Comment: Saddam still holding many cards

The international haggling is over. A new UN resolution on Iraq passed Friday, and weapons inspectors soon could be heading back to Baghdad.

The Bush administration is pushing and planning for a speedy denouement that will either yield any weapons of mass destruction Iraq might possess or spark war to find and destroy them.

Yet a growing chorus of former weapons inspectors, intelligence analysts and Iraq experts warn that the process of trying to disarm Baghdad could drag on for months, quite possibly beyond the preferred timing for a U.S. military operation in the cooler winter months.

Indeed, in what could prove to be the administration's worst-case scenario, the Iraqi regime may comply, at least at the outset, the sources predicted. Saddam may even allow UN teams entry into eight palace compounds, access he long restricted on grounds of Iraqi sovereignty.

"We are setting ourselves up for a big confrontation. We'll try in-your-face, hardline inspections assuming the Iraqis won't cooperate.

"But Saddam will meet them with all kinds of fluffy-stuff public demonstrations, opening the palaces to the Iraqi people and other creative ploys to distract attention and make the whole thing look silly, hoping to throw the inspections off course," said Judith Yaphe, a former intelligence analyst now at National Defence University in Washington.

"By the time the inspectors get in, there'll be nothing to look for in the palaces they want to check," she said.

How the showdown unfolds will be keyed to both deadlines and performance. But despite the unprecedented pressures and demands on him, Saddam still holds many cards, UN and U.S. officials conceded.

"It's going to be easier for him to string out the process beyond the administration's (informal) deadline and harder for the United States to find a trigger mechanism to act militarily," said Phebe Marr, an Iraq expert and former U.S. government analyst. "We've already been slowed just in getting a UN resolution."

The first test will be the Friday deadline for Iraq to accept the new UN resolution. Many analysts both in and outside government expect Saddam to agree.

But the real test will be the 30-day deadline for handing over a complete list of any Iraqi nuclear, chemical and biological weapons and ballistic missiles. Iraq was supposed to provide the list within 15 days of the Gulf War's end in 1991, but still hadn't complied by the time the weapons inspectors withdrew in 1998.

Iraq has insisted for months that it has nothing left to declare – one reason the United States pushed hard for the United Nations to make lying or failing to fully declare any of its deadliest arms a "material breach" on Iraq's part that could justify military action.

Coming clean will be tough. But again, several former weapons inspectors and Iraq experts predicted that Baghdad would in the end confirm it still has weapons of mass destruction.

As part of the 1991 ceasefire, Iraq initially gave up roughly one-third of its weapons, hoping the UN teams would soon go away. They didn't. In the mid-1990s, Iraq again admitted it still had some weaponry, after claiming to be clean, a move forced by the defection of Saddam's son-in-law, who managed programmes to develop weapons of mass destruction.

As a stalling tactic, however, all Iraq has to do is confess to a few arms, perhaps a few token Scud missiles and some of the "dual-use" programmes that can make chemical or biological weapons out of everyday ingredients, analysts and former weapons inspectors said. That could muddy the waters and lead to further splits in the international community.

"If Iraq coughs up some of the stuff, particularly real biological and chemical weapons, then the United States is in trouble. It'll be very difficult for the administration to say it still may launch a war. We couldn't justify this even to the Brits," said Whitley Brunner, a former U.S. intelligence official who served in Iraq.

Since the outside world in still unsure of exactly what Saddam does and does not have, the inspectors will need time to determine whether his regime is still hiding an arsenal, analysts and former inspectors said.

Iraq's initial revelation might be greeted by many in Europe and the Arab world as proof that the inspections are working and that war is avoidable, the sources said.

Then will come the tricky and labour-intensive inspections. They will involve a nationwid hunt through hundreds of potential "dual-use" facilities, from government sites to university labs, hospitals to industrial sites, including breweries and baby-formula plants. Breweries, for example, could have "growth media" to produce biological weapons.

Merely working up what is known as a "baseline" of all the facilities to check and then setting up monitors to ensure they will not later be converted for weapons manufacture could take four to five months, said former inspectors who spent a year working up the initial baseline for the last round of inspections.

Running surprise inspections along the way will be the hardest part, since surprises are almost impossible to pull off in Saddam's tightly controlled nation.

Without major new arms discoveries, Baghdad is likely to argue that there's nothing more to find and begin pressing for an end to the inspections and the lifting of the world's toughest economic sanctions. Iraq could find sympathy from key UN Security Council members such as France and Russia.