WASHINGTON — This is the week that President Bush hopes to convince the country, and a largely skeptical world, that Saddam Hussein will never voluntarily disarm, leaving war as the only remaining answer.

"Today is the beginning of the final phase," a senior adviser to Bush said.

He got unexpected help Monday from Hans Blix, the normally understated Swede who is co-chief of the U.N. weapons inspections program. With his quietly devastating list of questions that Iraq has refused to answer — Where are the stores of anthrax and VX? Where are the illegal missiles and the artillery shells stuffed with chemical weapons? — he gave Bush much, though not quite all, of the backing he needs.

The inspectors' list of continuing intransigence by Saddam gives Bush the political opportunity on Tuesday night to argue in his State of the Union address that more time will not solve the Iraq problem.

In the speech, one of the most critical of his presidency so far, Bush plans "to answer the question, 'Why now?' " a senior aide who has reviewed a draft said Monday night.

It is a question that, some of Bush's friends and sympathetic allies concede, he has so far failed to address in any convincing fashion.

That creates even more pressure as he and his staff put finishing touches to the State of the Union and map out a series of phone calls and personal meetings intended to bridge the divide between the United States and its closest allies.

Not surprisingly, Bush is spending the week with the most like-minded international leaders, calling the conservative prime minister of Spain on Monday, and inviting Italy's leader, Silvio Berlusconi, to visit him in Washington. On Friday, he will take Prime Minister Tony Blair of Britain — a loyal partner in public, a voice of some caution in private — to Camp David.

Blix, who oversees the team of chemical and biological weapons inspectors in Iraq, did not hand Bush a complete victory Monday. His counterpart for nuclear weapons, Mohamed ElBaradei, the head of the International Atomic Energy Agency, made clear that his inspectors had not found any tell-tale signs of radioactivity, or other evidence that Saddam was reconstituting a bomb project that was six months or so away from a weapon in 1991 — a central tenet in the administration's case of Saddam as a potential threat.

That may hurt Bush's cause, because nothing constitutes a more compelling "smoking gun" than evidence of nuclear bomb-making.

Still, few at the White House expected Blix to make as much of a case for Bush as he did on Monday. In private, administration officials have complained that he is usually in "Volvo mode" — the safety-first approach of his country's best-known car. But Monday was different, and Blix's frustration was evident.

Iraq, he said, "appears not to have come to a genuine acceptance, even today, of the disarmament which was demanded of it." He listed, in painstaking detail, the inconsistencies in Iraq's declarations, the blocking of U-2 surveillance flights, and the fact that not a single Iraqi scientist agreed to be interviewed without a government minder.

"Blix laid out the bill of indictment for Saddam Hussein, and it is more credible coming from him than from Bush," said Kenneth Pollack, a former national security official in the Clinton administration, who is director of research at the Saban Center at the Brookings Institution. Pollack said he was expecting Blix to "focus on the positive."

But Pollack and others cautioned that it was far from clear that Bush will be able to capitalize on the Blix report. Already on Monday, European officials were saying that even if everything Blix says is true — and they did not dispute it — Saddam has been hiding these weapons for a decade. And the question that Germany and France have pressed remains: If Saddam's power is contained by the presence of inspectors and the troops massing on his border, what is the urgency of toppling him now?

"The pressure on Saddam is fine, and we want to keep it up," one senior German official said on Monday by telephone from Berlin. "Why risk everything else that can go wrong — uprisings in the streets, a broken Iraq — if we have him where we want him?"

It is that question which Bush's aides know they have to hit square-on in one of the most widely anticipated State of the Union addresses in modern history. There was evidence on Monday that Bush understood the challenge, and would argue that Iraq is not only a major threat, but an urgent one.

This weekend, his chief of staff, Andrew Card, a Massachusetts Republican who is usually as understated as Blix, said it was up to the United States to "protect us and the world from a Holocaust" should Saddam begin thinking about using weapons of mass destruction.

On Monday, the White House pushed that argument further, sending Secretary of State Colin Powell out to reiterate — without providing much new evidence — that there are links between Saddam and the al-Qaida terrorist organization. Implicit in that argument is that even if Saddam does not lash out at America directly, he could pass his weapons to terrorists who will.

Experts say the risk is there. But in Europe last week, officials in several countries argued that terrorists in search of a nuclear weapon would be far more likely to obtain one in Pakistan or North Korea — a threat Bush says far less about — than in Baghdad.

So part of Bush's challenge is to make Saddam sound like an urgent threat without overreaching in a way that makes it easier for critics to say he is exaggerating.

"There's a risk to our credibility if we make claims that seem less than fully plausible," one senior American diplomat said last week. "Could Saddam hand off his anthrax or his VX? Sure. Is there any evidence so far he's done that? Not much."

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There are other potential complications for Bush. Precisely because Blix sounded tough and fairminded on Monday, many allies will argue that he needs to be given a chance to finish his work. ElBaradei explicitly urged the Security Council to give him many more months.

"He's not going to get that," one White House official said.

As Europeans argue for more time, however, they face a major strategic problem of their own: Powell no longer seems to be on their side.


ON TV: President Bush's State of the Union speech will be televised at 7 p.m. MST.

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