By Mike Allen
Washington Post Staff Writer
Monday, September 9, 2002; Page A01

President Bush, preparing to make his case against Iraq at the United Nations, deployed five members of his war cabinet to yesterday's talk shows to argue that Saddam Hussein is aggressively assembling nuclear weapons and that waiting any longer to disarm him could prove catastrophic for the United States and its allies.

Vice President Cheney struck a newly measured tone, reflecting a decision by White House officials to show deference to Congress and the United Nations while not backing away from Bush's determination to deal swiftly with Hussein. The administration officials suggested that Bush would accept a last-chance effort by the United Nations to deploy weapons inspectors in Iraq but would not agree to a prolonged process.

"We're trying very hard not to be unilateralist," Cheney said on NBC's "Meet the Press" in his first televised interview in four months. "We're working to build support with the American people, with the Congress, as many have suggested we should. And we're also, as many have suggested we should, going to the United Nations."

Nevertheless, the officials said Bush remains committed to a timetable so rapid he may ask Congress to authorize military force within weeks. National security adviser Condoleezza Rice said Bush wants lawmakers to approve a resolution before their pre-election recess, which is scheduled for Oct. 4 but could slip a week or more.

"The president thinks it's better to do this sooner rather than later," Rice said on CNN's "Late Edition." "I don't think anyone wants to wait for the 100 percent surety that [Hussein] has a weapon of mass destruction that can reach the United States, because the only time we may be 100 percent sure is when something lands on our territory."

The appearances by Bush's war planners provided a detailed preview of the logic and evidence Bush will use in his address to the U.N. General Assembly in New York on Thursday, the day after the anniversary of the Sept. 11 attacks. Bush also will meet privately this week with leaders of Canada, Portugal, India, Pakistan, Japan and South Africa. As a measure of the hurdles he faces, a poll on the front page of Saturday's Toronto Globe and Mail found that 69 percent of Canadian respondents said the United States bears some responsibility for the attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon because of its policies in the Middle East and around the globe.

Secretary of State Colin L. Powell made clear that Bush will turn many of his skeptics' arguments back at them by emphasizing Hussein's failure to comply with U.N. resolutions in conjunction with the Persian Gulf War ceasefire of 1991, which called for him to destroy his chemical and biological weapons stocks, cease his nuclear program and allow unfettered inspections.

"This is the time to deal with a problem that's been there for years -- violation of international law, violation of the will of the international community," Powell said on "Fox News Sunday." "The United States, often accused of being unilateral, is now bringing the problem back to its original source, the United Nations."

Rice said the U.N. Charter "certainly endorses self-defense." She said the burden of proof is on Hussein, "not on the United States, not on Great Britain."

"The United Nations and Security Council have teeth, and in 1991, they bared those teeth to try to deal with this real threat," Rice said. "There's been plenty of ultimatums. . . . We can't continue to have the kind of defiance of the United Nations, the defiance of the international community, that we've had."

The officials offered clues that Bush does not think a new U.N. resolution is the solution. "Let's be very clear that the absence of resolutions is not the problem," Rice said. "Nobody is going to negotiate anything with this regime."

A Kremlin official said Russian President Vladimir Putin told Bush on Friday that he sees "serious doubts regarding the basis, from the point of view of international law or global policy, for applying force to Iraq." Cheney suggested that the administration views a first strike on Iraq as justified under international law as a matter of self-defense.

"He is, in fact, actively and aggressively seeking to acquire nuclear weapons," Cheney said. "If we have reason to believe someone is preparing an attack against the U.S., has developed that capability, harbors those aspirations, then I think the United States is justified in dealing with that, if necessary, by military force."

A refrain of Bush's critics, on Capitol Hill and abroad, has been that they want to see new evidence of Hussein's weapons developments, and administration officials were cautious not to raise expectations. The dossier that British Prime Minister Tony Blair plans to release, for instance, is said to contain mostly familiar material. "We don't have all the evidence," Cheney said. "We have 10 percent, 20 percent, 30 percent. We don't know how much. We know we have a part of the picture. And that part of the picture tells us that he is, in fact, actively and aggressively seeking to acquire nuclear weapons."

Air Force Gen. Richard B. Myers, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, said on ABC's "This Week" that the U.S. consensus is that Hussein "does not have a nuclear weapon, but he wants one."

None of the officials claimed to have direct proof of a connection between Iraq and Osama bin Laden's al Qaeda terrorist network. "I'm not here today to make a specific allegation that Iraq was somehow responsible for 9/11," Cheney said. "I can't say that." But he said intelligence reports since Sept. 11 have documented "a number of contacts over the years."

Parisoula Lampsos, who said she was Hussein's mistress for 30 years, told ABC News in an interview for "Primetime Thursday" that the Iraqi president met twice with bin Laden and in 1996 gave him money.

Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld said on CBS's "Face the Nation" that the country's task is to "connect the dots before the fact and behave in a way that there won't be books written about why we slept."

Staff writers Karen DeYoung, Glenn Kessler and Bill Miller contributed to this report.