Iraq has told the UN it is ready to readmit weapons inspectors, four years after the last inspections were carried out there.

The chief UN arms inspector, Hans Blix, has said he hopes to have an advance party in Iraq on 15 October.

President Bush meets the Russian foreign minister, Igor Ivanov and defence minister, Sergei Ivanov, on Friday in an effort to win Russian acquiescence in his campaign against Saddam Hussein.

The US has dismissed the Iraq's offer of allowing the return of the inspectors without conditions as a tactical ploy and urged people to remember that Iraq has had a long history of obstructing the inspectors's work.

Will Iraq's offer defuse the crisis? Do you think the offer is genuine? Or do you think Saddam Hussein is just calling Washington's bluff? Does that mean we don't need to change the regime in Iraq? Or should we focus only on the threat of weapons of mass destruction?

Former UN weapons inspector Olivia Bosch, BBC's security correspondent Frank Gardner and the BBC's correspondent in Baghdad, Caroline Hawley answered your questions in an BBC Interactive forum presented by BBC defence correspondent Paul Adams.

Transcript

Paul Adams:
Here to join us to discuss Iraq and weapons inspections are the former weapons inspector, Olivia Bosch, the BBC's security correspondent, Frank Gardner and down the line from Baghdad, Caroline Hawley.

Caroline if we can go to you first. There's a question here from Kathleen Gillen, London: I would like to ask Ms Hawley if there is any sign of people in Iraq preparing for a war and if so what are they doing?

Caroline Hawley:
Here in Baghdad there's a sense really it's very much business as usual. We have heard of a few people stockpiling food. We've heard that hospitals are getting prepared should there be a war. We're not privy of course to any information about the military preparations the Iraqi authorities may be taking. Iraqi television has been showing pictures of teenagers training for battle - training for street-to-street fighting if it should come to that.

But I would say that overall mood is one of great uncertainty. The people here are hearing a lot about American plans to overthrow Saddam Hussein but the Iraqi people have no idea how the Americans plan to do that and who would replace Saddam Hussein.

Paul Adams:
So people there are acutely conscious of the sense of hysteria that is building up in the West about this impending conflict?

Caroline Hawley:
I don't think there's anything like a sense of panic here in Iraq at the moment. People are basically saying, we're used to this, we're used to threats, we're used to war itself. So I would say there is no sense of panic. The other thing of course is that the Iraqi media is state-run and the headlines here tend to be focusing on, for example, the opposition that's been voiced in many parts of the world to any American attack on Iraq.

Paul Adams:
The other thing that Iraq is very used to is sanctions and the price that Iraq has been made to pay for it's apparent or alleged non-compliance with UN resolutions over the years. What's life like there for ordinary people in Baghdad? Do you get a sense of suffering, of weariness with this whole disastrous period since the Gulf War?

Caroline Hawley:
Yes and I think that Iraqis feel that they been unfairly picked on by the Americans, by the British, by the UN - that they have suffered a lot for something that they did not commit. Now having said that I think that life has improved for many people since 1996 when the UN's oil for food programme came into effect when Iraq was able to sell its oil in return for importing humanitarian goods. Now you see shops full of things. You see the odd Mercedes on the road. You see the roads in central Baghdad in really a very good state of repair. You see grand new mosques being built by the authorities. You see of course lots of statues of Saddam Hussein. But I would say also that most people are still desperately poor - there is no functioning economy here and people are relying on government food rations to survive.

Paul Adams:
How free are you to talk to people, to get their impressions or are you constantly being monitored? Are you being monitored now?

Caroline Hawley:
I don't think I'm being monitored now but certainly our office, our bureau, is in the Ministry of Information as are the offices of most other broadcasters. We do not set foot outside the Ministry of Information without an official escort - a minder, if you like - and that person will accompany us on every interview. They will accompany us to every place we want to film or record and of course people will not speak publicly under those conditions about what they think of the regime here.

Paul Adams:
If we could turn to the question of weapons inspectors now. Frank, there's a question here from John Henry, Singapore: Shouldn't we give Saddam Hussein a chance to prove that this time he means what he says? The US and UK always have the capability to attack if he doesn't

Frank Gardner:
Well the view in Washington is that he's had plenty of chances over the last 10 years to prove that he means what he says and he's blown every single chance. They would say that the UN inspections regime has changed, but Saddam's regime has not and therefore once a cheat, once a liar, always one of those.

