Send More Inspectors, White House Urges U.N.

The Bush administration is urging the United Nations to conduct more aggressive weapons searches in Iraq, saying more inspectors should be deployed to conduct multiple, simultaneous site checks, the White House said Wednesday.

The White House is convinced that Iraq retains weapons of mass destruction but is skeptical that the inspectors can find them. So while the administration is pushing for more assertive inspections, it is also dismissing any suggestion that Iraq’s early cooperation with U.N. monitors means that Baghdad has indeed disarmed and war will be averted.

On Monday, National Security Advisor Condoleezza Rice met with chief weapons inspector Hans Blix at the U.N. and urged him to increase the number of inspectors and carry out several surprise searches at the same time to speed the process and to make it more difficult for Iraq to thwart the operations.

“We want to make certain that they are aggressive enough to be able to ascertain the facts in the face of an adversary who in the past did everything in his power to hide the facts,” White House spokesman Ari Fleischer said Wednesday.

The number of inspectors will increase from 17 to 100 by Christmas, with more monitors to be trained in January, Blix said. But Washington has asked that the training sessions be speeded up. Blix said that Rice offered plenty of “recommendations and advice on how to proceed” but that he didn’t interpret it as undue pressure. “I know what my job is,” he said.

The push to step up the inspections’ pace occurred as U.N. teams finished their first week’s work in Iraq without incident and the Sunday deadline approached for Baghdad to submit an inventory of its weapons programs.

Fleischer characterized Dec. 8, the deadline for Iraq’s report, as the beginning of a new phase in Washington’s showdown with Baghdad. The report will be delivered to the Security Council members, including the United States, on Sunday night or Monday morning, U.N. officials said. But it will take some time to determine whether the information in the report -- or lack of it -- will clearly show that Iraq is disarming or dissembling.

U.N. officials said that they expect the report to be thousands of pages long, with summaries in English and supporting documents in Arabic, and that it would take “days” to translate and analyze it.

The U.S. administration is also gearing up for an in-depth review and cross-check with its own intelligence about what weapons Baghdad may still hold. If the U.S. believes Iraq’s declaration to be patently false, diplomats may hand their counter-evidence to the weapons inspectors to discreetly verify it, or they may go straight to the Security Council to present it as proof of a “material breach” of Resolution 1441.

In Iraq, weapons experts visited two sites known to have produced banned weapons in the past.

Al Tuwaitha, south of Baghdad, was associated with Iraq’s nuclear program. Research reactors and all significant nuclear-related installations were destroyed during the 1991 Persian Gulf War, and the rest dismantled later.

Biological and chemical experts, meanwhile, inspected the sprawling Al Muthanna complex, northwest of Baghdad, the original home of Iraq’s biological weapons program. The site was heavily bombed in 1991, and inspectors viewed the rusting hulls of old fermenters and tanks.

U.N. team leader Dimitri Perricos said the inspectors had found mustard gas at the site -- as expected -- because U.N. monitors left it there during the last inspections in 1998.

While Iraqi authorities have cooperated with the inspections, even during a search for documents in one of President Saddam Hussein’s carefully guarded presidential palaces, a senior Iraqi official allowed a flicker of anger to show Wednesday.

Vice President Taha Yassin Ramadan said the teams’ “work is to spy, to serve the CIA and Mossad,” the Israeli intelligence service, the Associated Press reported from Baghdad. In 1998, some members of the inspection teams said the U.N. mission was being used by intelligence agencies. The teams’ efforts unraveled as Hussein charged them with espionage and blocked access to inspection sites. Ultimately, the inspectors pulled out of Baghdad the day before a U.S.-British bombing strike.

Iraq depends on a clean bill of health from inspectors not only to avoid war but also to end a decade of punitive sanctions implemented after Iraq’s 1990 invasion of Kuwait. At U.N. headquarters in New York on Wednesday, the Security Council voted to extend the humanitarian “oil for food” program for six more months, but to review a list of banned import items within 30 days.

The extension of the program is usually routine, but this time, the U.S. wanted to add new items to the list it claimed could be used for military purposes and threatened to block the rollover. Russia countered by saying it wanted to take items off the list, such as Russian-made trucks. The 15-member council avoided a split in its unity on Iraq by deciding to extend the program and hold discussions on the “goods review list.”

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Gerstenzang reported from Washington and Farley from the United Nations. Times staff writer Bob Drogin in Washington contributed to this report.