Bush plans to give Iraq at least 2 more weeks

WASHINGTON — President Bush plans at least two more weeks of diplomacy before deciding whether to attack Iraq and may support a deadline for Iraqi President Saddam Hussein to visibly destroy his chemical and biological weapons, administration officials said yesterday.

Officials said the United States and Britain are likely to push for an enforcement resolution in the United Nations Security Council this week. One option being considered, a senior administration official said, was a demand for "actual disarmament" by Iraq within a specified number of days.

"It would say, 'This is your last window,' " the official said.

It is questionable whether such a resolution would get the support of the Security Council.

President Jacques Chirac of France, which has veto power in the council, said yesterday his country at this time would oppose any effort to draft a resolution that explicitly authorized war against Iraq.

"There is no need for a second resolution today, which France would have no choice but to oppose," Chirac said yesterday as he arrived for a European Union summit in Brussels, Belgium.

At that summit, the 15 European Union leaders agreed that U.N. weapons inspectors should get more time to find and destroy Iraq's weapons of mass destruction and declared that war against Iraq "should be used only as a last resort."

As the Bush administration has tried to keep the pressure on Iraq in the past two months, it often has implied that a final deadline was near. Officials suggested yesterday that Bush's rough timetable has always been slightly longer than many diplomats assumed when he announced Jan. 30 that the issue of how to deal with Saddam would be resolved in "a matter of weeks, not months."

But this time, the administration appears to have left little room for retreat from a timetable heading toward a final decision in about two weeks.

National security adviser Condoleezza Rice on Sunday implied that what she called a "diplomatic window" would close following the next council meeting March 1, when members will again hear an assessment of Iraqi cooperation from Hans Blix, the chief U.N. weapons inspector.

U.S. and British military deployments to the Persian Gulf region will then have reached levels more than adequate for an attack by early to mid-March.

Although senior military officials have said that troops could remain in the region for months without any action, planners have expressed concern about fighting in the intense heat that falls over the region in early spring.

While the administration has consistently maintained that it does not need another council resolution to launch an attack against Iraq, dozens of countries that support the administration have said they would prefer a U.N. imprimatur on any action.

In addition to a possible final deadline for Iraq, other possibilities for a new resolution include declaring that Iraq already has violated the November council demand that it disarm immediately and completely.

Such a resolution would not spell out any consequences requiring members to agree to military action, but the administration would assert that such approval was implied.

While all the diplomatic options have drawbacks, the administration also believes a new resolution could greatly expand the support, including financial contributions, that the United States would receive from other nations for post-Saddam occupation and reconstruction.

However, officials made it clear Bush is prepared to go to war without U.N. approval if he is convinced no headway is being made.

"We're going to see a lot of arm-twisting and knee-capping over the next few days, but when it's all over the U.S. could end up with only a coalition of the coerced," says Joseph Cirincione, director of the Non-Proliferation Project at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace in Washington.

"That spells trouble for the point where a war starts to turn bad, or for the postwar period when you want a sympathetic world working with you."

Information from The Christian Science Monitor is included in this report.