Global Policy Forum

By Barbara Crossette & Steven Lee Myers

The United Nations has assembled a new team of arms inspectors that is ready to enter Iraq within weeks, raising the prospect of another confrontation with President Saddam Hussein over his weapons programs.

The creation of the new team comes more than two years after Mr. Hussein halted cooperation with a previous group of inspectors, provoking a diplomatic crisis that culminated in four nights of American and British airstrikes in December 1998.

Iraq has repeatedly said it will not cooperate with the new weapons commission, which the Security Council ordered nine months ago in the hope that it would resolve some objections the Iraqis, as well as the Russians and French, had about the previous commission.

One of the chief Iraqi complaints about the previous commission, headed by Richard Butler, an Australian arms control expert, was that there were too many inspectors from the United States and Britain, who the Iraqis asserted were really spies.

The new team, with members from 19 countries, is meant to be more accountable to the United Nations secretary general, Kofi Annan. All the members work directly for the United Nations, not for their own countries as before.

This week, Hans Blix, the leader of the new team, is to discuss the need for access to Iraq with a panel of international weapons experts who serve as the commission's directors. By Sept. 1 he is expected to report to the Security Council that the inspectors are ready to begin work and, barring a change in Iraq's position, to report that the Iraqis continued to reject new inspections.

But it remains far from clear what the United States or other members of the Security Council will do if Iraq refuses to cooperate. It is also not clear how forcefully the council will push the new inspections, especially since its 15 members are sharply divided over Iraq and the broad economic sanctions imposed on it. Their positions are not likely to become clear until debates in the council begin sometime in September.

The sanctions were imposed after Iraq invaded Kuwait in 1990. They are to remain in place until Iraq is certified as free of prohibited weapons -- chemical, biological and nuclear arms as well as long-range missiles. Last December the Security Council said it would suspend the sanctions if Iraq cooperated with the new team of arms inspectors.

Refusal by Mr. Hussein would leave the council no alternative to keeping the sanctions in place. It is unlikely that the council would call for the use of force, but in previous confrontations the United States and Britain have argued that existing resolutions authorize military action.

A confrontation would focus new attention on the Clinton administration's policy toward Iraq in the middle of the presidential election. That policy has come under sharp attack from Republicans and even some Democrats in Washington, who complain that President Clinton has not acted forcefully enough to force Mr. Hussein's government to accept the inspections. If Mr. Hussein refuses to cooperate, the administration will be under political pressure to act forcefully. If the Iraqi leader reverses course, Mr. Clinton's successor could be confronted with the politically difficult decision of whether to go along with a suspension of sanctions.

Diplomats and other officials at the United Nations said they believed that during this year's election campaign, the Clinton administration is not likely to press for strong action, even if Iraq remains defiant. But a senior administration official said the Iraqis or anyone else would be foolish to assume that. Although the administration has not indicated how it would answer new Iraqi defiance, the official refused to rule out the possibility of an "October surprise" of American military action at the height of a campaign, should the Iraqis provoke it. "They will be making a severe mistake if they think an election campaign will affect how we carry out our foreign policy," the official said.

In Washington, administration officials said they would insist that Iraq comply with the resolution that created Dr. Blix's team or face an indefinite extension of sanctions. "It's a mandatory resolution," Thomas R. Pickering, an under secretary of state, said in a telephone interview. "If the Iraqis don't comply, the sanctions will stay in place." Under the resolution that created Dr. Blix's team, those sanctions can be suspended six months after the Iraqis fulfill a list of key requirements set by the inspectors and, ultimately, be lifted once the inspectors conclude that Iraq has come clean and dismantled its prohibited weapons programs.

The previous commission had a more comprehensive standard for declaring Iraq free of weapons before sanctions could be lifted, offering no interim steps like a suspension. The new inspection organization is officially known as the United Nations Monitoring, Verification and Inspection Commission. Dr. Blix, a Swedish arms control expert, previously served as director general of the International Atomic Energy Agency in Vienna.

This month, he completed recruiting and training the 44 inspectors from countries friendly and not so friendly to the Iraqis. Dr. Blix said his first step would be to find out what had happened to several hundred sites inspected by the last commission in 1998, a process that could take at least several months.

The Iraqis have said they believe that the United States would never agree to a suspension of sanctions but would instead find another reason to keep them in place, making cooperation, in their view, fruitless.

Administration officials have long argued that resuming inspections in Iraq -- rather than resorting to force -- is the most effective way to combat Mr. Hussein's efforts to hold on to nuclear, chemical or biological weapons, as well as long-range missiles that could deliver them.

