WHITE HOUSE spokesman Ari Fleischer said Bush, in his State of the Union address, was “not sending a signal that military action is imminent.” Fleischer said the comments had been an “expression of how serious the president takes protecting our country.”

By singling out Iraq, Iran and North Korea, Bush elevated concerns about weapons of mass destruction to the same level as terrorism. While all three are on the State Department’s list of state sponsors of terrorism, Iraq and North Korea have played at most a minimal role in backing terrorist groups in recent years, officials said. 

Heightened U.S. concerns about weapons proliferation after Sept. 11, and especially after the anthrax attacks, have given Bush wider latitude to extend his campaign to countries accused of trying to acquire biological and other weapons, analysts said.

“This was a pretty clear signal that the overlap between the campaign against terrorism and opposition to the proliferation of weapons of mass destruction is nearly complete,” said a senior administration official.

Since the start of the administration, Iraq has been a matter of particular concern; some senior officials in the White House and Pentagon argue that the United States should actively promote the ouster of President Saddam Hussein.

But several Pentagon officials stressed yesterday that there is no impending military action against Iraq. “It would be news to us,” said one defense official familiar with military planning.

Another Pentagon official went even farther, saying that current military planning is focused primarily on other areas where al Qaeda and its sympathizers are believed to be active. “We’re looking more at Somalia, the Philippines, places like that,” the official said.

Nor is it clear that military operations are the best way to address the threats posed by Iraq, Iran and North Korea, administration officials said.

“Military power is obviously one element of national power. But I warn that the United States is not going to have a one-size-fits-all policy here,” said a senior administration official. “We would make a mistake to assume the president is saying, ‘I’m going to repeat Afghanistan everywhere else in the world.””

Administration officials said they would press ahead with diplomatic and technical approaches to blocking countries from gaining weapons of mass destruction while also continuing to support unconditional dialogue with Iran and North Korea to address the issue. 

No such offer of dialogue was made to Iraq, which remains under U.N. sanctions for failing to disarm after the 1991 Persian Gulf War.

“You try to choke off the development of weapons of mass destruction,” said State Department spokesman Richard A. Boucher. “You can do that through a discussion with governments and countries, if they’re prepared to abandon these programs and open themselves up to international [nuclear] inspectors, for example, or in the case of Iraq, open themselves up to fully comply with U.N. resolutions.”

Administration officials and analysts said the prospect of war with Iran or North Korea remains remote

ON HOLD
Officials said senior policymakers had not begun to seriously debate whether to launch a new military campaign against Baghdad or step up support for the efforts of Iraqi opposition groups bent on overthrowing Hussein.

Pentagon officials sought last fall to win an administration decision to seek Hussein’s ouster. But with war in Afghanistan then looming, top officials decided unanimously to put that discussion on hold because they saw no clear link between Baghdad and the Sept. 11 attacks.

Two defense officials, however, drew a possible connection between Osama bin Laden’s al Qaeda network and Iraq. They said that some in the U.S. government, perplexed that several hundred members of al Qaeda seem to have left Afghanistan along with their families without being detected, have suggested that they might have passed through Iran and gone into hiding in Iraq.

But several other officials emphatically rejected that line of thinking. “To make a connection between Iraq and terrorism would be a long reach,” said one official. He noted that Hussein seems intentionally to have avoided provoking the United States in recent months. “Connecting himself to terrorism would go against his own strategy,” he said.

Even the administration’s strongest advocates of trying to overthrow Hussein acknowledge it could take months to build the Iraqi National Congress, an umbrella of opposition groups, into an effective fighting force. The INC leadership held a pair of meetings yesterday with State Department officials in part to discuss U.S. funding for the group, which had been frozen because of dispute over how the INC accounted for its spending. The meetings resulted in a decision to provide the group $2.4 million over the next three months, a State Department official said.

If Bush decided to seek Hussein’s ouster with U.S. troops, it could take weeks if not months to put in place a force large enough to defeat his military - an estimated 200,000 U.S. soldiers or more, officials and analysts said. Part of this campaign could involve deploying a force about the size of a division of U.S. troops in western Iraq to prevent Hussein from firing Scud missiles armed with chemical weapons at Israel in retaliation for a U.S. invasion.

U.S. officials also have not begun in earnest the diplomatic task of winning assent for a campaign against Iraq from its neighbors, such as Saudi Arabia, Kuwait and Turkey, as well as European allies.