But this is not a game. It is deadly serious. We are dealing with a threat to the security of our nation and the world. At the same time, however, President Bush understands fully the risks and dangers of war and the President wants to do everything humanly possible to eliminate this threat by peaceful means. That is why the President called for the U.N. Security Council to pass what became Resolution 1441, giving Iraq a final opportunity to comply with its disarmament obligations and, in so doing, to eliminate the danger that Iraq's weapons of mass terror could fall into the hands of terrorists. In making that proposal, President Bush understood perfectly well that compliance with that resolution would require a massive change of attitude and actions on the part of the Iraqi regime. But history proves that such a change is possible.

U.N. Security Council Resolution 1441 gave Saddam Hussein one last chance to choose a path of cooperative disarmament, one that he was obliged to take and agreed to take 12 years ago. We were under no illusions that the Baghdad regime had undergone the fundamental change of heart that underpinned the successes I just mentioned. Nevertheless, there is still the hope -- if Saddam is faced with a serious enough threat that he would otherwise be disarmed forcibly and removed from power -- there is still the hope that he might decide to adopt a fundamentally different course. But time is running out.

The United States entered this process hopeful that it could eliminate the threat posed by Iraq's weapons of mass terror without having to resort to force. And we've put more than just our hopes into this process. Last fall, the Security Council requested member states to give, quote, "full support," unquote, to U.N. inspectors.

The United States answered that call and President Bush directed departments and agencies to provide, I quote, "material, operational, personnel, and intelligence support," unquote, for U.N. inspections under Resolution 1441. Such assistance includes a comprehensive package of intelligence support, including names of individuals whom we believe it would be productive to interview and information about sites suspected to be associated with proscribed material or activities. We have provided our analysis of Iraq's nuclear, chemical, biological and missile programs, and we have suggested an inspection strategy and tactics. We have provided counterintelligence support to improve the inspectors' ability to thwart Iraqi attempts to penetrate their organizations.

The United States has also made available a wide array of technology to support the inspectors' efforts, including aerial surveillance support in the form of U-2 and Predator aircraft. So far, Iraq is blocking U-2 flights requested by the U.N., in direct violation of Resolution 1441, which states that inspectors shall have free and unrestricted use of manned and unmanned reconnaissance vehicles.

Let's consider for a moment what inspectors can do and what they can't. As the case of South Africa and the other success stories demonstrate, inspection teams can do a great deal to verify the dismantling of a program if they are working with a cooperative government that wants to prove to the world it has disarmed. It is not the job of inspectors to disarm Iraq; it is Iraq's job to disarm itself. What inspectors can do is confirm that a country has willingly disarmed and provided verifiable evidence that it has done so. If a government is unwilling to disarm itself, it is unreasonable to expect the inspectors to do it for them. They cannot be charged with a "search and destroy" mission to uncover so-called smoking guns, especially not if the host government is intent on hiding them and impeding the inspectors' every move. Inspectors cannot verify the destruction of weapons materials if there are no credible records of their disposition.

Think about it for a moment. When an auditor discovers discrepancies in the books, it is not the auditor's obligation to prove where the embezzler has stashed his money. It is up to the person or institution being audited to explain the discrepancy. It is quite unreasonable to expect a few hundred inspectors to search every potential hiding place in a country the size of France, even if nothing were being moved. And, of course, there is every reason to believe that things are being moved constantly and hidden. The whole purpose, if you think about it, for Iraq constructing mobile units to produce biological weapons could only have been to be able to hide them. We know about that capability from defectors and other sources, but unless Iraq comes clean about what it has, we cannot expect the inspectors to find them.

Nor is it the inspectors' role to find Saddam's hidden weapons when he lies about them and conceals them. That would make them not inspectors, but detectives, charged with going through that vast country, climbing through tunnels and searching private homes. Sending a few hundred inspectors to search an area the size of the state of California would be to send them on a fool's errand or to play a game. And let me repeat: this is not a game.

