UN arms experts said yesterday they wanted up to a year to complete their inspections in Iraq, as Washington massed a force in the Gulf that will be ready to wage war within weeks.
The UN inspectors' comments were likely to further fuel an anti-war camp that includes much of the public in Europe and the Middle East, many of their governments and the Pope, who declared yesterday war would be a "defeat for humanity."
Top UN inspectors Hans Blix and Mohamed ElBaradei go to Baghdad next weekend to demand Iraq account for missing stocks of such items as chemical bombs, nerve gas and missile engines.
But they appeared anxious yesterday to slow the timetable of the attack the US threatens to launch if Iraq's answers fail to satisfy.
International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) spokesman Mark Gwozdecky said that UN resolutions provided timelines of "somewhere between six and 12 months" for inspections.
"We think we'll get the time we need since no one has explicitly said that they disagreed with our assessment of the time it would take," he said in Vienna.
ElBaradei himself told reporters in Paris: "We need to take a few months ... How long depends on the cooperation of Iraq."
Asked if the timeframe of a year quoted by the IAEA spokesman was conservatively lengthy, ElBaradei replied, "Yes."
Tens of thousands of US troops have already been massed in the Gulf and analysts say military chiefs want any attack on Iraq to be launched within the next two or three winter months, before temperatures in the desert region rise.
"It is a far better option to wait a little bit longer than to have to resort to war," Gwozdecky told CNN separately.
He stressed that Jan. 27, when inspectors are scheduled to report to the UN Security Council on Iraq's compliance with disarmament demands, was not a final deadline.
"There's a little bit of misunderstanding about this January 27 reporting date," Gwozdecky said. "The Security Council is asking us to report but not to have all the answers at that point."
The newspaper USA Today said yesterday the US force in the Gulf would not be ready for full-scale war until late February or early March because of logistical complications.
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