WASHINGTON: Having secured congressional auth orization for an invasion of Iraq, the Bush administration has shifted focus to the United Nations, where it hopes the Security Council will soon approve a tough new weapons inspection programme and backing for military action if Saddam Hussein does not comply.

Discussions in New York are far more complicated than last week’s brief skirmish with a largely pliant Congress; a majority of the council, including three of the five permanent members with veto power, has already rejected several key US demands.

Success is still within reach, according to a wide range of US and foreign officials. But whether the next foreign force to reach Iraq is a United Nations weapons inspection team or a US military invasion, officials said, may depend as much on the administration’s willingness to compromise with its council colleagues as it does on Saddam’s acquiescence.

The question of what, if anything, the United States is willing to give up in the toughly-worded UN resolution it has proposed has already divided the administration along familiar multilateral-unilateral fault lines and caused confusion among allies about exactly what is US policy.

The answer is likely to require President Bush to take a far more definitive and public side in that internal debate than he has been willing to take thus far.

Among the most contentious items in a draft US resolution are provisions allowing representatives from any of the council’s five permanent members to accompany UN inspectors on any mission inside Iraq, and pre-authorize members to deploy “all necessary means,” including military force, if they decide Iraq is not cooperating.

Both sides of the administration believe they have Bush’s backing. Sources close to Secretary of State Colin Powell, who is leading the UN effort, said he has been assured the president fully supports his willingness to give up parts of the resolution — including member participation in inspections and the automatic use-of-force authorization — as long as its bedrock demand that Iraq fully cooperate with anytime, anyplace inspections and a UN commitment to impose “consequences” for non-cooperation is satisfied.

Powell would not have called his French counterpart, Foreign Minister Dominique de Villepin, last Thursday, offering to remove the “all necessary means” wording, without Bush’s approval, sources said. France, who along with Russia and China believes consideration of consequences for Iraqi failure should wait until Baghdad is given a chance to cooperate, responded that the wording was still too “ambiguous.”

But among senior Pentagon civilians led by Defence Secretary Donald Rumsfeld at the Pentagon, where planning for war against Iraq is well underway, and in the office of Vice President Dick Cheney, who played a lead role in drafting the resolution, there is equally strong conviction that Bush will not permit any substantive change in the proposed wording. This is as much for military reasons as political: As the armed forces steadily build up forces in the region, Pentagon officials are worried that preparedness could erode if they are not used quickly.

If there is any compromising to be done, this side has made clear, it will be by French President Jacques Chirac and Russian President Vladmir Putin, not Bush.

“The ability to have our own people on inspections teams, and not just a bunch of UN bureaucrats” is not open to discussion, said a senior administration official closely involved in Iraq planning.

Disdain for the United Nations Monitoring, Verification and Inspection Commission (UNMOVIC) is high in the Pentagon, where senior officials routinely dismiss UNMOVIC chief Hans Blix, who has objected to this and several other provisions in the resolution, as living in a fantasyland where a few dozen inspectors can counter Iraq’s efforts to hide chemical and biological weaponry.

Blix’s concern, which was echoed in an interview with Rolf Ekeus, the first head of the UN inspection team in Iraq, is that if the United States and other permanent council members put their people on inspection teams, the UN team leader would lose control. “Suppose the US member wants to go behind one door in a building and the French member doesn’t, what happens?” Ekeus said in a recent interview. “That plan is unworkable.”

“It is fair to say that one reason why we’re insisting so hard that they not water (the resolution) down is that UNMOVIC cannot go through the hide and seek game that UNSCOM went through,” a senior Defence official said. That was a reference to the first Iraq weapons inspection organization that gave up in 1998 after more than six years of battling Iraqi concealment and Saddam’s final refusal to allow them to continue.

Some of this disdain is transferred to Powell, whose UN efforts are seen by some advocates of US military action as a placeholder while the Pentagon gets its forces up to invasion strength. Their views are returned in kind by some in the State Department, who suggest refusal to compromise on “expendable” parts of the resolution is motivated by a desire to see the UN and inspections fail so an invasion can begin.

As the Security Council debate begins in earnest this week, a number of US friends and allies professed confusion and concern about a US policy dispute they thought was settled by Bush’s decision to take his case against Iraq to the United Nations.

Since Bush’s UN speech on Sept 12, said a diplomat from one council member, the administration has had two Iraq policies, “one for New York, and one for Washington.” He said even his government, a close US ally, is still unsure which one is Bush’s.

Others say they wonder if Bush was ever serious about the UN “We all want Washington to stay on the UN line, and having gotten us all fired up, not walk away,” said another council diplomat.

While Powell and his aides have stressed that the UN must be prepared to take multinational military action if Iraq defies new inspection rules, their negotiating emphasis has been on the importance of the multinational inspections effort and the elimination of weapons of mass destruction. There has been unspoken acknowledgment that, in the unlikely event Saddam cooperates fully, he will be allowed to stay in power.

Away from the United Nations, in news conferences, speeches and testimony designed to promote public and Congressional support, Rumsfeld and others have stressed Iraqi links with Al Qaeda and the potential for attacks on the United States that would be far worse than Sept 11. Even if the Security Council agreed to a tough resolution, and even if Iraq cooperated, several officials have said that is only one step toward Saddam’s ouster.

In the unlikely event that Saddam complied with UN resolutions, Zalmay Khalilzad, who handles Iraq on the White House National Security Council staff told a group of Middle East specialists here, force might not be required in the “near term.” But “we would still pursue regime change and liberation.”—Dawn/The Washington Post News Service.