WASHINGTON -- The Bush administration could lay out further evidence of the threat posed by Iraq in the coming days and weeks, Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld said Tuesday.

That information could be released during congressional hearings on Iraq planned for later this month, Rumsfeld said at a Pentagon briefing.

"What the president wants to do, and will do, in his own time, is to provide information he feels is important with respect to any judgment he decides to make," Rumsfeld said.

President Bush plans to discuss Iraq in a meeting Wednesday at the White House with Republican and Democratic leaders from both houses of Congress, a congressional aide, speaking on condition of anonymity, said Tuesday.

At an economic development summit in South Africa, Iraqi officials said Iraq was ready to discuss a return of U.N. weapons inspectors, but only in a broader context of ending sanctions and restoring Iraqi sovereignty over all its territory. The latter issue refers to the no-fly zones over northern and southern Iraq created after the 1991 Gulf War and patrolled by U.S. and British warplanes.

"If you want to find a solution, you have to find a solution for all these matters, not only pick up one certain aspect of it," Iraqi Deputy Prime Minister Tariq Aziz said after meeting with U.N. Secretary-General Kofi Annan. "We are ready to find such a solution."

Rumsfeld said the United States wants Iraq to let United Nations weapons inspectors return without conditions. He said Iraq was trying to "play the international community and the U.N. process like a guitar, plucking the right string and the right process at the right moment.

"And then you'll find at the last moment, they'll withdraw that carrot and go back into their other mode of thumbing their nose at the international community," Rumsfeld said.

White House spokesman Ari Fleischer said the United States would regard the return of inspectors as a "first step" that might not alter Bush's view of the situation.

"The issue is whether or not Saddam Hussein possesses weapons of mass destruction," Fleischer said. "The inspectors are a means to that end, and the policy of this government has been that regime change will make the world a safer, more peaceful place."

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