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| Angel Franco, Ruby Washington/The New York Times |
| Mohammed Aldouri, the Iraqi ambassador, left, listened on Monday as Hans Blix, the head of the United Nations team searching for biological and chemical weapons, gave a report to the Security Council. |
UNITED NATIONS, Jan. 27 — Hans Blix, one of the chief United Nations weapons inspectors, gave a broadly negative report today on Iraq's cooperation with two months of inspections, providing support to the Bush administration's campaign to disarm Iraq by force if necessary.
"Iraq appears not to have come to genuine acceptance — not even today — of the disarmament which was demanded of it and which it needs to carry out to win the confidence of the world and live in peace," Mr. Blix said, summing up a grim 15-page catalog of Iraq's chemical and biological arms programs that provided an exhaustive account of ways in which Saddam Hussein has failed to prove that he has eliminated illegal weapons.
After Mr. Blix spoke, Secretary of State Colin L. Powell said in Washington: "Time is running out. We've made it very clear from the very beginning that we would not allow the process of inspections to string out forever."
Mr. Powell's allusion to the limited time left for Iraq to avoid war came at the start of a crucial few days in which President Bush will press his case for disarming Mr. Hussein in his State of the Union address on Tuesday night. Later in the week, the president will consult with allies, including Prime Minister Tony Blair of Britain. Only then, Mr. Powell suggested, will Mr. Bush make his plans clear.
Administration officials said the White House was likely to declassify some intelligence information about Iraq's effort to obtain and conceal weapons of mass destruction. But it is unclear whether that information would be released by the United States or by Britain. It is likely to be disclosed days after the State of Union address.
Dr. Mohamed ElBaradei, the chief inspector for atomic weapons, was less critical of Iraq today, reporting that his team had found no evidence so far that Iraq had tried to revive its nuclear arms program and appealing to the Security Council for a "few months" more to complete his work.
The clash in the 15-member Security Council over the duration of the inspections sharpened today. The United States ambassador, John D. Negroponte, insisted that they had already gone on long enough to demonstrate that Iraq had no intention of disclosing its secret arms to the inspectors. "There is nothing in either presentation that would give us hope that Iraq has ever intended to fully comply," he said.
Other veto-bearing Council nations, including France, Russia and China, contended that the inspections were still working and should be allowed to continue. Britain, the United States' closest ally, expressed support for a German proposal that the inspectors report back to the Council again on Feb. 14. Such a date for a further interim report would allow the United States and Britain to continue preparations for a war in late February or March while demonstrating to skeptical allies, including France, that they are not rushing to judgment.
Most Security Council nations supported the German proposal today. The United States accepted it, but said no significance should be attached to the date.
Mr. Blix's sweeping and detailed critique of Iraq's failure to demonstrate with documents, interviews and other evidence that it had destroyed its prohibited weapons appeared to put new pressure on France, Germany and other nations that have resisted early military action to respond more forcefully to Baghdad's noncompliance.
Iraq heightened the confrontation today by bluntly rejecting all of the inspectors' criticism.
"Iraq has complied fully with all its obligations," said the Iraqi ambassador, Mohammed A. Aldouri, referring to Resolution 1441, which set up the inspections.
The Council nations are due to give their official evaluations of the chief inspectors' reports on Wednesday. Dr. ElBaradei called on the Council to continue the inspections as a "valuable investment in peace." Mr. Blix skirted the matter, noting simply that his team remains "at the disposal" of the Council.
The Bush administration did not succeed, after an intensive campaign of speech-making by senior officials in recent days, in persuading other Council nations to take the chief inspectors' report today as the opening of a broad debate on whether to authorize military action.
But Mr. Blix's powerfully critical assessment forced doubting Council members to confront Iraq's efforts to thwart or hamper the inspectors.
In an open Council meeting this morning and a closed session in the late afternoon, Mr. Blix said that despite Iraq's denials, his team had found "indications" that Iraq had created weapons using the nerve agent VX, which he described as "one of the most toxic ever developed."
He said Iraq had provided contradictory information about its VX stocks in a 12,000-page declaration of its arms programs that Baghdad presented on Dec. 7.
So far, he added, Iraq had failed to account for 6,500 chemical bombs that could contain as much as 1,000 tons of chemical agent.