But I think many people, particularly here in Britain, would say - well actually we should give Saddam a chance, we should give the Iraqis a chance to do this. At least let's get the inspectors in on the ground - if they're then obstructed, if it then becomes clear that the Iraqis are going to do exactly what they've done throughout the 1990s and try and evade and cheat and retreat as it's know as - then that would be possibly a cause for military action.

But there is a difference, I think, between the view in Washington and that in London. It's much harder in Washington. There are many people in Washington who simply don't want to give Iraq a chance at all - they're just saying, no, it's time to get on and sort this out once and for all and not even bother with the UN. Britain has a much softer line - they want to at least give inspectors and the Iraqi government a chance.

Paul Adams:
Of course there are sceptics about this whole emphasis on weapons inspection. Voicing that is Andrew in the US: It seems quite obvious to me that if the US is pursuing regime change at the very same time that the United Nations is trying to disarm Iraq, won't Saddam resist efforts to disarm him since it will just make it easier for the United States to overthrow him?

Frank Gardner:
There's quite an element of truth in that. If you were in charge of a country and you thought you were going to be attacked anyhow, then why co-operate? Saddam Hussein has been very smart over the 1990s. It was proven that he did have weapons of mass destruction - that became very clear in 1995 particularly after his son-in-law defected briefly and gave a lot of information to the inspectors which allowed them to discover an entire biological weapons programme.

If he's smart this time, what he will do is let them in and appear to give them every possible facility that they want. The nightmare for America is that the inspectors go everywhere, wherever they please without notice and find absolutely nothing because Iraq will be able to turn to the world and say look - we told you so, there's nothing here, we were telling the truth and George Bush will have no excuse then - or he'll be really pushed to find an excuse to go to war. But I'm not sure that's going to happen. I don't think that given all the pressure that's going on at the moment, I think ways will found to engineer a conflict.

Paul Adams:
Olivia Bosch you've got first-hand experience of this whole process. There's a question here from Ian Harris, England: How does a weapons inspector know where to begin looking? Surely you can never hope to cover the whole of Iraq.

Olivia Bosch:
He asks a question that is frequently asked. In fact the onus is on the regime to comply to the resolutions not for the inspectors to find things. An important component of the Resolution 687 is the on-going monitoring and verification part. Over the last few weeks, we've heard much more on destruction and finding of weapons of mass destruction - again finding is not the clincher here. But there's also to be a process of on-going monitoring so that he doesn't re-establish a weapons capability as he had before.

Paul Adams:
Eve Liggen, UK: I would like to ask the former arms inspector what we really really know about weapons in Iraq. Are there chemical and nuclear weapons being made or is it just American propaganda?

Olivia Bosch:
There were many weapons found during the period of the UNSCOM inspections, from 1991 to 1998. And as Frank had said, in the early stages, the regime had under-declared a lot that that had. The inspectors would then find components, parts and weapons and ask for an explanation and a satisfactory explanation often didn't come forward. So they had to go to New York and ask New York to go to Baghdad to say please come up with more information and then the Iraqi regime would, in most cases, come up with the truth and reveal more than what they had said.

An important turning point was that up until 1995, they had in fact denied that they had an offensive biological weapons capability. Everyone has the right to do research for vaccines etc. but in terms of an offensive capability, they had denied that until 1995 when the defector was going to reveal the possible information and the regime wanted to pre-empt him. And in fact led the inspectors to the site, where the biological weapons were being made and they found 680,000 pages of documents that provided detailed information about the various weapons of mass destruction programme. The fact is that over the years, physically we saw many chemical munitions - bombs, artillery shells filled with chemical agents. So there's no doubt that they did have chemical weapons, biological weapons and a nuclear capability.

Now involved during the period of UNSCOM from 1991 to 1998, most of the weapons that were found were destroyed. The presumption is that he has in place therefore an infrastructure to make at least chemical and biological weapons if he wanted to do so. There were particular component parts that were unaccounted for. So he does have in place an infrastructure which includes not only equipment but also scientists and military engineers who have the know-how to make a lot of potential weapons.

Paul Adams:
You said that it wasn't always easy to get the Iraqis to be forthcoming with you and sometimes it got worse than that - it became almost farcical with inspectors arriving at the front gates while chaps with briefcases full of documents where heading out of the back gate. There is a question here from Christopher Lowell, USA: Would any former UN weapons inspector, including yourself, look at this as move by Saddam as anything but a ploy?

