Iraq D-Day? More Like ZZZ-Day

By Jill Smolowe

Saddam Hussein is a lucky man. When the United Nations gave the Iraqi leader until July 25 to reveal once and for all the scope of his country's weapons program, George Bush backed up the deadline with the threat of a military strike. But that was before Secretary of State James Baker's shuttle diplomacy in the Middle East began to show promise. When the deadline passed last week, Washington charged that Baghdad had still not come clean. But the military threat against Saddam is on hold -- at least for the moment.

U.S. officials insisted that the July 25 cutoff -- "Marker Day," not D- day, a State Department official helpfully explained -- was never intended to signal the immediate resumption of allied aerial strikes against Iraq. The arrival last Saturday of yet another U.N. inspection team in Baghdad gives Saddam additional breathing space. But the truth is that the current appetite for renewed warfare is slight. Bush does not want to seem trigger-happy when he arrives in Moscow this week for talks with Mikhail Gorbachev. And Arab allies, whose cooperation is crucial to any Middle East peace conference, have signaled their distaste for new bombardments. "Most of our people think the Iraqis have suffered enough already," says a senior Egyptian diplomat.

Mounting concern for the plight of hungry Iraqi citizens is also forcing Washington and its European allies to temper their hard-line stance on continued economic sanctions. The drumbeat to ease the embargo began when Prince Sadruddin Aga Khan, who heads the U.N.'s relief efforts in the gulf, warned that food and medicine shortages presented "a humanitarian crisis that could degenerate into a catastrophe." His recommendation: a U.N.-regulated sale of Iraqi oil to raise $2.6 billion, enough to cover humanitarian needs for the next four months. Last week the Bush Administration reluctantly supported a one-time-only oil sale, provided the revenues are monitored by an international organization to ensure that they are not diverted for military purposes.

The apparent softening of the U.S. position is really no more than hard political reality: Bush cannot appear to be indifferent to the plight of innocent Iraqi citizens. Washington officials believe, with good cause, that Saddam has ample food to feed his people. Since March 22, the Security Council's sanctions committee has received notice of exporters' intentions to ship more than 2 million tons of food to Iraq -- nearly one ton for every nine Iraqis. In addition, Baghdad has been permitted to import generators, medical supplies, water pumps and water-treatment systems.

Iraq has ample money to spend on medical needs, if Saddam so chooses. By Washington's reckoning, Saddam has access to as much as $1 billion in foreign accounts. Baghdad is also believed to have $2 billion worth of stockpiled gold and an additional $1 billion worth looted from Kuwait's Central Bank. "Saddam has enough for vital imports at the moment, if he were to define vital imports as including food and medicine," says Patrick Clawson, an expert on the Iraqi economy and editor of the Philadelphia-based foreign-policy journal Orbis. "Instead, he's buying luxury goods for his immediate entourage, equipment for his security apparatus and military goods."

Meanwhile, U.S. officials last week provided more details about Iraq's nuclear-, biological- and chemical-weapons program. According to Washington, Baghdad had almost 100 different major weapons programs under way before the gulf war began. The effort employed 500,000 people, which, in a country of 18 million, made the defense industry far and away Iraq's largest employer. One nuclear complex in Thaji, north of Baghdad, comprised 1,000 buildings and covered an area the size of the District of Columbia. U.S. officials also disclosed more specifics about Iraq's uranium-enrichment programs, the linchpin of Baghdad's efforts to develop an atom bomb. In addition to the three methods for separating uranium isotopes -- gas centrifuge, calutron and gaseous diffusion -- already identified by Washington, Iraq relied on a chemical technique and a jet-nozzle process used in South Africa. New intelligence information has also confirmed that Iraq's chemical stocks are actually 40% larger than Baghdad has admitted. Inspection efforts have been hampered because much of the stock is either buried beneath rubble or stored in leaking canisters that pose health risks. U.N. inspectors were recently treated to a sampling of the remaining inventory when Iraqis, instructed to destroy bomb- and artillery-shell casings, scattered a dose of unidentified chemicals just upwind of the U.N. team.

Biological agents, including anthrax and botulism toxin, remain the biggest threat. At the time of the allied aerial attacks last winter, pilots avoided targeting sites where biological weapons were believed to be stored, or hitting them with incendiary bombs. According to Air Force Lieut. General Charles Horner, who ran the allied air campaign, a strike by a conventional bomb could have spread a deadly agent across the countryside, killing millions. As a result, Iraq's biological stocks are largely intact, and a U.S. attack poses the same risks that it did during the war. Unless Saddam discloses the whereabouts of his entire arsenal, Iraq will retain at least some of its biological weapons.

With reporting by William Mader/London and J.F.O. McAllister and Bruce van Voorst/Washington