Disarming Iraq Not as Easy as It Sounds, Intelligence Analysts Say
WASHINGTON — A dozen years after Iraq's invasion of little oil-rich Kuwait, the endgame over the future of Saddam Hussein's regime has finally begun.
Or has it?
The international haggling is over. A new U.N. 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 warns that disarming Baghdad could drag on quite possibly beyond the preferred timing for a U.S. military operation in the cooler winter months.
In what could prove to be the administration's worst-case scenario, the Iraqi regime may comply at least at the outset, the sources predict. Hussein may even allow U.N. 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 hard-line 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 the National Defense 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. "That will be the pattern over and over again, wherever the inspectors go."
How the showdown unfolds will be keyed to both deadlines and performance. But despite the unprecedented pressures and demands on him, Hussein still holds many cards, U.N. and U.S. officials concede.
"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 U.N. resolution."
The first test will be the Friday deadline for Iraq to accept the new U.N. resolution. Many analysts both inside and outside government expect Hussein to agree.
