Making case for Iraq war is a critical test for Bush

Washington - This week, President Bush hopes to convince the country, and a largely skeptical world, that Saddam Hussein will never voluntarily disarm, leaving war as the only remaining answer.

"Today is the beginning of the final phase," a senior adviser to the president said.

Mr. Bush got unexpected help today from Hans Blix, the normally understated Swede who is co-chief of the United Nations weapons inspections program. With his quietly devastating list of questions that Iraq has refused to answer — where are the stores of anthrax and VX? where are the illegal missiles and the artillery shells stuffed with chemical weapons? — he gave the president much, though not quite all, of the support he needs.

The inspectors' list of continuing acts of intransigence by Mr. Hussein gives Mr. Bush the political opportunity on Tuesday night to argue in his State of the Union address that more time will not solve the Iraq problem.

In the speech, one of the most critical of his presidency so far, Mr. Bush plans "to answer the question, `Why now?' " a senior aide who has reviewed a draft said tonight.

It is a question that, some of Mr. Bush's friends and sympathetic allies concede, he has so far failed to address in any convincing fashion.

That creates even more pressure as he and his staff put finishing touches to the State of the Union address, and map out a series of phone calls and personal meetings intended to bridge the divide between the United States and its closest allies.

Not surprisingly, Mr. Bush is spending the week with the most like-minded foreign leaders, calling the conservative prime minister of Spain today, and inviting Italy's leader, Silvio Berlusconi, to visit him in Washington. On Friday he will take Prime Minister Tony Blair of Britain — a loyal partner in public, a voice of some caution in private — to Camp David.

Mr. Blix, who oversees the team of chemical and biological weapons inspectors in Iraq, did not hand Mr. Bush a complete victory today. His counterpart for nuclear weapons, Dr. Mohamed ElBaradei, the head of the International Atomic Energy Agency, made clear that his inspectors had not found any signs of radioactivity or other evidence that Mr. Hussein was reviving a bomb project that was six months or so away from a weapon in 1991 — a central tenet in the administration's case.

That may hurt Mr. Bush's cause, because nothing constitutes a more compelling "smoking gun" than evidence of nuclear bomb-making.

Still, few at the White House expected Mr. Blix to make as much of a case for Mr. Bush as he did today. In private, administration officials have complained that he is usually in "Volvo mode" — the safety-first approach of his country's best-known car. But today was different, and Mr. Blix's frustration was evident.

Iraq, he said, "appears not to have come to a genuine acceptance, even today, of the disarmament which was demanded of it." He listed, in painstaking detail, the inconsistencies in Iraq's declarations, the blocking of U-2 surveillance flights, and the fact that not a single Iraqi scientist agreed to be interviewed without a government official present.

"Blix laid out the bill of indictment for Saddam Hussein, and it is more credible coming from him than from Bush," said Kenneth M. Pollack, a former national security official in the Clinton administration, who is director of research at the Saban Center at the Brookings Institution. Mr. Pollack said he was expecting Mr. Blix to "focus on the positive."

But Mr. Pollack and others cautioned that it is far from clear that Mr. Bush will be able to capitalize on the Blix report. Already today European officials were saying that even if everything Mr. Blix says is true — and they did not dispute it — Iraq has been hiding whatever weapons it has for a decade. And the question that Germany and France have pressed remains: If Saddam Hussein's power is contained by the presence of inspectors and the troops massing on his border, what is the urgency of toppling him now?

"The pressure on Saddam is fine, and we want to keep it up," one senior German official said today by telephone from Berlin. "Why risk everything else that can go wrong — uprisings in the streets, a broken Iraq — if we have him where we want him?"

Mr. Bush's aides know they have to answer that question directly in one of the most widely anticipated State of the Union addresses in recent history. There was evidence today that Mr. Bush understood the challenge, and that he would argue that Iraq is not only a major threat, but also an urgent one.

Over the weekend, his chief of staff, Andrew H. Card Jr., a Massachusetts Republican who is usually as understated as Mr. Blix, said it was up to the United States to "protect us and the world from a Holocaust" should Mr. Hussein begin thinking about using weapons of mass destruction.

Today the White House pushed that argument further, sending Secretary of State Colin L. Powell out to reiterate — without providing much new evidence — that there are links between Mr. Hussein and the terrorist organization Al Qaeda. Implicit in that argument is that even if Mr. Hussein does not lash out at America directly, he could pass his weapons to terrorists who will.

Experts say the risk is there. But last week, officials in several European countries argued that terrorists would be far more likely to obtain a nuclear weapon in Pakistan or North Korea — a threat Mr. Bush says far less about — than in Baghdad.

So part of Mr. Bush's challenge is to make Mr. Hussein sound like an urgent threat without overreaching in a way that would make it easier for critics to say he is exaggerating.

"There's a risk to our credibility if we make claims that seem less than fully plausible," one senior American diplomat said last week. "Could Saddam hand off his anthrax or his VX? Sure. Is there any evidence so far he's done that? Not much." -- New York Times

Brudirect.com