Olivia Bosch:
Well it was not unexpected that he would say that and this ties in with what Frank had mentioned before. That at a time when the threat of military force is very imminent the Iraqi regime has consistently over the years shown that they would become more co-operative and more forthcoming about letting inspectors in or gaining access to a site previous to 1998. In order for the current offer to be effective, here is his chance, to allow inspectors in and for the Iraqi regime to comply with the Resolution 687 and the others. But at the same time, there should also then be the continued diplomatic activity in the UN at this moment for the resolution as well as having a continued military presence in the region. So in effect, I would see it as an interrelated triple track process.

Paul Adams:
Coercive inspections? Is that the kind of thing we need to see here?

Olivia Bosch:
Well this has been the proposal recently put out by the Carnegie Endowment of International Peace in Washington. The idea to have some kind of middle opportunity here is a very good one. But coercive inspections will be very difficult to implement. If you were to have a military presence it would presumably have to be at the border because even as the Iraqi regime has said - they will allow the inspectors in but one would not expect them to allow a military presence.

So even if there was a moment that might appear to be of non-co-operation on the ground during inspections, it would then take hours before this military force would come there and therefore it would be ineffective in that way. I think more fundamentally it also makes muddy the role of the inspections - they're there to put into place a monitoring process to make sure that he doesn't rearm or continue making weapons of mass destruction.

Frank Gardner:
There was a point I wanted to add there. I've been looking at the language that Iraq has been using in the United Nations, particularly yesterday in the speech delivered by Naji Sabri, the Foreign Minister, where he is a delivering a message from the President Saddam Hussein, where he says - anybody is welcome to come inspect these sites, all they need to do is to tell us where they want to go and see and then they come and inspect it. In other words give us advance warning. That's not what the inspections are supposed to be about.

There's another a little red flag that I've seen here as well where Naji Sabri talks about the need to respect Iraq's sovereignty and its dignity etc. Now in the past that has meant that certain areas had been off limits, such as the presidential palaces and there is a feeling of suspicion in the West and particularly in the United States, that as soon as world attention moves away from Iraq that we're going to be back to the same old game of the 1990s - basically misleading or of obstructing inspectors and saying you're welcome to go wherever you want apart from that particular there because that's a hospital and it's only for dignitaries etc. Now let's hope that that isn't the case - if Iraq has nothing to hide nowhere will be off limits.

Paul Adams:
Let me ask Caroline that very point. Two e-mails here Caroline that touch on this issue of whether or not Iraq really means what it says. The first is from Nazim Akhtar, Pakistan: Will the weapon inspectors diffuse the crisis - because does Iraq really want to avoid war?

Barbara Cook, England: Given that inspections were ineffectual last time due to a lack of co-operation and overt obstruction on the part of the Iraqis - Why will a new round of inspections be any different?

Caroline Hawley:
I think that the key thing that's changed is that the stakes are so much higher this time around. The Americans have made clear that they want to overthrow the regime here. This is a regime that has been in power for more than 30 years and wants to stay in power. Now it agreed to let the weapons inspectors back under immense pressure - not only pressure from the UN, from the Americans and from the British but also advice from what it considers friends - people saying you have absolutely no choice, you have to let the weapons inspectors back.

Now Iraq has very severe reservations about allowing the inspections to resume. It also has a deep distrust over the inspectors. We've had in Baghdad just recently the former head weapons inspector, Scott Ritter, who admitted again in front of the Iraqi parliament that spying did go on, that the system was abused to collect information about Saddam Hussein himself. So there is a lot of distrust of the inspectors. But I think the Iraqis know very well that if they try to block them that will result in a new crisis that would lead to a probable attack. So I think there in a difficult position - I think they're very well aware of the pressure they are under.

Paul Adams:
Olivia Bosch is that a description of your work that you recognise? That Scott Ritter's suggestion that the whole UNSCOM operation was fundamentally undermined by association with western intelligence agencies?

Olivia Bosch:
The whole UNSCOM operation was not a spying exercise. Of course the Iraqi regime would want to portray that. I didn't know of any spying going on and in fact in order to appease even the perception that that was going on, the new successor to UNSCOM, the United Nations Monitoring Verification and Inspection Commission, has been created to help appease that concern of the Iraqis whereby nations would be able to provide intelligence information to facilitate where the inspectors would go. But they're not allowed to report it back to national countries. So we're trying to be mindful of that.

