Blix report shows little uncovered
By Deborah Hastings / Associated Press
Sunday, March 16, 2003
UNITED NATIONS -- What has Hans Blix uncovered during more than four months of weapons inspections in Iraq? Not an awful lot, according to his latest report, which nonetheless runs 173 dense pages.
Former U.N. inspectors say it is not surprising. The new experts who arrived in November are far less experienced in the ways of chemical warfare than their predecessors, and they have far less time.
And, like the inspectors who arrived after the 1991 Persian Gulf War, these experts work in the surreal atmosphere of being misled by the Iraqis who are required to help them.
"It took us 4 1/2 years to find they had a biological weapons program," said former inspector Terence Taylor, a retired British Army colonel. "It's ridiculous to think that this can be done in a few months."
A separate document on chemical agents was delivered by Iraq to inspectors on Friday, but its contents haven't been made public. Tomorrow, Blix will present yet another report to the Security Council, this one laying out a work schedule for inspectors in Iraq, which is expected to cover months.
But the United States and its allies, Britain and Spain, think Iraq has been given more than enough time and are threatening war.
With the Security Council deadlocked on whether to authorize military force against Iraq, the findings of the United Nations inspectors are manipulated by all sides.
"We've been down this road before," said Secretary of State Colin Powell, who believes inspections are futile, and told the Security Council so on March 7, after Blix presented his report.
Among other things, Powell cited the report's length as proof that Iraq is violating U.N. Resolution 1441, which requires Iraq to "immediately, unconditionally and actively" disarm itself of all weapons banned after the Gulf War -- most importantly, the vast stockpiles it was believed to have had of chemical and biological weapons including anthrax, mustard gas and the deadly VX nerve agent.
"If it was real disarmament," Powell said, the report "would be thousands and thousands of pages on gas, chemical agents" and the like.
Blix, however, said recently that Iraq's cooperation had moved from reluctant to "proactive" -- albeit largely because of American and British troops massed in the region. When Blix ordered Iraq to begin destroying its Al Samoud 2 missiles by March 1, the Iraqis reluctantly did so.
The Al Samoud 2, however, is a conventional weapon. Former inspectors said such weaponry is not the real problem.
"It's all a charade, as far as I'm concerned," said Richard Spertzel, former head investigator for biochemical weapons under the United Nations Special Committee (UNSCOM), the previous inspection team, who made 40 trips to Iraq before inspectors left the country in 1998.
"So they've agreed to destroy Al Samoud 2 missiles and maybe once every few days they let them talk to a scientist," Spertzel said. "At that rate, maybe in 2103, we'll get Iraq disarmed."
Blix's 12th quarterly report, titled "Unresolved Disarmament Issues" is really a bureaucratic database with more than 1 million entries from unnamed government intelligence, old U.N. inspection reports, and Iraqi government documents, to name a few sources, given to the new inspectors. Blix's report documents the inspectors' efforts to prioritize and then verify the information.
There are about 150 inspectors and staff currently in Iraq. Before the current round of inspections began in November, the country had not been monitored since 1998, when UNSCOM chief weapons inspector Richard Butler, known for candor and controversy, ordered inspectors to leave Iraq without consulting the Security Council.
Butler's aggressive team had fallen apart amid accusations that inspectors were spying for Israel and the United States. That taint, former inspectors said, resulted in many UNSCOM observers not being allowed into Iraq with Blix's new team.
"There is a lack of expertise," said Jonathan Tucker, a former inspector and current senior fellow at the Washington, D.C.-based U.S. Institute of Peace. "Most of the (new) inspectors came from chemical or biochemical technology and had no experience with weapons systems."
The inspectors are not identified to protect their safety and credibility. Tucker said a good friend is on the new team and describes his efforts as "running from one wild goose chase to another because the intelligence they're getting is just terrible."
In at least one case, that intelligence was a lie.
Mohamed ElBaradei, the chief U.N. nuclear inspector, told the council that correspondence purporting to show that Iraq attempted to purchase enriched uranium from Niger was found to be forged.
Tucker called the false documents "an embarrassment," saying the incident "raises the question of who forged the documents" and whether the inspectors are deliberately being fed wrong information.
Neither Blix nor ElBaradei has disclosed the source of the fake documents. Thus far, Blix told the council on March 7 that Iraq has dropped its opposition and allowed spy planes to fly over the country; that interviews with scientists were being conducted, but the process was not without "remaining shortcomings"; and that despite intelligence information about mobile biological weapons and laboratories, no evidence supporting those claims had been found.
Iraq has also opened a pit where it says it dumped stocks of anthrax and VX, along with neutralizing agents, in 1991. Iraq has asked inspectors to analyze soil samples to verify the unilateral destruction.
Blix doubts that will work. "If you pour(ed) some milk into the ground 10 years ago, then analyze the soil ... it might not be so easy to see whether it was one liter or two liters or 100 liters," he told the council.
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