stay there in perpetuity,” Lugar said. “There could be a series of strikes that do very considerable military damage, as well as to clean up at least those questions about sites for weapons of mass destruction over which we have some questions. And then, if he is not gone, there could be some more strikes. There could be additional military action.”

Ever since the 1991 Persian Gulf War, America’s military strategy has been to occasionally punish Iraq from the air, but not put U.S. soldiers on the ground.

Critics of the Iraqi regime also have stepped up efforts to encourage resistance to Hussein, a strategy that has not worked in the past. So far, the Iraqi leader has brutally repressed political resistance to his regime.

Lugar said he “presumed” that the administration was working with others to change the Iraqi government. In London, British officials Sunday expressed support for the opponents of Hussein’s dictatorship.

“The groups are fragmented, but you shouldn’t go too far in writing them off. Let’s see what happens,” a British official said Sunday.

Amid the verbal sparring, U.N. inspectors set out to examine Iraqi weapons sites Sunday for a fifth straight day. Witnesses said monitors in white UNSCOM vehicles drove out of U.N. headquarters in Baghdad early in the morning. UNSCOM is the U.N. Special Commission charged with the responsibility of eliminating Iraq’s prohibited weapons programs.

Yet even as the inspectors went to work, Iraqi officials spoke contemptuously of their leader, Butler, describing his requests as “provocative” and assailing him as a “tool” of the U.S. who is seeking to provide the White House with a pretext for military attack.

Butler “has asked for alleged documents that do not exist,” said Iraqi Deputy Prime Minister Tarik Aziz in Baghdad. “He has asked for old stories which were settled in the past, and he also asked for access to all the archives of the government of Iraq.

“We told him we cannot provide documents that do not exist. It is quite provocative if you want to dig into the whole archive of the government of Iraq, which might take decades to investigate,” Aziz said. “This is the crisis.”

*

Times staff writer Elizabeth Shogren contributed to this report from Seoul.