It's not hard to see why U.N. Secretary General Kofi Annan warmly congratulated the Bush administration Monday on Iraq's sudden pledge to accept unconditional U.N. weapons inspections -- and why the administration hardly considered that development a victory. Without doubt, Saddam Hussein's regime never would have agreed to new inspections had it not been for President Bush's forceful address to the General Assembly last week, and for the support it quickly engendered for the enforcement of the U.N. resolutions. But a decade of experience shows that Iraq's nominal concession is a defensive maneuver, designed to undermine support for any new U.S. initiative and mire the United Nations in months or years of fruitless procedures. Fear of just such a quagmire motivated the administration's initial inclination to take action against Iraq without any further diplomacy. Yet Mr. Bush was right to take his cause to the United Nations; its support could galvanize a broad coalition to destroy Baghdad's weapons of mass destruction and replace Saddam Hussein with a stable and progressive government. The administration must now, with patience and determined diplomacy, push the Security Council to avoid Iraq's tactical traps and demand genuine enforcement.

It can begin to do so by insisting that the Security Council not repeat the failures of previous inspection missions. Inspectors worked in Iraq from 1991 to 1998; though they detected and arrested Iraq's nuclear weapons program, and eliminated large stocks of chemical and biological weapons, the mission never located all of Iraq's weapons of mass destruction and was repeatedly blocked in its efforts to do so. That's not just the conclusion of Bush administration hawks; that's what the inspection mission itself officially reported to the Security Council. The council itself passed at least 10 motions condemning Iraqi obstructionism and demanding full cooperation; all were ignored. Most of the senior members of the inspection team now say that a new group could never overcome Saddam Hussein's resistance to disarmament; even their former chief, Rolf Ekeus, who argues otherwise, advocates backing any new inspections with a military "implementation force."

Such a force, originally proposed by a task force of the Carnegie Endowment, may or may not be a workable idea -- but the principle behind it is vital. The Security Council cannot simply dispatch the current inspection force, which was created in 1999 but has never visited Iraq. Accepting its procedures would mean that even with full Iraqi cooperation -- something that is simply inconceivable -- an official determination of whether and how Iraq is stockpiling weapons of mass destruction could take up to a year. Any plan for inspections must be accelerated and provided with specific triggers that allow for enforcement with the first act of Iraqi noncompliance. Preparations for a possible military campaign, which are underway, should parallel the U.N. process so that dilatory action will invite consequences beyond toothless statements from the Security Council.

The messy and difficult debate that was already beginning yesterday -- as Russia, Germany and other appeasers of Saddam Hussein hurried to endorse his latest gambit -- will probably tempt the administration to return to a unilateralist course. The urge should be resisted for now, because the Bush administration will have a much better chance of achieving its ambitious aims in Iraq if it can build a broad coalition. This may take time, more time than Mr. Bush seems to have built into his brisk march toward action. Though it almost certainly won't work, devoting several weeks or months to a last attempt at the peaceful implementation of the Security Council's resolutions is an intrinsically valuable step if the alternative is a war that could cost many thousands of lives. If the administration tries with the United Nations and fails, it will be far closer than it is now to achieving a strong consensus with key allies and the American public on military action. The president is right in insisting that Iraqi disarmament, not U.N. inspections, is the appropriate objective. Now he must do his best to convince the Security Council.