But within the Pentagon and the American intelligence agencies, there is growing concern that Mr. Hussein has used the prolonged absence of inspectors to continue those efforts. The Central Intelligence Agency sent a report to Congress this month warning that Iraq had already rebuilt missile and chemical weapons factories since the airstrikes in 1998.

The issue of inspections is only one area in which the international standoff with Mr. Hussein appears headed for a new period of confrontation, a decade after Iraq's invasion of Kuwait led to the Persian Gulf war. In recent weeks Mr. Hussein has taken steps to ease his diplomatic isolation, receiving a visit from President Hugo Chávez of Venezuela. A thriving black market is reportedly eroding the sanctions, while Russia, supported by China, is challenging the American and British patrols of the "no flight" zones in northern and southern Iraq, which were established to protect Kurds and Shiite Muslims from Mr. Hussein's government.

In the face of these challenges, diplomats at the United Nations and even some American officials say, the administration's policy has been left to drift. The American ambassador to the United Nations, Richard C. Holbrooke, has not involved himself in the issue. Mr. Holbrooke says he has been too busy on other matters.

"There's no doubt things are on autopilot," said one official in Washington. "And it might be an autopilot with a 10-degree downward tilt." Several diplomats, including some from nations on the Security Council, said the administration had undermined its influence by openly calling for the removal of Mr. Hussein from power. That has given the Iraqis an excuse for dismissing the council's pledge to suspend sanctions if Mr. Hussein cooperates with new inspectors, the diplomats said.

The administration may find itself even further isolated on the council, since three countries supportive of the United States and Britain -- Argentina, Canada and the Netherlands -- will be among the five countries relinquishing their rotating council seats.

Administration officials say they have succeeded in containing Iraq by enforcing the sanctions and continuing to enforce the "no flight" zones despite repeated Iraqi provocations that have resulted in hundreds of limited retaliatory airstrikes since 1998.

When American and British warplanes and missiles launched a much larger attack 20 months ago, administration officials acknowledged that the attack would make it difficult to resume weapons inspections. But they argued that with Mr. Hussein refusing to cooperate, there was no other way to prevent Iraq from acquiring chemical or biological weapons. "Mark my words," President Clinton said of Mr. Hussein at the time, "he will develop weapons of mass destruction. He will deploy them, and he will use them. Because we're acting today, it is less likely that we will face these dangers in the future."

At the time, Secretary of Defense William S. Cohen and others also warned that the United States was prepared to use force again if there was evidence that Iraq had resumed its chemical or biological weapons programs -- or if Iraq threatened its neighbors or attacked the Kurds in the north.

James M. Bodner, the principal deputy under secretary of defense for policy and a longtime aide to Mr. Cohen, said in an interview that the United States remained ready to respond if Iraq crossed any of those "red lines." Administration officials said they had no concrete evidence that Iraq had restarted its weapons programs. But in addition to repairing the damage done in 1998, Iraq has resumed testing its shorter-range missiles. Officials fear that those tests, while not prohibited under the United Nations resolutions, have allowed Iraq to perfect longer-range missiles.

Despite that, the administration's warnings about Iraq's weapons have lost much of their urgency. In the fall of 1997, Mr. Cohen held up a bag of sugar on television and ominously warned that an equivalent amount of anthrax bacteria, which Iraq is believed to possess, could destroy half the population of Washington.

In recent months administration officials have made no such dire warnings, even though there have been no effective inspections in two years. At the same time, Americans have done little publicly to press Dr. Blix to accelerate the formation of his inspection team, which has proceeded slowly. He began interviewing weapons experts in May, and those selected have completed a four-week training program. Dr. Blix said there are signs that Iraq is thinking over its next moves.

The Iraqis recently presented a legalistic analysis of the new inspection plan to governments of Islamic nations meeting in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia. The memorandum suggests that the Iraqis still nurture hopes that the resolution creating the inspection commission can be rewritten. Russia has already called for changes, but United Nations and American officials have adamantly ruled that out.

Some diplomats say that Iraq may have calculated that it can bide its time, hoping for a better deal. Others say Mr. Hussein will stop short of any actions that would invite American retaliation, while trying to build support for an unconditional lifting of the sanctions. "Right now, he thinks things are going his way," a Defense Department official said. "He's outlasted the Clinton administration. He outlasted the Bush administration. I think his perception is he can outlast them all."