By Karen DeYoung and Rick Weiss
Washington Post Staff Writers
Wednesday, October 24, 2001; Page A17

Concerned that rising speculation about Iraqi involvement in the mailings of deadly anthrax spores was causing an escalation of public fear and worries among anti-terrorism allies about a possible U.S. assault on Baghdad, the Bush administration appears to have calmed its public rhetoric on Iraq in recent days.

Soon after the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks, administration officials warned that if any link were discovered between the administration's prime suspect, Osama bin Laden's al Qaeda organization, and Iraq, the United States would not hesitate to retaliate. Those warnings gained added significance in recent weeks with the anthrax mailings, along with confusing official statements about the high quality of the spores, and public theorizing -- including by members of Congress -- that Iraq was the likely supplier.

Barely a week ago, senior administration officials were emphasizing Iraq's biological weapons capability in tandem with President Bush's commitment to a "broad war" against terrorism. Asked to deny that Iraq was the target of a coming "second stage of this war," national security adviser Condoleezza Rice told the Arab satellite TV network al-Jazeera on Oct. 15 that "we worry about [Iraqi leader] Saddam Hussein. We worry about his weapons of mass destruction . . . and certainly, the United States will act if Iraq threatens its interests."

The question of whether the United States should begin preparing to immediately turn its military sights on Iraq after Afghanistan has been the subject of debate in the administration. Among the many senior officials who also served in the administration of Bush's father, some strongly believe that the 1991 Desert Storm war should have finished off Saddam Hussein.

In public statements long before Sept. 11, Deputy Defense Secretary Paul D. Wolfowitz, undersecretary for defense in Bush's father's administration, advocated striking Baghdad as soon as "we find the right way to do it." In a speech last May, Wolfowitz said the United States "must see Saddam without illusion if we are to know how to deal with the dangers that he creates. We cannot appease him. His appetites cannot be satisfied. There will be no peace in the region and no safety for our friends there . . . as long as he remains in power."

But others, including Vice President Cheney and Secretary of State Colin L. Powell -- both of whom served in the first Bush administration -- have said that all focus must be on the Afghan campaign for now.

Officials continue to publicly voice suspicion about a connection between the anthrax mailings and international terrorism. "We all suspect it," House Minority Leader Richard A. Gephardt (D-Mo.) said yesterday after a meeting with Bush. If irrefutable evidence of an Iraqi connection were found, many of those who advocate caution would likely change their views.

But in the meantime, Powell told CNN on Sunday that "it would be wise for all of us to take a deep breath and let our investigative agencies figure this out before we go rushing in front of television sets to present these rumors and present this speculation and get the country all excited."

Asked Monday if he believed the anthrax came from al Qaeda, or if he had any idea of the source, Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld answered succinctly: "I don't. And no."

Former president George Bush, who rarely gives public counsel to his son's administration, said in a CBS interview yesterday that the United States had to be "very careful about what we do now" in the Persian Gulf region, "and I'm sure the president is being and will be."

Asked if he had any regrets about not going after Saddam Hussein in 1991, Bush said: "The answer is no. What would have happened if we'd have done that is we would have been alone. We would have been an occupying power in an Arab land. . . . And we would have seen something much worse than we have now, because we would have had the enmity of all the gulf. Egypt would have been gone. Jordan, who came back, would have been gone; Turkey, you name it. So I think we did the right thing."

A similar argument was made last week about the current conflict by the former president's national security adviser. If anything, Brent Scowcroft wrote in a Washington Post opinion article, Washington needs Arab support now more than it did in the Gulf War.

Those comments are likely to give comfort to members of the international anti-terrorism coalition that Bush has assembled, virtually all of whom have insisted that they signed up to help the Americans vanquish bin Laden, al Qaeda and Afghanistan's ruling Taliban militia but were loath to consider expanding the war to Iraq. Speaking on CNN's "Larry King Live" Monday night, the Pakistani leader, Gen. Pervez Musharraf, said that an attack on Iraq would cause much of the Islamic world to turn against Washington.

It is difficult to know whether the tone and substance of this week's administration statements reflect genuine doubt, based on investigative evidence, about Iraqi involvement in either the Sept. 11 attacks or anthrax, or are primarily a reflection of concern about the anxiety the Iraq speculation is causing. Senior officials have been increasingly close-mouthed about whatever plans they may have for Baghdad, even as many outside the administration have become more vocal in their insistence that Iraq is the ultimate culprit and must be stopped.

Chief among the latter has been former CIA director R. James Woolsey, who has insisted there are proven links between bin Laden and Iraq dating at least to the 1993 World Trade Center bombing. As to the Sept. 11 perpetrators, Woolsey said in a speech Monday night, "There are too many things, too many examples of stolen identities, of cleverly crafted documentation, of coordination across continents and between states . . . to stray very far from the conclusion that a state, and a very well-run intelligence service, is involved here."

While he acknowledged to reporters that the jury is still out on Iraqi involvement, Woolsey said there are "enough indications that we should be highly suspicious, be very alert and should look under that rock as hard as we possibly can." Woolsey serves on two government panels, one for the Navy and one for the CIA, and reportedly traveled to London last month on a mission from Wolfowitz to look for evidence against Baghdad.

An even sharper call for action came last week from Sen. Joseph I. Lieberman (Conn.), the former Democratic vice presidential candidate, who said there should be a definite "phase two" in the U.S. response to the Sept. 11 attacks.

Meanwhile, in Baghdad, Foreign Minister Naji Sabri reportedly used an expletive last week to describe reports of an Iraqi link to the anthrax mailings. Al-Thawra, the newspaper of the ruling Baath party, said yesterday that Washington's "aim is to create suspicion around countries listed by the United States [as state sponsors of terrorism] in order to commit aggression against them," Reuters reported.

Much of the suspicion that Iraq supplied the anthrax spores rests on the 1999 final report from UNSCOM, the United Nations group that conducted multiple inspections of Iraqi facilities after the Gulf War and was to oversee the destruction of Iraqi weapons. The report expressed "serious doubts" that Iraq had terminated its offensive biological weapons program.

Iraq denied it ever had a biological weapons warfare program, but after seven years of verification efforts, one of the U.N. inspectors' few certainties was that Iraq had "weaponized" large quantities of the bacteria that cause anthrax. Moreover, the group's report concluded, "the commission has no confidence that all bulk agents have been destroyed; that no BW [biological weapons] munitions or weapons remain in Iraq; and that a BW capability does not still exist in Iraq."