IRAQ/WEAPONS INSPECTIONS page 2 of 2 < < Previous 1 | 2
U.S. and British officials fret that under the current system, Saddam could string inspectors along for some time, making a false show of compliance while diluting the world's will to take him on. Blix says unmovic will need at least a year to complete a full accounting of Iraq's inventory. According to the International Atomic Energy Agency (iaea), the inspectors will present a "work plan" to the Security Council within 50 days of arriving. Any serious assessment is a year off, however. The U.S. and Britain want to stack the deck for exposing Saddam in noncompliance by giving inspectors explicit authority to conduct "anytime, anywhere" searches. British diplomats are pushing the Security Council to rip up the old rules that allowed Iraq to designate "presidential sites" off limits and required inspectors to give Iraq 24 hours' notice before carrying out certain inspections. Says a London official: "We need to make it clear that this is tougher than [previous investigations], more intrusive, more likely to get results."
But is it? Even if inspectors return to Iraq with expanded powers, can they document, uncover and dismantle Saddam's full arsenal more completely than their predecessors? (From 1991 to 1998, monitors found hundreds of tons of chemical agents, dismantled more than 800 Scud missiles and wiped out Saddam's budding nuclear program, but they didn't come close to uncovering everything.) The U.S. has even less confidence in inspections after a hiatus: Saddam has had the past four years to hone his concealment skills. In eight years of efforts to uncover Iraq's stockpiles, "we taught them what we could find, and they learned how to conceal, deceive and deny," says David Kay, former chief nuclear inspector and an outspoken critic of the effort. The Iraqi weapons program now "is a lot smaller but a lot harder for us to ever have detailed knowledge of."
Some items on the inspectors' checklist — like suspected nuclear workshops and long-range ballistic missiles that require large stationary facilities — are relatively easy to spot. The man charged with finding them, iaea chief inspector Jacques Baute, said last week his nuclear-inspections team is equipped to uncover any bombs: "If you have the right people and use the right techniques, your probability of catching the offender is high." Since 1998, the iaea has been analyzing satellite photos for signs that Saddam is pursuing nukes. Last month those photos produced images of new buildings going up at a former Iraqi weapons plant that the iaea wants to explore. These experts will wield new high-tech tools — a gamma-spectroscopy monitor known as the Ranger, which is used to detect radiation, and a bright yellow device, known as Alex, that can pick out metals used for nuclear purposes.
But chemical and biological weapons and the labs used to produce them are devilish to pinpoint. "They can be smaller and dual use," says Gary Samore, a weapons expert at London's International Institute for Strategic Studies. "Any food-processing facility could be used for processing biological agents." Defectors have told Western officials that Saddam loads bioweapons into sealed wells drilled 60 ft. deep across the rural landscape and stocks chemical components in residential basements and palace bunkers. Labs for cooking up new toxins and germs are mounted on specially converted commercial trucks that cruise Iraqi highways to foil pursuers. "His weapons-of-mass-destruction capabilities are mobile," Rumsfeld said last week. "They can be hidden from inspectors no matter how intrusive." Hardest of all to get rid of are the notebooks and computer hard drives filled with biochem recipes and nuclear designs that Saddam's scientists have compiled over the years. Even if all of Saddam's germ factories and the weapons made in them were eradicated, he would still possess the knowledge needed to rebuild after he "disarmed."
So what can inspections actually accomplish? In the White House's view, they won't help disarm Iraq. Bush says only a regime change can eliminate the threat posed by Iraq's weapons of mass destruction, which means inspections are just a politically necessary warm-up for the main event. Bui*At the countries that forced Bush to try inspections first could see things very differently. They could well be pleased if the process somehow takes the air out of the American case for war. That means the argument Colin Powell won on that day back in August — that going to the U.N. will build support for U.S. policy without limiting Bush's options — could turn out to be dead wrong. |
