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COMMENTARY
January 28, 2003
Semantics
Once again the United Nations has produced lots of words with little if any content. Two reports were presented yesterday on Iraqi disarmament. One was from Hans Blix who commands the UNMOVIC on-the-ground inspection effort; the other from Mohamed El Baradei chief nuclear inspector as head of the IAEA in Vienna. The reports were identical in substance (neither contained any interesting or new information) but different in tone. Mr. Blix's report after 60 days of mostly quick and casual spot checks of locations visited by the previous UNSCOM inspection teams (the least likely places to find smoke or fire) was sphinx-like. On the one hand the Iraqis do not have weapons of mass destruction in the places they would be least likely to keep them. On the other they don't say where they do keep them. On the one hand the Iraqis have not put obstacles in the way and with only one exception Mr. Blix's boys have been quickly admitted wherever they went. On the other the Iraqis didn't give them any help. (When individual Iraqis present themselves to the U.N. in Baghdad they are turned over promptly to Saddam's police as we saw in three cases over the weekend.) There was one bad moment when the U.N. team found something it wasn't supposed to find -- owing it now appears to sheer bureaucratic ineptitude on Saddam's side. There was a small cache of chemical shells in a very obvious location. But these were only the 16 latest little "smoking guns". (The last round of inspections yielded 27 000 of them; but then the last round of inspectors were much pushier.) Mr. El-Baradei's report was not sphinx-like but a plea for peace at any price. He had no indications that Iraq had "resumed" its nuclear weapons programme nor any reason to believe that and just wanted infinitely more time. (The IAEA failed to detect a massive Iraqi nuclear programme the last time too.) Paul Wolfowitz the U.S. deputy defence secretary last week openly suggested that the Iraqis have infiltrated UNMOVIC as they did UNSCOM before it. Given the calibre of people Mr. Blix recruited this time -- few with technical qualifications and there were no serious security or background checks -- this wouldn't be unlikely. And Colin Powell the U.S. secretary of state in Davos Switzerland for the World Economic Forum made the Bush administration's contempt for the U.N.'s inspection operation very clear. But as a well-placed administration source speaking quite off the record told me even to complain about the standards of Messrs. Blix and El Baradei is to be led off topic: "The point of Resolution 1441 was Saddam will disarm now. It was not to play pin-the-tail-on-the-donkey. Saddam had 30 days to announce where his ugly weapons were and Blix was going to check this and monitor their destruction. We already played hide-and-seek with Saddam we already played Charades Password Smoking Gun and I'm-a-Little-Teapot for seven years. The U.N. agreed that in return for our patience we weren't going to play any of those games any more only Disarmament. But from Day One Blix's instructions were to resume the old games. And now with the time expired he goes before the Security Council to say what? To say 'I'm a little teapot short and stout'." The imposture in this is not subtle. When the U.N. inspectors were thrown out of Iraq in 1998 they had documented and only partially destroyed very large inventories of chemical and biological weaponry and delivery systems. These were all tagged and documented. What happened to them at the least? Here is what we're being asked to believe: After throwing out the UNSCOM inspectors and with no other external pressure Saddam Hussein suddenly decided out of pure benevolence to get rid of all his many programmes in "WMD". The people who did this for him destroyed all the documentation so that not one piece of paper not one photograph of this massive disarmament operation could be produced from the entire Iraqi bureaucracy in support of the claim. Nor for some reason is a single living witness available to describe what he saw five years ago. Again yesterday Mr. Blix told the Security Council that he is obliged to give Saddam the benefit of the doubt -- even though information in his own files on e.g. the weaponization of the VX nerve agent anthrax production and long-range Scuds would tend to contradict these Iraqi claims. He says this with a straight face and with Kofi Annan the French the Germans and sundry other peace-loving authorities backing him up. If a six-year-old child believes this that child has a learning disability. The Bush White House and indeed the Rumsfeld Pentagon may have reasons to delay the disarmament i.e. invasion of Iraq which have nothing to do with any of the above. Behind the public scenes there is chaos in orchestrating post-Saddam governing arrangements as rival Iraqi opposition parties assuming the U.S. will take out Saddam concentrate on damaging one another. There are also logistical bottlenecks and complications of which the chief one appears to be getting the back-up production of ordnance flowing smoothly. The Pentagon is still undoing damage from cumulative budget cuts in the last administration. This has been given to me as the single biggest reason an earlier invasion of Iraq was not considered. And the Turks in particular are causing all kinds of anxiety owing to their petty horsetrading over special forces deployments that can't wait. (The new elected moderately Islamic government of Turkey is desperately inexperienced and does not seem able to grasp the potentially serious consequences of their endless stream of requests and conditions. They assure the Bush administration that they will be onside come the big day but seem to think complex U.S. deployments of aircraft troops and equipment can wait until the last ten minutes before the strike.) This means that the farce at the U.N. is almost welcome to a Bush administration seeking a few more weeks to prepare. I provide the above excuses because they are what I have been told. They don't strike me as credible. To my view the time for President Bush to call the U.N. bluff is now. Any further delay carries huge costs to U.S. credibility in return for diplomatic gains that will be illusory or transient. But I shall leave the President to speak for himself this evening. David Warren
© Ottawa Citizen
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