Washington ? Secretary of State Colin Powell said on Sunday that the Bush administration wants the return of weapons inspectors to Iraq to be the “first step” toward solving the crisis over the military threat posed by Saddam Hussein.

Powell’s comments to the British Broadcasting Corp. appear to contradict statements by Vice President Dick Cheney, who last week rejected the possibility of restarting U.N. weapons inspections in Iraq and called instead for a U.S. military strike.

White House spokesman Scott McClellan Sunday downplayed Powell’s apparent contradiction of Cheney. As President Bush prepared to return to Washington after a vacation in Texas, McClellan said Powell’s comments echoed the administration’s call for “unfettered” inspections of Iraq’s weapons of mass destruction. “It’s what we’ve been saying all along,” McClellan said.

But McClellan added that inspections alone may not be enough. “Inspections are no guarantee if at the same time the regime in Iraq continues to try to hide weapons of mass destruction,” McClellan said. He added that the burden is on Iraq to prove it’s not amassing such weapons.

The dueling remarks, however, fueled a fresh round of criticism that the Bush team isn’t speaking with a unified voice on Iraq and has done a poor job of selling its military plans to allies and the U.S. public.

“There is a disconnect here and I don’t understand it,” said Lawrence Eagleburger, who served as secretary of state under the first President Bush, on NBC’s Meet the Press.

Richard Holbrooke, the U.S. ambassador to the United Nations under President Clinton, agreed. “Instead of making the case unambiguously with a single group of people singing from the same song sheet, they’re singing at least, at a minimum, different lyrics to the same music, and they’re undermining their case,” Holbrooke told Fox News Sunday.

No one in the administration, including Powell, argues that Saddam isn’t a menace; that Iraq, the Middle East and the world would not be better off without him; or that diplomacy alone can defuse the problem. But Bush’s top aides are sharply split over just how immediate the Iraqi threat is and how quickly Saddam must be eliminated.

Cheney, Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld and National Security Advisor Condoleezza Rice argue that because Saddam already has stocks of chemical and biological weapons, he could give them to al-Qaida or another terrorist group at any time.

Powell, top CIA officials and many of the nation’s uniformed military leaders, however, say there’s no reason to rush to war, especially with U.S. forces still tied down in Afghanistan, many of America’ s allies unwilling to participate, and Iraqi dissidents divided and unprepared to fight.