David Kay, a former chief UNSCOM inspector, has said that confirming a country's voluntary disarmament is a job that should not take months or years. With cooperation, it would be relatively simple because the real indicators of disarmament are readily apparent. They start with the willingness of the regime to be disarmed, the commitments communicated by its leaders, the disclosure of the full scope of work on weapons of mass destruction, and verifiable records of dismantling and destruction.

Unfortunately, though not surprisingly, we have seen none of these indications of willing disarmament from Iraq.

So let's discuss what disarmament does not look like. Despite our skepticism about the intentions of the Baghdad regime, we entered the disarmament process in good faith. Iraq has done anything but that.

Instead of a high-level commitment to disarmament, Iraq has a high-level commitment to concealing its weapons of mass terror. Instead of charging national institutions with the responsibility to dismantle programs, key Iraqi organizations operate a concealment effort that targets inspectors and thwarts their efforts. Instead of the full cooperation and transparency that is evident in each of those disarmament success stories, Iraq has started the process by openly defying the requirement of Resolution 1441, and I quote, "to provide a currently accurate, full and complete" declaration of all of its programs.

Indeed, with its December 7th declaration, Iraq resumed a familiar process of deception. Secretary Powell has called that 12,200-page document a catalogue of recycled information and brazen omissions that the secretary said, "totally fails to meet the resolution's requirements. Most brazenly of all" -- I'm still quoting Powell -- "the Iraqi declaration denies the existence of any prohibited weapons programs at all," unquote. Among those omissions are large quantities of anthrax and other deadly biological agents and nuclear-related items that the U.N. Special Commission concluded Iraq had not accounted for. There are also gaps in accounting for such deadly items as 1.5 tons of the nerve gas VX, 550 mustard-filled artillery shells, and 400 biological weapons-capable aerial bombs that the U.N. Special Commission concluded in 1999 -- and this is the U.N.'s conclusion -- Iraq had failed to account for.

There is no mention of Iraqi efforts to procure uranium from abroad. Iraq fails to explain why it's producing missile fuel that seems designed for ballistic missiles it claims it does not have. There is no information on 13 recent Iraqi missile tests cited by Dr. Blix that exceeded the 150-kilometer limit. There is no explanation of the connection between Iraq's extensive unmanned aerial vehicle program and chemical or biological agent dispersal. There is no information about Iraq's mobile biological-weapons production facilities. And, very disturbingly, Iraq has not accounted for some two tons of anthrax growth media.

When U.N. inspectors left Iraq in 1998, they concluded, and I quote: "The history of the Special Commission's work in Iraq has been plagued by coordinated efforts to thwart full discovery of Iraq's programs," unquote. What we know today from the testimony of Iraqis with first-hand knowledge, from U.N. inspectors and from a variety of other sources, about Iraq's current efforts to deceive inspectors suggests that Iraq is fully engaged today in the same old practices of concealment and deception. Iraq seems to be employing virtually all of the old techniques that it used to frustrate U.N. inspections in the past.

At the heart of those techniques, of course, is hiding things, and moving them if they're found. In the past, Iraq made determined efforts to hide its prohibited weapons and to move them if inspectors were about to find them. In 1991, in one of the first, and only, instances where the inspectors found prohibited equipment, they came upon some massive calutrons, devices used for enriching uranium, at an Iraqi military base. Even at that early stage, Iraq had begun to make provisions to move its illegal weapons in case inspectors stumbled across them. As the inspectors appeared at the front gate, the Iraqis moved the calutrons out the back of the base on large tank transporters.

Today, those practices continue, except that over the last 12 years, Iraqi preparations for concealing their illegal programs have become more extensive and sophisticated. Iraq's national policy is not to disarm but rather to hide its weapons of mass terror. That effort, significantly -- the effort of concealment -- is led by none other than Saddam's own son, Qusay, who uses a Special Security Organization under his control for that purpose. Other security organizations contribute to these "anti-inspection" activities, including the National Monitoring Directorate, whose ostensible purpose is to facilitate inspections. Instead, it provides tip-offs of sites that are about to be inspected and uses "minders" to intimidate witnesses. Iraqi security organizations and a number of government agencies provide thousands of personnel to hide documents and materials from inspectors, to sanitize inspection sites and to monitor the inspectors' activities. Indeed, the "anti-inspectors" vastly outnumber the couple of hundred of U.N. personnel on the ground in Iraq.

