Iraq’s Report Falls Short, Inspectors Say

Iraq has failed to prove that it has no weapons of mass destruction, the chief U.N. inspector said Thursday, pointing out that Baghdad’s 12,000-page arms declaration made no attempt to account for suspect materials that inspectors believe the country may still possess.

U.S. officials went a step further, calling the omissions “another material breach” but stopping short of declaring the flawed declaration a trigger for war. Instead, U.S. officials consider Baghdad in effect on probation until the inspectors’ next assessment of Iraq’s cooperation Jan. 27.

The report’s “pattern of systematic holes and gaps” violated the terms of the U.N. resolution on disarming Iraq, putting Baghdad just one misstep away from military action, U.S. Ambassador John D. Negroponte said after inspectors Hans Blix and Mohammed Baradei met with the Security Council on Thursday morning.

“These are material omissions that, in our view, constitute another material breach,” Negroponte said.

Secretary of State Colin L. Powell echoed the warning in Washington. “We are disappointed, but we are not deceived,” he said at a later news conference. “We have seen this game again and again -- an attempt to sow confusion and buy time, hoping the world will lose interest. This time, the game is not working.”

Although the White House said this week that the declaration was supposed to be Iraq’s “final chance” to come clean about its weapons inventory, Powell indicated that Iraq could still fill in the declaration’s gaps before the final deadline Jan. 27.

The extra time would also allow inspectors in Iraq an opportunity to ferret out any hidden materials with the help of more international intelligence -- and gives the United States some breathing room to build a politically important consensus on the Security Council to launch military action if necessary. By February, coalition troops would be in position.

In the meantime, Powell said the international community’s strategy must proceed on several fronts to ensure that Baghdad begins to comply. First, the United States and its Security Council partners should continue to analyze the Iraqi declaration to determine the extent of any deceptions and to find other ways to “compel compliance,” Powell said.

“The burden remains on Iraq -- not on the United Nations, not on the United States,” he warned.

High priority would then be given to interviews with Iraqi scientists and other “witnesses” outside Iraq, where Powell said they could speak freely. Baghdad, he stressed, is obligated to make these witnesses available. U.S. officials acknowledge that access to scientists, engineers and other technicians has become the pivotal element in revealing where weapons material might be hidden.

Diplomats at the U.N. say they anticipate that Iraq will fail to provide access to people on the list, providing a clear act of noncompliance with the resolution that the council could agree on as a trigger for military action. “If the omissions in the declaration are the first nail in the coffin, that will be the second,” said a diplomat on the Security Council.

Finally, the U.N. inspections process would be intensified, with data, intelligence and “every possible assistance” provided by all Security Council members, Powell said.

British Ambassador Jeremy Greenstock said Thursday that London already has passed on key information to the inspectors and will continue to do so.

“We want them now to get down to hard questioning and robust inspections,” he said.

Iraq must provide full cooperation with inspectors, “not just on process, on access and opening doors but proactive cooperation on substance,” Greenstock said. “That will be the test.”

After insisting for days that Washington “knows” that Iraq is still pursuing a deadly weapons program, the U.S. is now prepared to share more targeted intelligence with inspectors to help prove it, Powell added.

Many council members said they would like the U.S. to share their evidence with them as well.

“We have been hearing allegations that Iraq does continue its [weapons of mass destruction] programs,” Russian Ambassador Sergei V. Lavrov said. “We have heard it many times, but we never saw any evidence that this is the case.... To say that ‘we know but we wouldn’t tell you’ is not something which is persuasive, frankly speaking. It’s not a poker game, when you hold your cards and call others’ bluff.”

But U.S. officials later said they are unlikely to release their intelligence to the Security Council at large and will even be guarded in how and what to provide the U.N. inspectors, for fear that Iraq might gain access to preempt or undermine the inspections.

The extra month will also permit the U.S. to get troops into position for an anticipated February invasion.

More than 50,000 U.S. troops are already deployed in the Persian Gulf region, Pentagon officials said, and as many as 50,000 more may be readied for duty in the Gulf in early January.

But war is not inevitable, insist Security Council members such as France, who led the way to build guarantees into Resolution 1441 to prevent a hair-trigger attack on Iraq.

According to the resolution, omissions in the declaration alone cannot trigger war but instead must be combined with other acts of noncooperation. “Lies alone are not enough for war,” a U.N. diplomat said. “They have to lie and cheat to bring on the bombs.”

But that means that Iraq must step very carefully from now on, said Baradei, the director of the International Atomic Energy Agency.

“Because of Iraq’s patchy record of cooperation, they need to have 100% cooperation to exonerate themselves,” Baradei said. “They need to come forward with evidence that Iraq has been disarmed.”

Iraq has already shown that there is more information to hand over. After Baghdad submitted the inventory to U.N. officials Dec. 7, Iraqi officials discovered a report detailing chemical munitions that directly contradicted other declarations of its chemical weapons holdings and destruction.

The document is known as the “Air Force” report because an inspector seized it during a visit to Iraq’s air force headquarters in 1998. An Iraqi official grabbed it out of her hands, and a standoff ensued. The inspector was able to make notes of its contents but not a copy, and ultimately had to return it to the air force officials, who agreed to put it in a safe sealed by the inspectors for later examination. The inspectors didn’t see it again until this month.

Iraqi authorities, however, insist that they have provided everything that was required. Iraq’s deputy U.N. ambassador, Mohammed Salmane, dismissed as “baseless” the charges that Baghdad failed to prove that it no longer has weapons of mass destruction.

“I would like to confirm that the Iraqi declaration is complete and comprehensive,” he said, adding that it can be verified on the ground by U.N. inspectors.

Iraqi Vice President Taha Yassin Ramadan said earlier Thursday that his country has no weapons of mass destruction and that the United States is looking for an excuse to invade.

“Iraq had no arms of mass destruction. I think the United States is well placed to know this in the first place, but the United States is looking for a pretext for an attack,” he told French RFI radio through an interpreter.

“Every people and every nation,” he said, “has the right to defend itself through all possible means.”

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Farley reported from the United Nations and Wright from Washington.