U.S. to field new arms team to search Iraq

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The Pentagon announced yesterday it is sending a new, expanded team of inspectors to Iraq to solve the puzzle of whether ousted strongman Saddam Hussein harbored huge stocks of banned weapons or U.S. intelligence was wrong in saying he did.

Army Maj. Gen. Keith Dayton will head the Iraq Survey Team of some 1,400 American, British and Australian specialists.

The bigger team will replace the 75th Exploitation Task Force, a unit of several hundred that has not found chemical or biological weapons in inspecting 200 suspected weapons sites on a list of 900.

"Do I think we're going to find something?" Gen. Dayton asked himself at a Pentagon news conference. "Yeah, I kind of do.

"This is not necessarily going to be quick and easy," the Bush administration's new chief weapons detective added, "but it will be very thorough."

President Bush largely based his decision to invade Iraq and oust Saddam on the CIA's assessment that Baghdad had weapons of mass destruction and that they could one day fall into the hands of murderous al Qaeda terrorists.

The allies' failure to find such weapons seven weeks after Baghdad fell April 9 has stirred some Democrats and antiwar activists to charge that the president sent troops to war under false pretenses. British Prime Minister Tony Blair has come under similar attack at home.

Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld, Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz and other top U.S. officials counter that the search is still young. They say Saddam oversaw a complex deception program that is proving tough to crack.

Officials also say that all top Iraqi Ba'ath Party operatives in coalition custody are sticking to Baghdad's assertion that all banned weapons were destroyed. Officials view this as a continuation of Saddam's deception program.