Raising the stakes

By Wolf Blitzer
CNN Wolf Blitzer Reports

WASHINGTON (CNN) -- For the second time this week, Vice President Dick Cheney has made the case for war against Iraq. On Monday, he made the case before the Veterans of Foreign Wars. Now, he has raised the stakes in a speech before Korean War veterans in San Antonio. He warned that Iraqi President Saddam Hussein was working to amass chemical, biological and nuclear weapons.

"Armed with an arsenal of these weapons of terror and sitting atop 10 percent of the oil reserve, Saddam Hussein can then be expected to seek domination of the entire Middle East," Cheney said. He added that the Iraqi leader would then seek "to take control of the great portion of the world's energy supplies, to directly threaten the people throughout the region, and subject the United States or any other nation to nuclear blackmail."

He suggested that resuming U.N. weapons inspections in Iraq -- suspended for nearly four years -- would probably be a waste of time. And he warned that Saddam Hussein would use that time to develop more weapons of mass destruction.

"These are not weapons designed for the purpose of defending Iraq," he said. "These are offensive weapons for the purpose of inflicting death on a massive scale developed so that Saddam Hussein can hold the threat over anyone that he chooses in his own region or beyond."

President Bush, speaking at a Republican fundraising event in Oklahoma City, didn't go into details about Iraq but he, too, did issue a thinly-veiled threat. "We must not allow the world's worst leaders to develop or harbor the world's worst weapons," he said. He also said he was working on his own timetable. "I've got a lot of tools at my disposal, and I'm a patient man," he said. "But I understand that history gives us an opportunity to make the world more peaceful."

A senior White House official, by the way, says President Bush will seek congressional approval before striking Iraq. The specific form of that approval remains to be determined.

Meanwhile, we've now heard from another U.S. ally who says the Bush administration should not strike unilaterally against Iraq. French President Jacques Chirac says: "This development is worrying, contrary to France's collective vision of security."

President Bush, sources say, is probably going to use the occasion of his September 12 address before the U.N. General Assembly to make his case against Saddam Hussein directly before the world community.