HED: U.S. concedes Saddam won this round
— Jul 29th, 1992
NUT: President Bush and his advisers are suggesting the threat of war has passed, but want to keep alive the possibility of using force in future confrontations.
WASHINGTON (AP) -- The Bush administration said Tuesday that the standoff with Iraq "is defused" for the moment, but it braced for new confrontations.
Top congressional Democrats voiced cautious support for President Bush's handling of the crisis.
The White House conceded that Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein had scored a victory in barring Americans or other coalition members from a U.N. inspection team that entered an Agriculture Ministry building in Baghdad -- but called it a minor one.
And, as Bush and other administration officials tried to maintain pressure on Iraq by insisting on full compliance of all cease-fire terms, the president told top lawmakers he was not prepared to send a U.S. team into Iraq to try to eliminate Saddam Hussein.
"Whose son do you want to go to Baghdad to get Saddam Hussein?" participants at the early-morning White House session said Bush asked them.
One senior administration official said the United States would try to persuade the United Nations to step up its pace of inspections in Iraq.
Rather than waiting for Saddam to provoke another showdown, the United States may seek ways to provoke its own confrontation to keep him from stretching out his defiance, the official said.
As U.N. inspectors searched Baghdad's Agriculture Ministry for evidence on Iraq's weapons programs, ending a three-month impasse, Bush and his advisers suggested the immediate threat of war had passed.
But they sought to keep alive the possibility of the use of force in later confrontations.
"We will continue to show our resolve in enforcing the U.N. resolutions and strengthening the U.N. peacekeeping abilities," Bush told congressional leaders, according to his spokesman, Marlin Fitzwater.
Fitzwater told his daily news briefing: "The immediate situation is defused" even though many tensions remain.
In one indication that military action was not imminent, Pentagon officials said Tuesday that the aircraft carrier John F. Kennedy was carrying out training exercises in the Atlantic and was not heading into the Mediterranean as ordered before Sunday's compromise on the inspectors.
On Monday Pentagon officials privately said the carrier was on its way to bolster U.S. forces in the Persian Gulf region.
Defense Secretary Dick Cheney, testifying before the Senate Armed Services Committee, called recent military moves, including the deployment of Patriot missiles to Kuwait, "precautionary."
"I would not want to convey a sense of crisis publicly," Cheney told the panel.
Bush got pledges of bipartisan support from most top congressional leaders.
"Fundamentally, the question is are we willing and anxious to work together on key U.S. foreign policy and defense issues, and the answer is yes," said House Speaker Thomas Foley, D-Wash. "The President pledged his interest in doing that and we did, as well."
Added Senate Majority Leader George Mitchell, D-Maine: "We don't view this in an election context."
But Senate Minority Leader Bob Dole, R-Kans., said congressional support wasn't unconditional.
"He (Bush) kept cautioning us, 'this is O.K. for today, but what about tomorrow?' And I think members said, 'we're not going to give you a blank check, but if something happens tomorrow, give us a call."'
Not surprisingly, there was less bipartisan sentiment coming from the campaign trail. In Atlanta, both Democratic vice presidential nominee Al Gore and former President Jimmy Carter had harsh words on Bush's conduct of foreign policy.
Carter said the "recent success" of Saddam in his nation's standoff with the United Nations "doesn't show to me any particular advantage to having experience in the White House."
Gore accused the administration of concentrating its energy "almost exclusively on foreign policy....to the exclusion of domestic policy."
And in the House, Armed Services Committee Chairman Les Aspin, D-Wis., issued a statement saying the barring of American and British inspectors "set a damaging precedent." He added: "it looks like Saddam Hussein has more to cheer about than George Bush does."
"George Bush continues to treat these challenges as isolated episodes," Aspin said. "Meanwhile Saddam Hussein gets away with a pattern of abuse that is slowly but steadily eroding Iraq's ceasefire obligations."
Fitzwater continued to put out the administration line that Saddam had backed down, accusing him of following a "cheat and retreat" pattern. But he did concede that Saddam had his way in keeping Americans and coalition partners off the ministry inspection team.
"He won on that point. But it's not related to the quality of inspections," Fitzwater said. "There'll be Americans on other inspection teams."
Fitzwater said the administration has told the United Nations that additional inspections should be carried out "as rapidly as possible." He reiterated the U.S. stance that Saddam should comply with all cease-fire terms and added, "We would like to force that issue at every opportunity."
Specifically, Fitzwater cited Iraq's failure to cooperate in the inspection and destruction of weapons, failure to participate in a Iraq-Kuwait boundary commission, refusal to account for Kuwaiti citizens seized during the occupation, refusal to return stolen Kuwaiti property, and its stepping up of its harassments of Shiites.
"All of these refusals or defiance episodes tend to portray a pattern that to us is very disturbing, and one that should be monitored very closely," Fitzwater said.
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