Iraq Will Give, but Not Give In

Iraq’s response to U.N. inspections of potential chemical, biological and nuclear sites is just what the Bush administration feared, officials said Wednesday: initial compliance but little evidence that Saddam Hussein is genuinely ready to disarm.

With just one day of inspections completed, U.S. officials and experts outside the government said they expect Iraq to continue to cooperate even as it attempts to conceal ongoing weapons programs.

They point out that Iraq, even as it agreed to allow inspectors back after a four-year hiatus, insisted that it has nothing to hide. But that assertion flies in the face of evidence the U.S., Britain, France and other governments say their intelligence agencies have amassed that Iraq is pursuing nuclear, chemical and biological weapons programs.

“What they’ve been doing is complying, but grudgingly ... in a way that portends bad things to come,” a senior Bush administration official said in an interview on condition he not be identified.

Iraq watchers outside the government largely agreed.

“The Iraqis are very confident in their ability to continue to hide this stuff from the inspectors,” said Kenneth M. Pollack, a former CIA expert on Iraq.

Pollack, who served on President Clinton’s National Security Council staff, argues in his book “The Threatening Storm” that the only reliable way to disarm Iraq is through military action.

“They know it’s simply a waiting game,” Pollack said. “They’ve waited out the international community once, and I think they’re confident they can do it again.”

“[Hussein] will do everything possible to delay, protract, draw the process out in hope that something will happen to derail us,” said David L. Mack, a former State Department official and Iraq expert. “His whole history is based on believing that something will happen that allows him to escape.”

Teams of U.N. inspectors carried out their first inspections of Iraqi facilities Wednesday and met with no apparent resistance from the Baghdad government.

The inspectors did not report any immediate findings, but they were not expected to. Their initial forays were intended largely as trial runs, in part to test whether the Iraqis would put obstacles in their path.

President Bush and his aides have made it clear for weeks that Iraq’s level of cooperation with the inspectors was a key early test and that, if the Iraqis failed, a U.S.-led invasion would shortly follow.

That’s still the case, the senior official said Wednesday. “The only way this is going to work is if Iraq is willingly complying,” he said.

He said Iraqi officials had allowed the inspectors to enter the country and begin their operations unhindered. But more significant, he said, were Baghdad’s repeated statements arguing that the inspections regime is unfair.

“They continue to say there are no weapons of mass destruction in Iraq,” the official said. Inspections chief Hans Blix “has told them you need to prove that’s true.”

The next major test will come Dec. 8, when Iraq is due to submit an “accurate, full and complete declaration” of any nuclear, chemical and biological programs. There, the experts say, Hussein faces several options -- and they disagree over which he is most likely to choose.

He may say he has nothing to declare, that Iraq has no weapons programs beyond the ones it has already acknowledged. Or he may try to guess what the CIA and other Western intelligence agencies know about his weapons programs and declare a little more. Or he may declare everything -- and drown the U.N. in paper by including every chemical and biological laboratory in the country, from weapons programs to veterinary stations and high schools.

The most likely scenario, government officials believe, is the first one: a declaration that Baghdad has already revealed all its weapons of mass destruction -- issuing, in effect, a challenge to the U.N. to find whatever it can.

“The conundrum will be if they stand pat” on previous declarations to the U.N., or if they say, ‘We had [a weapon] but we destroyed it, and the records were destroyed too,’ ” the senior official said.

At that point, it will be up to the U.N. inspectors, aided by Western intelligence, to prove the declaration wrong.

But some analysts think the difficulty could come from the opposite direction -- if Hussein gives the inspectors too much data.

“He could give them a lot of meaningless stuff to make it look like he’s softening,” warned Judith Yaphe, a scholar at the National Defense University. “He’ll say, ‘Of course we’ll comply.’ But his objective will be to slow the process down, be patient, and expect to get it all back someday.”

The U.N. resolution requires Iraq to declare not only military facilities but also civilian programs that involve chemical, biological or nuclear technology. The Iraqis have complained that this requires them to declare such things as petrochemical plants that manufacture plastic sandals, and they have warned that they might not meet the deadline.

The U.N., with U.S. approval, has responded that it might accept belated declarations of purely civilian facilities but not military programs, the official said.

Several experts said they expect Hussein to choose the middle option: a declaration that includes some new information about military programs but not everything in Iraq’s secret arsenal.

“I’m inclined to think [the declaration] will be pretty thorough,” said Mack, who oversaw Iraq policy at the State Department during the Persian Gulf War a decade ago. “They will probably make some confessions of oversight.

“But he’ll try to hold on to something.... The weapons of mass destruction are important to his image with the senior generals and the intelligence people in his own regime. His survival in power does depend on being able to intimidate other people internally, and that depends on an image of being able to outsmart the United States and the U.N.

“Cooperation might win him praise from the international community, but it has a definite downside for him inside Iraq,” Mack said.

“His strategy is always going to be: ‘What can I do to drive a wedge between those people who have lined up against me? How can I split off the weak-kneed?’ ” said Joseph C. Wilson, a former U.S. diplomat in Baghdad.

Even if Hussein “had a change of heart and decided that he wanted to comply completely” with the U.N. resolution, Wilson said, Iraq’s national security needs could get in the way.

“Disarmament is a wonderful goal, but the Iraqis didn’t build their weapons of mass destruction because they hate America,” he said. “They built them because they are in a tough neighborhood. They built them because they are afraid of three strong countries nearby: Israel, Turkey and Iran.”