US Split on Need for Last Chance for Saddam

President Bush's tough and carefully chosen words on Iraq have failed to stem the bitter row within his administration over how to deal with Saddam Hussein. It has instead sparked off a debate about how to put the American case to the UN next week.

Mr Bush said in his speech to the UN general assembly on September 12 he would point out how President Saddam was "stiffing the world" over his weapons of mass destruction and would "talk about ways to make sure that he fulfils his obligations".

But there is no consensus within the administration on whether the Iraqi leader should even be given another chance to fulfil those obligations, laid out in the post-Gulf war resolution 687 calling on him to disarm.

Some administration officials interpreted the president's words as meaning the US would seek another resolution setting a deadline on Iraqi compliance, with UN backing for US-led military intervention if President Saddam maintained his defiance. Others said it meant nothing of the sort.

The New York Times quoted a senior official as playing down expectations of a new resolution, declaring: "All we can say is we've had 16 of them and [Saddam] has not complied."

Yesterday it was clear only that the speech - likely to be one of the most important of the president's term - has not yet been written, and the lobbying inside the administration, in the US press, and abroad has become frenetic.

Much is likely to depend on Mr Bush's talks with Tony Blair on Saturday at Camp David and his telephone conversations with the other members of the "permanent five" in the UN security council: France, China and Russia. The discussions will explore whether the security council can agree on an ultimatum that is tough enough to satisfy the administration, but is not simply a pretext for a US invasion of Iraq.

"The ball is in everyone's court," said a European diplomat in Washington. "This administration wants to take the multilateral route, but they won't go down that route if they can't get a 'last-chance saloon' ultimatum with a high bar."

At the core of the issue are UN weapons inspections and whether they retain any credibility. The Bush administration believes they do not, pointing to President Saddam's record of evasion, but in his remarks on Wednesday, Mr Bush suggested he was open to a final attempt to make them work.

An international group of policy experts, former US officials and military officers will today put forward proposals for a new form of "coercive inspections". The proposals, published by the Carnegie Endowment Institute for Peace, envisage a 50,000-strong multinational force authorised by the security council, deployed in Jordan, Kuwait, Saudi Arabia and Turkey, and ready to step in to ensure Iraqi compliance with inspections and to protect the inspectors. If Iraq resisted it would trigger a US-led invasion.

Daryl Kimball, the head of the Washington-based Arms Control Association, argued that the Carnegie proposal was so militaristic that it was bound to be rejected.

"This inspections approach borders on an invasion," he said, adding that Iraq and its neighbours "will not see the subtle distinction between that and 100,000 troops marching on Baghdad".

Mr Kimball instead proposed a security council resolution demanding that Iraq provide UN inspectors unconditional and unrestricted access to suspected weapons sites around the country, backed up by UN authorisation for the US and its allies to use "appropriate and necessary" military force to enforce the resolution.

But for either plan to work, President Saddam would have to be given an incentive to cooperate, and to be offered the chance of survival if he cooperates. That runs counter to the Bush administration's policy of "regime change" irrespective of his behaviour.

The Carnegie report stipulates that the US would have to "forswear unilateral military action against Iraq for as long as international inspections are working".

The Carnegie team, which includes a retired air force general, Charles Boyd, once the deputy commander of US forces in Europe, and a former chief UN inspector, Rolf Ekeus, argues the US would have to strive "to convince Iraq and others that this is not a perfunctory bow to international opinion preparatory to an invasion and that the United States' intent is to see inspections succeed, not a ruse to have them quickly fail".

But the Pentagon is hostile to the idea of a UN-sponsored multinational force and the administration will be loth to drop the goal of "regime change" that has become one of its guiding principles. Washington's refusal to compromise on that may prove to be the thorniest problem in establishing a UN consensus that could, in turn, be all that stands in the path of a US invasion.