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Politics : Foreign Affairs Discussion Group -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Nadine Carroll who wrote (136294)	6/11/2004 6:32:08 PM
From: carranza2	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 281500

With reference to new information, and what people "now know," Perricos, the acting head of UNMOVIC following Blix, has advised the Security Council that material capable of making WMD has been shipped out of Iraq since the war. The stuff seems to have been plundered and sold. I wonder what Saddam was doing with this kind of material if he didn't have the capacity to make WMD or own any? Probably using the stuff as decorative modern art for his palaces. The NYT has published the story but has surely not given it any emphasis. So what else is new: Equipment and material that could have been used to produce banned weapons and long-range missiles have been emptied from Iraqi sites since the war and shipped abroad, the head of the United Nations inspectors office told the Security Council today. Demetrius Perricos, deputy to the former chief weapons inspector Hans Blix and now the acting executive chairman of the United Nations Monitoring, Verification and Inspection Commission, told a closed-door session of the council that many of the items bear tags placed by United Nations inspectors as suspect "dual use" ones having capabilities for creating harmless consumer products as well as unconventional weapons. Mr. Perricos accompanied his briefing with a report showing satellite photos of a fully built-up missile site near Baghdad in May 2003 and the same site denuded in February 2004. His spokesman, Ewen Buchanan, said that items removed from the site included fermenters, a freeze drier, distillation columns, parts of missiles and a reactor vessel — all tools suitable for making biological or chemical weapons. "It raises the question of what happened to the dual use equipment, where is it now and what is it being used for," Mr. Buchanan said. He said that a fermenter was a good example of a dual use item that was potentially dangerous if it fell into the wrong hands. "You can make all kinds of pharmaceutical and medicinal products with a fermenter," he said. "You can also use it to breed anthrax." Another photo showed an engine from a banned SA-2 surface-to-air missile that had been tagged by the United Nations in Iraq in 1996 and recently discovered in a scrapyard in Rotterdam, the Dutch port. The report said that workers there had told inspectors from UNMOVIC and the International Atomic Energy Agency that as many as 12 such engines may have passed through the yard in January and February 2004 and that additional items made of stainless steel and other corrosion-resistant metal alloys with the inscriptions "Iraq" and "Baghdad" had been observed since November 2003. "This is only a snapshot," said Mr. Buchanan. Two inspectors, he said, acting on information from the Netherlands, went to scrapyards in Jordan this past week and found 20 more such engines in addition to tagged processing equipment such as chemical reactors, heat exchangers and a solid propellent mixing bowl. "The problem for us is that we don't know what may have passed through these yards and other yards elsewhere," he said. "We can't really assess the significance and don't know the full extent of activity that could be going on there or with others of Iraq's neighbors." Inspectors are hoping to check scrapyards in Turkey, he said. Last month, The New York Times reported that large quantities of new reconstruction equipment and sensitive military material was being plundered in Iraq and trucked to Jordan to be sold as scrap. Mohamed El Baradei, director of the International Atomic Energy Agency, warned the Security Council in April that nuclear facilities were unguarded and that large amounts of material, some of it contaminated, were being smuggled out of the country. The United Nations inspectors were removed from Iraq just before the war broke out in March 2003, and, the report says, have been ignored by the American-led Iraq Survey Group that has been searching for arms since then. In the negotiations leading to Tuesday's passage of a Security Council resolution on Iraq, Russia pressed for inclusion in the measure of language promising to reinvigorate the United Nations inspectors, but the final version simply pledged to "revisit" their mandate. nytimes.com

To: Nadine Carroll who wrote (136294)	6/12/2004 10:11:10 AM
From: Mary Cluney	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 281500

Nadine, <<<So the downside potential of leaving things as they were went something like this:>>> I truly think you would be a better fit for GWB as National Security Advisor than Condi Rice. You could make self fulfilling prophacies much more consistent with GWB wishes than Ms. Rice. I think she had to do some gymnastics to fit her views to that of her bosses (GWB, VEEP, Wolfowitz of Arabia, etc). You, on the other hand, could have led the way. If you were right on those issues, we could all say you had great resolve. But what do you call it when you are completely wrong?

To: Nadine Carroll who wrote (136294)	6/12/2004 1:25:52 PM
From: Ilaine	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 281500

OK, I'll bite. Given that so far we've failed to turn up any significant evidence of WMD stockpiles or programs, containment was working. Why stop it? You say it was falling apart. I see no evidence of that. Yes, there was corruption. The war has given greater opportunities for corruption, only about different things. We could have worked harder on stopping corruption before the war. Why didn't we? Russia and France make billions? So what? US has a "major climbdown"? If you don't think we've lost worse in the prestige area, we'll agree to disagree. I assume you're arguing that "all the Arab street respects is force." I worry about what the rest of the world thinks about us more than I worry about "the Arab street." All thought of reform evaporates in the Arab world? You see thought of reform in the Arab world now? I don't. Palestinian suicide bombers funded? I think you're on thin ice here -- plenty of people are already p'o'ed about their perception that the Iraq war was pushed by Zionists for Zionist interests. I don't belive "the jooooos run the world" but I do believe that everybody pushes their own interests. For example, I don't blame Chalabi, Iran, and the Iraqi ex-pats for feeding us false information in order to promote their interests. In their minds, they did the right thing, and if I were in their shoes, I'd agree. I never believed Saddam's propaganda that "500,000 Iraqi babies die every year due to the sanctions." Funny how people who refuse to even consider that the Kuwait baby incubator story had even a kernel of truth swallow that lie without straining. But human nature never changes, that's why we call it human nature. As for terrorism -- that remains to be seen, doesn't it? I suspect we were scarier when they thought we weren't as stupid as we've turned out to be.