(CBS) The Iraqi government, denying it has weapons of mass destruction, delivered to the United Nations on Saturday its long-awaited declaration on chemical, biological and nuclear programs. At the same moment, President Saddam Hussein issued an apology to the Kuwaiti people for invading their country in 1990.

The dramatic, fast-paced events on a Saturday evening in Baghdad were clearly designed as a bid by the Iraqi leadership to extricate this nation from the chain of war and sanctions that has ostracized it from most of the world for more than a decade.

Iraqi government vehicles bearing a half-dozen boxes and bags holding the arms documents entered the U.N. compound on Baghdad's outskirts about 8 p.m. local time, and officials unloaded the material for the handover at a private meeting with U.N. officials inside.

The filing of the more than 12,000 pages of technical detail, required under a U.N. resolution by this weekend, now shifts the Iraq crisis into a new stage, as Washington and Baghdad move step by step toward a crossroads between war and peace.

In his weekly radio address Saturday, President Bush made plain his skepticism about Iraq's weapons inventory. "Thus far we are not seeing the fundamental shift in practice and attitude that the world is demanding," Mr. Bush said in remarks taped Friday.

As the documents were being transferred, the Iraqi information minister appeared on national television to read the historic letter from Saddam to the people of Kuwait, more than 12 years after his army invaded their country, at the start of a seven-month occupation that ended only when a huge U.S.-led coalition drove the Iraqis out in February 1991.

"We apologize to God about any act that has angered him in the past and that was held against us, and we apologize to you (the Kuwaitis) on the same basis," wrote Saddam, Iraq's president for 23 years.

But he also assailed Kuwait's leaders, saying they were working "with foreigners" to attack Iraq, and he referred to Kuwait, where thousands of U.S. troops have been based since the 1991 war, as being under American occupation.

Lawrence Korb of the Council on Foreign Relations told CBS News, Radio that Saddam is trying to "get as much support in the Arab world as he can" and "prevent Kuwait from being used as a base to launch any attacks on Iraq."

CBS News Middle East consultant Fouad Ajami says in Kuawait, Saddam's apology is likely to be "laughed off and dismissed, as it should be, as a desperate act of a man who is now really under the gun."

Earlier in the day, Lt. Gen. Hossam Mohammed Amin, the official who oversaw the preparation of the arms declaration, said it "will answer all the questions which have been addressed during the last months and years."

Amin also said it would name companies and countries that helped Iraq develop weapons of mass destruction in the past, information that could help in prosecutions under other nations' export-control laws.

And that, says CBS News correspondent Mark Phillips, means the document is loaded with potential embarrassment for governments and companies around the world.

As for now, "I reiterate here Iraq has no weapons of mass destruction," Amin told reporters. "I think if the United States has the minimum level of fairness and braveness, it should accept the report and say this is the truth."

The huge declaration was to be flown out Sunday on a U.N. plane, to reach U.N. headquarters in New York and the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) in Vienna late in the day.

Iraqi officials had displayed the documents Saturday afternoon to the international media, including bound copies of volumes devoted separately to nuclear, chemical, biological and missile activities, titled "Currently Accurate, Full and Complete Declarations."

The mass of paper, in red and blue covers, was accompanied by computer disks, presumably with added information.

Under the Security Council resolution calling for the report, teams from the U.N. Monitoring, Verification and Inspection Commission and the U.N. nuclear watchdog resumed inspections Nov. 27 after a four-year interruption.

On Saturday, the inspectors visited two sites south of Baghdad previously inspected in the 1990s - an industrial plant that in the 1980s helped make medium-range missiles now forbidden to Iraq by the United Nations, and a site associated with Iraq's major nuclear research center.

As usual, the U.N. inspection agency offered no immediate information about the visits.

Iraq's report on past weapons programs and industrial activity will take U.N. experts weeks to analyze and inspectors months to verify inside Iraq.

What's more, U.N. officials said weeding out data that might help others produce chemical, biological or nuclear weapons will further delay handover of material to the Security Council's 15 member nations.

"No member will get it on Monday," chief U.N. weapons inspector Hans Blix told reporters in New York on Friday.

Former arms inspector Tim Travan tells CBS News the sheer size of the declaration is in itself a delaying tactic of sorts by Saddam: "He will be deliberately swamping the inspectors with a vast amount of data so that they take awhile to review it which will, in his estimation, push back the discussion of this in the Security Council.

The Bush administration says it's sure Iraq still harbors banned arms, despite its repeated denials - including the one in the declaration. If Iraq doesn't disarm, U.S. officials say, they will seek Security Council sanction for military action against Iraq. Failing that, they say, Washington would initiate an attack.

U.S. officials have not presented conclusive evidence Iraq has banned weapons. The White House said Thursday that "solid evidence" would be turned over to U.N. inspectors, without elaborating.

"We would like to have as much information from any member state as evidence that (Iraq) may have weapons of mass destruction," Blix said.

The Bush administration has told U.N. inspectors it will not provide them with intelligence information on suspected weapons sites in Iraq, as agreed in the U.N. resolution on inspections and pledged by Mr. Bush, until after it examines the weapons declaration from Baghdad, one of the two senior inspectors is quoted as saying, in The Washington Post's Saturday editions.
The comments by Mohamed El Baradei, director general of the International Atomic Energy Agency, reflected growing tension between the inspectors, along with some other members of the council, and the U.S. as inspections have begun and visible U.S. preparations for war continue, the Post explains.

Both El Baradei and Blix have expressed consternation over the rising volume of administration insistence that it has firm evidence that Iraq is lying when it says it has no weapons of mass destruction, while refusing to share any evidence with the inspectors it has sent to verify Iraq's assertions, the Post points out.

The United States on Friday offered to protect Iraqi scientists who cooperate with international weapons inspectors searching for hidden arms.

The Security Council resolution under which weapons inspectors are working allows them to solicit information from Iraqi scientists without Iraqi officials being present.

The Security Council resolution adopted Nov. 8 required Iraq to file by Sunday an "accurate, full, and complete declaration" of all weapons programs. Iraq also was required to report on "all other chemical, biological, and nuclear programs," even if not weapon-related.

In the 1990s, after Iraq's defeat in the Gulf War, U.N. inspectors destroyed many tons of Iraq's weapons of mass destruction and dismantled its program to try to build nuclear bombs. But the monitoring collapsed amid U.N.-Iraqi disputes, and the inspectors suspect they may have missed some chemical and biological weapons.

The inspectors hope the Iraqis at least will help them answer open questions by, for example, supplying convincing documentation on the fate of 550 artillery shells filled with poisonous mustard gas. Iraqi and U.N. accounts contain many such discrepancies from the 1990s.

Iraqi lies, under the inspections resolution unanimously passed by the U.N. Security Council last month, might then be declared a "material breach" of council demands and provide justification for the use of U.S. military force to topple Iraqi President Saddam Hussein.

If Iraq eventually is found to have cooperated fully with the inspectors, U.N. resolutions call for the Security Council to consider lifting economic sanctions imposed on Iraq after it invaded Kuwait in 1990.