Bush hardliners order CIA to report on UN

Hawks in the Bush administration fear that Saddam Hussein, by drawing UN weapons inspectors into a game of cat-and-mouse, will interfere with, and perhaps scupper, their plans to attack Iraq.

The hardliners are said to have commissioned a special report from the CIA on whether Hans Blix, the Swedish diplomat who will head any new inspections, is likely to be tough enough on President Saddam, a master of procrastination.The request to the CIA was apparently made in January by Paul Wolfowitz, the deputy secretary of defence and a leader of the faction seeking to oust the Iraqi leader by force.

According to The Washington Post yesterday, Mr Wolfowitz "hit the ceiling" on receiving the report, because it was not critical enough of Mr Blix, and, by implication, the entire inspection process.

Yesterday, Donald Rumsfeld, the Defence Secretary, and another champion of decisive action against President Saddam, did not dispute the account, saying merely that he issued these sorts of requests "15 times a day".

Mr Rumsfeld made clear his scepticism that any weapons inspection would be intrusive enough to lay bare Iraq's programmes for weapons of mass destruction. "The former regime of inspections was not able to find much, other than what defectors mentioned," Mr Rumsfeld said.

Mr Blix, as the director general of the International Atomic Energy Agency, headed the nuclear branch of the inspections in Iraq under the previous regime. Mr Rumsfeld warned of the "enormous use of dual purpose equipment" by Iraq. He said that made it hard to imagine any inspection regime intrusive enough "to offset the ease with which [the Iraqis] could deflect and deceive".

Iraq is negotiating with the UN the terms on which Mr Blix's team might return for the first such mission since December 1998.

Mr Wolfowitz and his supporters believe the inspectors could be duped into issuing a report that would rule out any US attack during Mr Bush's current term.

The window for action has now shrunk to 2003: nothing will happen before this November's mid-term elections and, by the end of 2003, the campaign for the White House will be heating up, making military action more complicated in political terms.

In the meantime, the unreported war against Baghdad continues. American and British aircraft attacked an air defence site in southern Iraq yesterday in response to hostile Iraqi fire, Pentagon officials said. The strike was the first for three months in the southern "no-fly" zone, patrolled by the two countries.

An Iraqi military spokesman said the planes had made 31 sorties from bases in Kuwait and Saudi Arabia. He said air defence units had fired on the planes and forced them to return to their bases.

A US military spokesman said his country's aircraft had returned safely. The last time Iraq reported such an attack was on 28 February.