The Taliban thought President Bush was playing a game of chicken too.
My guess is that Saddam will try to deflect things by letting inspectors in, but will explicitly refuse to meet Bush's conditions.
If so, the result will be to complicate the President's attempts to get support from Dems like Dasshole, and nations like Germany and France.
We've said we'll go it alone if we have to. Backing down from that seems very unlikely, but an even slightly conciliatory statement from Iraq would certainly have the potential to slow us down.