In a desperate move to notch a rare foreign policy victory before Bush leaves office in January, Washington seems to be bending backwards to reach an aid-for-disarmament deal with Pyongyang, experts said.

Key questions on North Korea's secret nuclear weapons network are being set aside in a quest to achieve a legacy for the Bush administration, they said.

"Clearly, there has been a change of US policy in the last year and a half, the previous policy of not engaging with North Korea has not been effective," said Bruce Klingner, a former CIA officer in charge of North Korean affairs.

Klingner, now with the Washington-based Heritage Foundation, said "there does appear to be eagerness on the administration's part to get an agreement that is less than complete."

The declaration does not include an inventory of North Korea's nuclear weapons -- some believe it has at least half a dozen plutonium-based bombs.

It also did not meet Washington's past demands for a full accounting of past uranium enrichment activities or alleged proliferation, the White House acknowledged Thursday.

The Bush administration first took a confrontational posture in dealing with North Korea as part of a doctrine of regime change and pre-emptive military action -- highlighted by the linking of Pyongyang to an "axis-of-evil" with Iran and Saddan Hussein's Iraq, and the subsequent 2003 invasion of Iraq.

The administration then made a 180-degree turn to traditional diplomacy, notably agreeing to engage directly with North Korea dictator Kim Jong-Il's regime while participating in six party nuclear talks involving the United States, China, Japan, the two Koreas and Russia.

Bush even sent Kim an unprecedented personal letter in December last year, raising the possibility of normalized relations if he fully disclosed his nuclear programs before the US leader leaves office in January.

The US leader stressed Thursday that any concessions to North Korea would be based on how it fulfilled its denuclearization promises.

"I'm under no illusions that this is the first step; this isn't the end of the process, this is the beginning of the process," he said of the declaration.

The six-party deal in which North Korea agreed to abandon its nuclear weapons in return for diplomatic, security and aid guarantees also mirrored a denuclearization accord the Clinton administration struck with Pyongyang and which the successor administration dumped.

But the new deal may never see North Korea fully abandon its nuclear weapons, experts warned.

"No one knows how North Korea will behave and no one is sure if the six parties will remain in consensus," said Jon Wolfstal, a nuclear expert at the Washington-based Center of Strategic and International Studies.

Wolfsthal said that if the ultimate goal was to make sure that North Korea had no nuclear weapons and could not produce them, the declaration must cover all nuclear programs, including uranium.

"The only thing we can be sure of is that there will be controversy and confrontation over the verification of North Korea's declaration," he said.

US Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice had said that fully verifying what North Korea has stated in the declaration would be difficult.

"Verifying an agreement with North Korea will be a serious challenge. This is the most secretive and opaque regime in the entire world. Consequently, our intelligence is far from perfect or complete," she acknowledged.

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