Worse Than a Farce: The danger and lunacy of U.N. inspections

National Review, Oct 14, 2002 by Kate O'Beirne

At a committee hearing on the eve of the 9/11 anniversary, Republican congressman Edward Schrock of Virginia paid an unusual tribute when he expressed his gratitude for the witnesses' chilling accounts of Saddam Hussein's arsenal of nuclear, chemical, and biological weapons: On behalf of the members of the House Armed Services Committee, he thanked the former U.N. weapons inspectors for "scaring us to death."

Nor was Schrock, a House freshman, reacting as a nervous newcomer to military realities: He is a retired Navy captain with 24 years' service, including two tours in Vietnam. During a closed-door briefing on the scariest scenarios, and in a scary-enough open session, the veteran experts agreed that if the Iraqi dictator isn't removed from power, he will almost certainly use his weapons of mass destruction to launch a devastating first attack against the U.S. and its friends.

The witnesses were Dr. David A. Kay, who was chief nuclear-weapons inspector in Iraq for the United Nations Special Commission (UNSCOM) immediately following the Gulf War, and Dr. Richard O. Spertzel, who headed up the biological-weapons inspection team until UNSCOM was booted from Iraq in 1998. Their informed case for the ouster of Saddam Hussein rests on their experiences with the severe limitations of the U.N.'s inspection regime, the fecklessness of the inspectors' overseers on the U.N. Security Council, "the gigantic scope and indigenous nature of Saddam's weapons program," and the coercive power wielded by his brutal dictatorship.

"We ought to give that inspection thing one more shot," former president Bill Clinton recently declared on Larry King Live. Others calling for another round of cat-and-mouse with Saddam share Clinton's ignorance of the fundamental nature of the U.N.'s "inspection thing," and ignore the Security Council's record of playing self-serving politics with the commission's mission and methods.

The U.N.'s weapons inspectors were charged with confirming that Saddam was fulfilling his post-Gulf War commitments to disarmament. Having been designed to verify the actions of a cooperating state, the inspection regime wasn't up to the task of catching a duplicitous dictator bent on hiding evidence of prohibited weapons in every nook and cranny of Iraq. Gary Milhollin, director of the Wisconsin Project on Nuclear Arms Control, explains, "It is a different proposition altogether to wander about a country looking for what has been deliberately concealed. That is a task with no end."

Having spent years in Iraq at precisely such an endless task, Dr. Kay says that it would take "tremendous resources, actually . . . resources beyond anything I can imagine," to prevent Saddam from thwarting inspections. The totalitarian Iraqi regime did a far better job of keeping track of the inspectors than the inspectors were able to do of keeping track of weapons. A recent analysis of the 280 inspections of facilities and sites that UNSCOM conducted from 1991 to 1998 found that fewer than a half dozen were surprise visits, catching the Iraqi minders off guard. Kay points out that Saddam has spent 20 years and an estimated $40 billion on a weapons-of-mass-destruction program that involves 40,000 Iraqis. To counter these enormous resources, any effective inspection force would be, in Kay's words, "very much like an occupation."

Furthermore, in their attempts to discover Iraq's deadliest weapons the inspectors actually had to fight a two-front war. The inspection teams were undercut by members of the Security Council eager to make business deals with Iraq, and cited an irresponsible buck-passing attitude of "if it were a serious problem, the U.S. would take care of it." By the time the U.N. capitulated in allowing Saddam to refuse inspectors access to "sensitive sites," Kay claims, UNSCOM had become so emasculated it "had almost become a shielding force for Iraq's weapons- of-mass-destruction development program."

Dr. Spertzel agrees, flatly declaring that in the face of a determined regime like Saddam's, "the inspectors don't have a chance." He points out that it took a full year to set up the biological-inspection system, including an extensive effort to survey every site in Iraq -- including hospitals, labs, and breweries -- that had potential for biological-weapons work. Once 80 sites were identified, monitoring was largely confined to reviewing the semi-annual or monthly reports the sites were required to provide. Given Saddam's long history of deception, the U.N.'s reliance on self-reporting was self-defeating. And the deception has become ever more creative. Spertzel points out that Iraq's use of mobile vans as production facilities would make their detection by monitors "virtually impossible."

Saddam's biological-warfare program began in the early 1970s -- probably, Spertzel notes, within a few months of Iraq's signing the Biological Weapons Convention. Spertzel explains that the biological- weapons program was organized under the intelligence service, and from the beginning had a "terrorist application" (what the Iraqis refer to as "secreted delivery"), along with its regular-military component. He believes that this program is undoubtedly much stronger today than at the time of the Gulf War. The agents in Saddam's biological arsenal that most concern Spertzel are anthrax, tularemia bacteria, and the smallpox virus that Iraq "almost certainly" has. In addition, Spertzel points out, Iraq has been working on weaponizing aflatoxin, a carcinogen whose ten-year trigger rules it out for military use, and cites "pretty doggone good evidence" that it has been used against the Kurds in northern Iraq. He agrees with Dr. Christine Gosden, the British scientist who has documented 250 uses of chemical and biological weapons by Saddam Hussein.