U.S. waits for Iraq cooperation

Even as the aircraft carrier USS Enterprise and five escort ships joined the U.S. naval fleet in Persian Gulf waters, President Clinton and his senior advisers were not even threatening Saddam Hussein with the kind of blistering rhetoric that led up to Clinton's decision nearly two weeks ago to launch airstrikes.

He called off the attack at the last minute after the Iraqi leader promised U.N. Secretary-General Kofi Annan he would permit unfettered searches. Saddam had prohibited field searches on Aug. 5 and halted all monitoring on Oct. 31.

Clinton set five tough criteria for judging Iraq's promise to comply and indicated defiance of any of them could prompt a U.S. attack. One was that Iraq must turn over to the U.N. Special Commission, or UNSCOM, all documents bearing on the productio

AP PHOTO Iraqi President Saddam Hussein reads in one of his offices in Baghdad on Monday. U.S. actions depend on Iraq cooperation with U.N. inspectors.

n of nuclear, chemical and biological weapons and missiles that could be used to deliver them.

Clinton has now taken a cautious approach, waiting for more "facts" and saying the United States should not "overreact," while Defense Secretary William Cohen was sounding only mildly hawkish.

"I don't believe Iraq should be in the position of declaring unilaterally that documents are irrelevant to the needs and requests of the UNSCOM inspectors," he said at a joint news conference with German Defense Minister Rudolf Scharping.

"So we will continue to follow it, but much depends upon the level and degree of cooperation on the part of the Iraqis," Cohen said.

State Department spokesperson James Rubin said it was clear that the Iraqis wanted "to dodge their obligations" to provide the documents. But, he said, documents were only part of "a broad spectrum of activities" on which Iraq must cooperate.

"It includes allowing the inspectors to go where they need to go," Rubin said, adding U.N. inspectors had been allowed to go about their work for a seventh straight day without any problems.

Whether Clinton reverts to force could depend on whether Iraq throws roadblocks in the path of U.N. inspectors in a way that is so outrageous that France and Russia would support the United States.

That kind of comprehensive test could take weeks to develop as Richard Butler, head of the U.N. weapons commission, and his fellow inspectors go about their searches in a deliberate way.

"We're waiting, we are expecting the Iraqis to cooperate," Peter Burleigh, the acting U.S. representative to the United Nations, said Monday. "They have said they are going to."

While Burleigh said Iraq's response to letters from Butler insisting on documents was inadequate, he also said "there are some activities going on on the ground in Iraq where Iraqi authorities have been cooperating. We'll see."

The clear implication was that the United States would not attack Iraq over the documents alone and that Saddam Hussein had reverted to tactics he has used for seven years: cooperating just enough with U.N. weapons inspectors to split the United States and Britain on one side from Russia, France and China on the other.

Secretary of State Madeleine Albright said, meanwhile, it was very important that Iraq cooperate with the U.N. commission "and provide documentation that is necessary."

Albright stopped short of declaring the dispute a crisis. "It's not a matter of a deadline; it's a matter of really coming forward with what is necessary to show that they are cooperating," she said.

According to James Phillips, a Middle East analyst at the Heritage Foundation, the administration has lost its opportunity to launch a decisive attack, "and now we are in another prewar buildup stage."

"Saddam has jerked us around repeatedly on this, and it really wears thin, not only with our relations with our allies but with other Security Council members," Phillips said in an interview.

"The Gulf Arabs are tired of being asked to bear the political costs of supporting a strike and then have the United States back off at the last minute," Phillips said. "Each time it gets harder and harder to mobilize this coalition."

With U.N. monitors back on the job, the problem is less acute, said Laurie Mylroie, publisher of Iraq News, a Washington-based newsletter. "But there is a basic problem of Iraq retaining proscribed weapons, proscribed capability, and that is very dangerous."

"The administration hasn't come up with an answer to that problem," she said in an interview. "You have to get rid of him."

The carrier Enterprise is getting set to relieve the carrier USS Eisenhower, which arrived in the Persian Gulf a month ago. Accompanying the Enterprise were a cruiser, two destroyers and a submarine.

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