MILHOLLIN'S DRIVE:

Why Iraq Will Defeat Arms Inspectors (GARY MILHOLLIN and KELLY MOTZ, September 16, 2002, The New York Times)

Whatever one's stance on how best to handle Saddam Hussein, it is crucial to understand one thing: United Nations inspections, as they are currently constituted, will never work.

There are several reasons for this. Consider the record of the United Nations Special Commission, an agency that was charged with inspecting Iraq's weapons programs from 1991 to 1998. While Unscom did manage to destroy tons of missiles and chemical and biological weapons, it could not complete the job. Iraqi obfuscations prevented it from ever getting a full picture of the entire weapons production effort. The commission's replacement, the United Nations Monitoring, Verification and Inspection Commission, which has not yet been allowed to enter Iraq, will have even less success given its structure and policies.

Mr. Milhollin was on the CBC show As it Happens last night [audio should be available later today] and in the space of about four minutes he just annihilated the idea of these UN inspections ever working. He lays out many of the problems in this editorial, ranging from the requirement that inspectors notify the Iraqis before they can visit a so-called "presidential site" and who's on the inspection team, to their lack of proprietary intelligence and the reluctance of sovereign nations to share precious data with them, to the advances Iraq has made in mobilizing their weapons program, so it can be moved around the country. [Meanwhile, if the report in yesterday's London Daily Mirror is accurate, the presidential sites may not even be included in Iraq's supposedly "unconditional" offer.] There's much more info on Iraq's weapons program at Mr. Milhollin's Iraq Watch website
Posted by Orrin Judd at September 18, 2002 10:00 AM