Already, we have multiple reports and other evidence of intensified efforts to hide documents in places where they are unlikely to be found, such as private homes of low-level officials and universities. We have reports and other evidence of prohibited material and documents being relocated to agricultural areas and private homes or hidden beneath mosques and hospitals. Furthermore, according to these reports, the material is moved constantly, making it difficult to trace or find without absolutely fresh intelligence. It is a shell game played on a grand scale with deadly serious weapons.

Those efforts at concealment are assisted by active surveillance and penetration of the inspectors. In the past, Iraq systematically used its intelligence capabilities to support efforts to conceal its illegal activities. Former inspector David Kay recalled that in 1991, the inspectors came across a document warning the chief security official of the facility they were about to inspect, that David Kay would lead the U.N. team. That warning had been issued less than 48 hours after the decision had been made for Kay to lead the team, and at that time, fewer than 10 people within the inspection organization were supposed to know the operational plan.

In the 1990s, there were reports that Iraqi intelligence recruited U.N. inspectors as informants. And it was known that Iraqi scientists were fearful about the confidentiality of their interviews. Recent reports that Iraq continues these kinds of efforts are a clear sign that it is not yet serious about disarmament.

Today, we also anticipate that Iraq is likely to target U.N. computer systems through cyber intrusions to steal inspections, methods, criteria, and findings. And we know that Iraq has the capability to do that. According to Khidhir Hamza, a former senior official in the Iraqi nuclear program, Iraq's Babylon Software Company was set up to develop cyber warfare capabilities on behalf of the Iraqi Intelligence Service in the early 1990s. Some people assigned to Babylon were segregated into a highly compartmented unit and tasked with breaking into foreign computers to download sensitive data. Some of the programmers reported that they had accumulated sufficient expertise to break into moderately protected computer systems, such as those that the inspectors depend upon.

Further technique is intimidation and coercion, both of the inspectors and of the people they're inspecting. In the past, Iraq did not hesitate to use pressure tactics to obtain information about the inspectors. Sometimes the pressure was quite crude. During the UNSCOM period, one inspector was reportedly filmed in a compromising situation and blackmailed.

Sometimes the pressure was more subtle. Richard Spertzel, a former inspector in the biological warfare unit, recalled the case of an Iraqi official who coyly asked a member of Spertzel's team, "Just how far is it from Salt Lake City to Minnesota?" Since this woman had just moved from Salt Lake City to Minneapolis a few days prior to her arrival in Iraq, you can imagine that she was unnerved by the comment.

More recently Iraq has again begun referring to the inspectors as spies, clearly hoping to make them uncomfortable at best and afraid at worst, and to intimidate Iraqis from interacting with them.

For Iraqis, there is nothing subtle about the intimidation. As President Bush stated so correctly, and as numerous reports by Human Rights Watch and other organizations confirm, "The dictator of Iraq is a student of Stalin, using murder as a tool of terror and control, within his own cabinet, within his own army, and even within his own family."

Today we know from multiple sources that Saddam has ordered that any scientist who cooperates during interviews will be killed, as well as their families. Furthermore, we know that scientists are being tutored on what to say to the U.N. inspectors and that Iraqi intelligence officers are posing as scientists to be interviewed by the inspectors.

And finally, of course, there's obstruction, and obstruction concealed by lying. In the past, U.N. inspectors faced many instances of delay, with excuses that ranged from, "We can't find the keys," to "You can't come in here because only women are allowed." When all else fails, lying becomes a standard technique.

