UNSCOM was a failure
I notice that you don't even attempt to back up this ludicrous statement with any documentation. UNSCOM was a huge success, destroying the vast majority of IRaq's bio/chem weapons, and completely eradicating its nuclear program.
Message 18145790
Richard Butler, Chief of the UN Special Commission (UNSCOM), ordered weapons inspectors to leave Baghdad on 16 December 1998.
Correct. Thank you for backing me up, though with your credibility, it isn't much help.
In fact, the inspectors continued to work well after the date you claim they stopped working. Even Richard Butler, who has established his extreme anti-Iraq bias, confirmed this.
<<< As Milan Rai's new book "War Plan Iraq" documents, the US has been undermining disarmament for years. The UN's principal means of persuasion was paragraph 22 of the Security Council's resolution 687, which promised that economic sanctions would be lifted once Iraq ceased to possess weapons of mass destruction. But in April 1994, Warren Christopher, the US Secretary of State, unilaterally withdrew this promise, removing Iraq's main incentive to comply. Three years later his successor, Madeline Albright, insisted that sanctions would not be lifted while Saddam remained in power.
The US government maintains that Saddam Hussein expelled the UN inspectors from Iraq in 1998, but this is not true. On October 30 1998 the US rejected a new UN proposal by again refusing to lift the oil embargo if Iraq disarmed. On the following day, the Iraqi government announced that it would cease to cooperate with the inspectors. In fact it permitted them to continue working, and over the next six weeks they completed around 300 operations. On December 14, Richard Butler, the head of the inspection team, published a curiously contradictory report. The body of the report recorded that over the past month "the majority of the inspections of facilities and sites under the ongoing monitoring system were carried out with Iraq's cooperation", but his well-publicised conclusion was that "no progress" had been made. Russia and China accused Butler of bias. On December 15th, the US ambassador to the UN warned him that his team should leave Iraq for its own safety. Butler pulled out, and on the following day the US started bombing Iraq.
From that point on, Saddam Hussein refused to allow UN inspectors to return. At the end of last year, Jose Bustani, the head of the Organisation for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons, proposed a means of resolving the crisis. His organisation had not been involved in the messy business of 1998, so he offered to send in his own inspectors, and complete the job the UN had almost finished. The US responded by demanding Bustani's dismissal. The other member states agreed to depose him only after the United States threatened to destroy the organisation if he stayed. Now Hans Blix, the head of the new UN inspectorate, may also be feeling the heat. On Tuesday he insisted that he would take his orders only from the security council. On Thursday, after an hour-long meeting with US officials, he agreed with the Americans that there should be no inspections until a new resolution had been approved.
For the past eight years the US, with Britain's help, appears to have been seeking to prevent a resolution of the crisis in Iraq. It is almost as if Iraq has been kept on ice, as a necessary enemy to be warmed up whenever the occasion demands. >>>
zmag.org
Tom |
