Saddam has chance to give inspectors what they want

BAGHDAD, Iraq -- "Keep your eyes on your enemy," advises the man who calls himself the Light of the Arabs. "Be ahead of him, but do not let him be far behind your back."

That man, Saddam Hussein, has yet another chance in the coming days to stay a step ahead of his pursuers. With peace in the balance, Iraq's resourceful president can give U.N. arms inspectors some of what they want.

Chief inspectors Hans Blix and Mohamed ElBaradei arrived Sunday for two days of talks with Baghdad officials, bearing a long list of demands for greater Iraqi cooperation in the effort to verify that Iraq has no chemical, biological or nuclear arms.

For Saddam and his aides, it's a list of opportunities to hold war at bay: by offering more weapons scientists for U.N. interviews, by handing over more documents, by accepting spy-plane overflights, by agreeing to write a ban on weapons of mass destruction into Iraqi law.

Military converging

Time seems short. American naval flotillas and army divisions are converging on the seas and deserts of the Middle East, and Washington threatens war to disarm Iraq. Secretary of State Colin Powell says he expects a definitive case of noncooperation to be laid against Iraq by month's end, when Blix and ElBaradei formally report to the U.N. Security Council.

But Iraq's resilient president, in three decades of power, has shown a knack for last-minute reversals, for the kind of surprises that, in this case, would give some at the United Nations enough to argue for peace. In a sign of such concessions, Blix reported the Iraqis on Sunday did offer some of the documents sought by the inspectors.

In their meetings here, the inspectors' top priority is to fill in gaps in the 12,000 pages of "declaration" Iraq submitted in December detailing its chemical, biological and nuclear programs. Washington has rejected it as grossly inadequate.

Need more information

"We are going to need a lot of additional information," ElBaradei, chief nuclear inspector, said after landing in Baghdad.

Because of discrepancies in accounts of weapons produced and destroyed, the declaration leaves questions unanswered about Iraqi chemical and biological arms programs, supposedly shut down under U.N. mandate after Iraq's defeat in the 1991 Gulf War.

Those discrepancies took concrete form last week when U.N. inspectors found a dozen empty chemical warheads, left over from the 1980s. On Sunday, the Iraqis told the U.N. delegation they had found four more elsewhere.

Earlier inspectors had certified the destruction of more than 100,000 such Iraqi aerial and artillery munitions in the 1990s, but the paper evidence was sparse for some 20,000 others, including those dozen, and that feeds suspicions Iraq is holding caches of forbidden arms.

Blix says inspectors want more "solid evidence" to close the books: production and destruction records, budget documents, transportation manifests, interviews with knowledgeable scientists, engineers and others.

The Iraqis submitted a list of 500 such potential witnesses in late December, a list that Blix dismissed as not a "serious effort." The arms monitors want the names of many more Iraqi specialists associated with old weapons making or with current programs that could be diverted to making weapons of mass destruction.

The inspectors also, among other demands, want Iraq to facilitate overflights by U.S. reconnaissance aircraft to aid the U.N. weapons hunt. The Security Council authorized such flights, but the Iraqis are bickering over arrangements. With U.S. combat forces on their doorstep, "they're nervous," a U.N. official said privately.

Blix also complains Baghdad has been slow to enact legislation incorporating the U.N. ban on Iraqi doomsday weapons into national law.

"There's still time" for Iraq to head off war, Blix says. And although it's late, Saddam has made a specialty of such 11th-hour retreats, tactical withdrawals to perhaps fight another day.

Just last September, Iraq's unexpected invitation for the inspectors to return, after a four-year absence, startled Washington officials, who for some days actually tried to delay the return of Blix's experts, while they worked out U.S. strategy. Weeks later, Saddam overruled his own Parliament to formally accept the U.N. resolution governing the inspections.

Sometimes, however, the Iraqi leader has misread the clock.

In 1982, after Iran's army surprised the world and drove back an Iraqi invasion, Saddam offered peace talks. It was too late; the war dragged on for six more years. And in 1991, when Saddam finally grasped that the United States was serious about chasing his army from Kuwait, he offered to accept failure and to withdraw. But again his timing was off; the American army struck anyway.

The hour is late once again for the durable Iraqi, and his long-suffering people must wonder whether he will follow his own advice, found in millions of copies of "Saddam's Lessons" distributed in pamphlets across Iraq:

"When you take a decision, do not regret it," the Father of Iraq counsels. "But when you find a mistake in it, do not hesitate to rectify it."