Richard Butler, the former head of the U.N. Special Commission, reported, and I quote, "Iraqi leaders had no difficulty sitting across from me and spontaneously changing a reported fact or figure." For example, he said, six previously reported warheads could suddenly become 15, or vice versa, with no explanation or apology about a previous lie. Butler reports that actions taken to obstruct inspectors were often explained away with excuses that were as credible as "the dog ate my homework." One example that Butler quotes, literally: "A wandering psychopath cut some wires to the chemical plant monitoring camera. It seems he hadn't received the medicine he needed because of the U.N. sanctions." (Laughter.) And here's another: "The wicked girlfriend of one of our workers tore up the documents in anger."

During the UNSCOM period, Richard Spertzel on one occasion confronted Dr. Rihab Taha, still a principal and sinister figure in Iraq's biological weapons program. He said to her, and I quote, "Dr. Taha, you know that we know that you're lying, so why are you doing it?" Dr. Taha drew herself up and replied, "Dr. Spertzel, it is not a lie when you are ordered to lie." Lying was more than a technique. It was, and it remains, a policy.

Today, Iraqi obstruction continues on large issues as well as small ones. Authorities that Resolution 1441 confers unconditionally on the inspectors are constantly subject to conditions by the Baghdad regime. For example, the resolution requires that the U.N. inspectors shall have, quote, "free and unrestricted use and landing of fixed- and rotary-winged aircraft, including manned and unmanned reconnaissance vehicles," unquote. But Iraq has objected to U-2 flights and shoots at our Predators. Even more serious, Iraq has yet to make a single one of its scientists or technical experts available to be interviewed in confidential circumstances free of intimidation as required by the U.N. resolution.

Long ago Iraq became accustomed to the fact that even when caught, the consequences could be negligible. And hence a new game entered the lexicon: cheat and retreat. This happened on issue after issue. For example, as Butler reports -- I'm quoting again -- "Initially Iraq had denied ever having manufactured, let alone deployed, VX. But this was not true." Confronted with evidence of VX in soil samples, the Iraqis then admitted they had manufactured, but claimed a quantity of no more than 200 liters. Subsequent probing showed they'd made far more. So Iraq's initial complete lie had been replaced by a false statement about the quantity. Iraq then reached for a third lie: they'd never weaponized VX. This, it turned out, was yet a third falsehood.

The same pattern was repeated with Iraq's nuclear and biological weapons. Baghdad revised its nuclear declaration to the IAEA four times within 14 months of the initial submission in April 1991. During the UNSCOM period, Iraq submitted six different biological warfare declarations, each one of which the U.N. inspectors rejected. Following the defection of Saddam's son-in-law, Husayn Kamil, Iraq dramatically disclosed more than half a million pages of biological weapons-related documents. But, in fact, sparse relevant information was buried within a massive volume of extraneous data, all of which was intended to create the appearance of candor and to overwhelm the U.N. inspectors' analytical resources.

A process that begins with a massive lie and proceeds with concealment, penetration, intimidation and obstruction cannot be a process of cooperative disarmament. The purpose of Resolution 1441, I repeat, was not to play a deadly game of hide-and-seek or cheat-and-retreat for another 12 years. The purpose was to achieve a clear resolution of the threat posed by Iraq's weapons of mass terror.

If Iraq were to choose to comply with the requirement to dismantle its weapons of mass terror, we would know it. We would know it from their full and complete declaration of everything that we know that they have, as well as by revelations of programs that our intelligence has probably not yet discovered. Recall that after the Gulf War, we were stunned by the magnitude of Iraq's nuclear program, despite all of our intelligence efforts and those of our allies, including Israel, and even though Iraq had been subject to IAEA inspections for many years.

We would know it if we saw an attitude on the part of the Iraqi government that encouraged people to cooperate with inspectors, rather than intimidated them into silence and lies. We would know it when inspectors were able to go about their work without being spied on or penetrated. And we would know it most of all when Iraqi scientists and others familiar with the program were clearly speaking freely.

But in the absence of full cooperation, particularly in the absence of full disclosure of what Iraq has actually done, we cannot expect that the U.N. inspectors have the capacity to disarm an uncooperative Iraq, even with the full support of American intelligence and the intelligence of other nations.