I do want to clarify too, on your previous questioner in fact. She or he presumed that the inspections were ineffective. I think overall most people would say they were effective in fact that they did find so many of his weapons of mass destruction. So while there was the denial of access that you referred to, those were some of the more journalistically appealing scenes which in effect had a tendency to distort what was going on over the previous years. In fact 50% of what was going on was monitoring of the various sites which is not journalistically appealing of course.

Paul Adams:
Does it trouble you that there is a sort of perhaps rather black propaganda going on about the kind of work you were doing, designed to discredit it, designed to make sure that we don't have a similar set up in the future? The hawks in Washington would like us to believe that those years of work were ineffective.

Olivia Bosch:
Many weapons were found. We learned more about the infrastructure he had in place. The new team will have learned the lessons that UNSCOM had had. Now it is a different scene - the atmosphere is so different now. Here is the regime's last chance. In effect he has been given, in a legal analogy, his "letter before action" and he has the chance now to comply with the resolutions. Again it's not for the inspectors to find things but for him to comply and the inspectors can go in, they have to check on about 700 sites and they've put in place a monitoring regime. Many of his weapons of mass destruction have already been destroyed. Most of UNSCOM was an investigatory process and towards the end focussing more on the monitoring aspect but as I mentioned before that has not been the focus of a lot of the debate.

Paul Adams:
Caroline, picking up on this idea of the Iraqi concerns about the inspection regime. Is there a feeling there that almost regardless of what happens Iraq is going to get attacked. Why invite some foreign nationals in who might provide useful intelligence to the West in planning its attack on Iraq. There's a question here from Paul Barrows, UK: Given the US's continuing military rhetoric, many Iraqis believe that they will be attacked whatever they do. What assurances can the UN offer Iraq that they absolutely will not be subject to military aggression if they comply? Is that the kind of assurance they're seeking?

Caroline Hawley:
It certainly is. Iraq did say it would let in the weapons inspectors without conditions. But they also made very clear that they had expectations of what they now want from the UN - they want guarantees they won't be attacked if they do let the weapons inspectors back in. They also want light at the end of the tunnel on the whole issue of sanctions. They believe that the Americans keep changing the goalposts and they also believe very strongly that the Americans in a sense won't take yes for an answer over the weapons inspections - that the Americans are determined to replace the regime here and that nothing that they do will be enough.

Paul Adams:
Luqman Ahmed Soorma, USA: Will there be a timeframe for when they would finally say that Iraq does not possess weapons of mass destruction?

At what point can you say the job is done?

Olivia Bosch:
We have in place now, Hans Blix, expects to meet with the Iraqis on the 30th September to the 6th October to put into place the next practicalities and he expects to have some kind of team go in by the 15th October. He mentioned subsequently that he hoped that inspections could begin about four weeks thereafter.

There is in place in the 1999 resolution that which created UMMOVIC a process that at some stage to be agreed after the work plan has been agreed, that once the inspections begin, there's a 120 day period where the sanctions will be suspended subject to co-operation from the Iraqi regime. So already there is place a mechanism, so the sooner the inspectors go in and the Iraqis show co-operation in complying with the conditions, then he is well on the road to having the sanctions suspended - closer to the time than most people realise.

Paul Adams:
Ahmed, Cape Town, South Africa: The US and UN should focus on the resolutions of 1967 that demand Israel withdraw from the occupied territories first. While I don't support Saddam or his policies, many in the world believe that the real threat to world peace is biased US foreign policy.

Frank Gardner:
I think Ahmed you're speaking not just for yourself but for almost the entire Muslim world and pretty much everybody in the Middle East outside Israel. The UN Secretary-General, Kofi Annan, is hugely aware of what is perceived as double standards here over UN resolutions. I spent a week with him going around the Middle East last summer and everywhere we went in the Arab world, this is exactly what he heard.

I guess the argument on that is that Israel does have weapons of mass destruction - its got nuclear weapons, but it has never tried to use them. Its probably got chemical weapons but hasn't tried to use them - Saddam has - its used them against the Iranians, its used them against the Kurds and the fear is that it will probably use them in any future conflict.

Paul Adams:
Thank you for your many e-mails and please keep sending them in. Thank you Caroline Hawley in Baghdad, thank you Olivia Bosch and Frank Gardner here in the studio. I'm Paul Adams, goodbye.