While Iraq has dismissed as insignificant the inspectors' finding on Jan. 16 of 12 empty chemical warheads in a recently built bunker, Mr. Blix said the rockets "could be the tip of a submerged iceberg."
The discovery "shows that Iraq needs to make more effort to ensure that its declaration is currently accurate," Mr. Blix said. He added that his inspectors had also found at another site a "laboratory quantity" of thiodiglycol, which he described as a precursor of mustard gas.
Iraq has declared that it produced 8,500 liters (a liter is slightly more than a quart) of anthrax for biological warfare before the Persian Gulf war in 1991, Mr. Blix said, and has claimed to have destroyed all of it unilaterally that year.
"Iraq has provided little evidence for this production and no convincing evidence for its destruction," he said. There were "strong indications" that Iraq had made more anthrax than it declared, and "at least some of this was retained after the declared destruction date."
In a letter delivered to the Council on Sunday, the Iraqi foreign minister, Naji Sabri, said Baghdad had fully declared all of the so-called growth media, which is used to develop biological weapons that it had imported.
"This is not evidence," Mr. Blix said curtly. He noted that the growth media could be used to produce as much as 5,000 liters of concentrated anthrax.
He also reported that Iraq is building two missiles, the Samoud 2 and the Fatah, which he said seemed clearly to violate United Nations restrictions limiting missiles to a range of 150 kilometers, or 90 miles. He said he had asked Iraq to cease test flights of the missiles.
Iraq has refurbished a missile plant that had been destroyed by weapons inspectors, and has illegally imported chemicals that could be used for weapons, Mr. Blix said.
He also reported that Iraq "is not so far complying with our request" to use his team's U-2 high-altitude photographic surveillance plane. Iraqi officials had tried to force the United Nations to cancel the no-flight zones over northern and southern Iraq, which are patrolled by United States and British warplanes, while the U-2 was flying there, and tried to persuade Mr. Blix to help them buy special radar to monitor the U-2 flights.
Mr. Blix had especially strong language for what he called "disturbing incidents and harassment," including charges by Iraqi officials that his inspectors are spies.
"Iraq knows they do not serve intelligence purposes, and Iraq should say so," he said.
In his much less confrontational report, Dr. ElBaradei, the director general of the International Atomic Energy Agency, said his team had visited nuclear-related buildings where satellite photography showed new structures and had found no new nuclear activities there.
Responding to this finding, Ari Fleischer, the White House spokesman, said Mr. Hussein's biological and chemical weapons capability alone could kill millions of people.
Dr. ElBaradei outspokenly defended his inspections, saying that "the presence of international inspectors in Iraq today continues to serve as an effective deterrent to and insurance against the resumption" of secret weapons programs.
In Congress, Democratic leaders have become increasingly insistent that Mr. Bush give the inspections more time or provide firm evidence as to why Iraq poses an immediate threat. They urged Mr. Bush today to avoid a rush toward a war.
Senator Tom Daschle of South Dakota, the minority leader, said, "If we have proof of nuclear and biological weapons, why don't we show that proof to the world, as President Kennedy did 40 years ago when he sent Adlai Stevenson to the United Nations to show the world U.S. photographs of offensive missiles in Cuba?"
Representatives John M. Spratt Jr. of South Carolina and Ike Skelton of Missouri, the senior Democrats on the House Armed Services Committee, sent Mr. Bush a letter today urging him to "weigh carefully the advantages of allowing the inspections to continue."
Ambassador Negroponte said, "In the days ahead, we believe the Council, and its member governments, must face its responsibilities," indicating that the United States is still considering pushing very soon for a debate over war.
Britain's ambassador to the United Nations, Sir Jeremy Greenstock, spoke to reporters right after Mr. Negroponte, striking a notably different tone. The British envoy said none of the Council's discussions this week would be "conclusive," and he made no suggestion that the inspections were coming to an end, although he did insist that Iraq needed to give "Grade A cooperation."
The Russian ambassador, Sergey Lavrov, waved aside Mr. Blix's criticism. "We do believe that the inspectors are doing a very useful job and they must continue," he said.
China echoed that view. "Since we have started this process and there is no clear reason to stop it, we should continue," said Zhang Yishan, the deputy ambassador.