American intelligence capabilities are extraordinary, but they are far from the omniscient, all-seeing eye depicted in some Hollywood movies. For a great body of what we need to know, we are dependent on traditional methods of intelligence -- that is to say, human beings, who either deliberately or inadvertently are communicating to us.

It was only after Saddam Hussein's son-in-law, Husayn Kamil, defected in 1995 that U.N. inspectors were led to a large cache of documents, on a chicken farm, that contained important revelations about Iraq's biological weapons. In contemplating the magnitude of the task of finding such hidden sites, one might ask: How many farms are there in Iraq? How many structures are there in which important documents could be stored? How many garages in that big country are large enough to hold the tractor-trailers that make up an Iraqi mobile biological weapons factory?

And we need to be worried. Even when inspectors were in Iraq before, the Baghdad regime was building and retaining weapons of mass terror. It would be folly to think that those efforts stopped when the inspectors left.

Consider that in 1997, U.N. inspectors found Iraq had produced and weaponized at least 10 liters of ricin. In concentrated form, that quantity of ricin is enough to kill more than 1 million people.

Baghdad declared to the U.N. inspectors that it had over 19,000 liters of botulinum toxin, enough to kill tens of millions; and 8,500 liters of anthrax, with the potential to kill hundreds of millions. And consider that the U.N. inspectors believe that much larger quantities of biological agents remained undeclared. Indeed, the inspectors think that Iraq has manufactured two to four times the amount of biological agents it has admitted to and has failed to explain the whereabouts of more than two metric tons of raw material for the growth of biological agents. Despite 11 years of inspections and sanctions, containment and military response, Baghdad retains chemical and biological weapons and is producing more. And Saddam's nuclear scientists are still hard at work.

As the President put it, and I quote, "The history, the logic and the facts lead to one conclusion: Saddam Hussein's regime is a grave and gathering danger. To suggest otherwise is to hope against the evidence. To assume the regime's good faith is to bet the lives of millions and the peace of the world in a reckless gamble. And this is a risk we must not take."

So, we come back to the imperative: Baghdad must disarm, peacefully if at all possible, but by force if necessary. The decision on whether Iraq's weapons of mass terror will be dismantled voluntarily or whether it will have to be done by force is not up to us, it is not up to the inspectors, it is not up to the United Nations. The decision rests entirely with Saddam Hussein. So far, he has not made the fundamental decision to disarm, and unless he does, the threat posed by his weapons programs will remain with us, and, indeed, it will grow.

Yes, there are real dangers in confronting a tyrant who has and uses weapons of mass terror and has links to terrorists. But those dangers will only grow. They are far greater now than they would have been five or 10 years ago, and they will be much greater still five or 10 years from now. President Bush has brought the world to an extraordinary consensus and focus on this problem; it is time to see it resolved, voluntarily or by force, but resolved one way or another. And time is running out.

On a happier note, if one thinks about it, once freed from Saddam's tyranny, it is reasonable to expect that Iraq's educated, industrious population of more than 20 million could build a modern society that would be a source of prosperity, not insecurity, for its neighbors.

Barham Salih, a very brave and distinguished Iraqi Kurdish leader, spoke recently of the dream of the Iraqi people, and I quote. He said, "In my office in Suleymaniyah, I meet almost every day some traveler who has come from Baghdad or other parts of Iraq. Without exception, they tell me of the continuing suffering inflicted by the Iraqi regime, of the fearful hope secretly nurtured by so many enslaved Iraqis for a free life, for a country where they can think without fear and speak without retribution."

We may someday look back on this moment in history as the time when the West defined itself for the 21st Century, not in terms of geography or race or religion or culture or language, but in terms of values, the values of freedom and democracy.

For people who cherish freedom and seek peace, these are indeed difficult times. But such times can deepen our understanding of the truth. And this truth we know: the single greatest threat to peace and freedom in our time is terrorism. So this truth we must also affirm: the truth does not belong to tyrants and terrorists. The truth belongs to those who dream the oldest and noblest dream of all -- the dream of peace and freedom.