For a brief moment one could almost believe that the US march toward war with Iraq had paused. The United Nations inspection regime was up and running, and the Iraqi government had produced 12,000 pages of documents by the December 8 deadline.

But the Administration spoiled our day. The President dutifully pledged that the Administration would comment on the Iraqi document "only after we have thoroughly examined it," but then various heavyweights were busily floating allegations that the Iraqis were lying. Most improbable, White House spokesman Ari Fleischer spun a gauzy web of guilt around the statement of the chief of Iraq's weapons program that Baghdad had attempted to develop a nuclear bomb in 1991 but abandoned the program.

In their voluminous report the Iraqis seemed bent on flooding the process--to delay but also to cleverly reveal "everything," that is, embarrassing material about companies in various countries, including the United States, that had supplied Baghdad with components for its weapons programs.

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