With his call for Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein to “immediately and unconditionally forswear, disclose and remove or destroy all weapons of mass destruction,” President Bush on Thursday raised the specter of a new round of United Nations inspections inside Iraq.
But even if Hussein complies, those who have directed past UN searches for evidence of Iraqi nuclear, chemical and biological weapons raise serious doubts about whether such inspections are workable.
Hussein has a record of obstructing inspectors and hiding weapons material in such out-of-the-way sites as chicken farms and prisons, former inspectors note. Even the United States’ sophisticated imaging technology, they say, is no match for a dictator who has an entire country in which to hide his arsenal.
“You’re sending a farm team up against a World Series contender in deception, denial and concealment efforts,” said David Kay, who led some of the first inspections into Iraq in the early 1990s. “Iraq has been terminating inspections, concealing and harassing all the years of inspections.”
UN teams scoured the country for Iraqi missiles and weapons of mass destruction from 1991 to 1998, when Hussein halted them. During that seven-year span, the searches were marked by repeated attempts by Iraqi officials to block access to weapons facilities, offices and labs and to conceal and destroy evidence, according to those who took part.
New inspection force
The notion of renewed inspections has gathered significant momentum recently among those in the United States and abroad who are trying to stave off a U.S.-led invasion of Iraq. The United Nations has a new inspection force–the UN Monitoring, Verification and Inspection Commission–which is ready to go into Iraq if Hussein agrees.
The Iraqi leader, who is well-practiced at stopping and starting inspections, has signaled recently that he would refuse new inspections and that he would consider them.
Some administration officials, including Vice President Dick Cheney, have suggested that inspections would be pointless, but the administration has recently softened its stance in the face of international criticism. Secretary of State Colin Powell called inspections a first step in dealing with Hussein, and Bush’s speech Thursday appeared to open the door to a last-ditch effort to make them work.
But former inspectors say previous searches failed to seriously impede Hussein.
Chemical and biological weapons ingredients remain well-concealed in Iraq, they say, and Iraq never stopped pursuing the means to make nuclear, chemical and biological weapons.
After Hussein’s son-in-law, Kamel Hassan, defected to Jordan in 1995, he pointed inspectors to 150 crates of weapons program documents concealed at a chicken farm. In the months that followed, UN teams exposed a number of previously unknown facilities where they believe weapons were made.
Iraq halted the last series of inspections after a UN team tried to gain access to Abu Ghraib prison, 25 miles west of Baghdad. Some inspectors believed the prison held important documents and possibly evidence that Iraqi scientists had used political prisoners to experiment with biological and chemical weapons.
When inspections were stopped, the UN teams were pursuing a variety of leads, including Iraq’s purchase of Russian fermentation equipment, the discovery of human-size testing chambers at a former biological research lab called Salman Pak, and the location of dozens of R-400 aerial bombs that are believed to contain the toxic agent botulinum.
Retracing steps
Adding to the challenge, a new inspection force would have to start by examining all the previously known sites and comparing records of past inspections with the facilities as they exist today. That would include Salman Pak and the works at Tuwaitha, a former nuclear facility that still contains 1.8 tons of low-enriched uranium and additional stocks of natural and depleted uranium.
Meanwhile, just a third of the staff of the new inspection commission has experience in Iraq, which could be a serious handicap given the sprawling nature of Hussein’s weapons complex. The initial work to re-create a “baseline” of Iraq’s previously known weapons sites may take a year, and that would cover only sites that Iraq has declared or previous inspections have uncovered.
“You’ve got to look at about 1,400 facilities–this is all the WMD facilities you knew about in 1998–and that’s square one,” Kay said, referring to weapons of mass destruction. “But you’ve then got to figure what they did at other places that you didn’t know about in 1998.”
But supporters of inspections note that UN teams managed to uncover and destroy large amounts of Iraqi weapons during the seven years they were allowed in the country.
Figures released by the UN Special Commission on Iraq report the destruction of material that includes 48 Scud missiles, 40,000 chemical munitions, 690 tons of chemical agents, 3,000 tons of chemical precursors and a range of biological factories and equipment. Early inspections by UN nuclear teams led to the discovery of Iraq’s covert atomic weapons program and the destruction of uranium enrichment equipment.
“With sufficient human and technological resources, time and political support, inspections can reduce Iraq’s WMD threat, if not to zero, to a negligible level,” said a recent report by the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace.
Proponents of inspections also argue that recent intelligence, as well as improved satellite imagery, would give new inspection teams unprecedented advantages.
Military backup urged
The international calls for renewed inspections have focused specifically on a proposal to back up the searches with the threat of force. French President Jacques Chirac, after speaking to Bush last weekend, floated the idea of giving Iraq three weeks to decide whether it will cooperate with new inspections, with the threat of an invasion if it does not.
The idea, spelled out in the Carnegie report, calls for the UN Security Council to approve a force that would be poised to enter Iraq and support inspection teams if needed. It also would require Hussein to agree to surprise inspections and to allow the teams unfettered access to Iraqi facilities.
“I think it’s realistic when you look at it in the light that it’s short of an all-out war and possibly the last option available,” said Stephen Baker, a retired Navy rear admiral, senior fellow at the Center for Defense Intelligence Information and a member of the Carnegie panel that compiled the report.
But Richard Spertzel, who headed a team of UN inspectors that searched for biological weapons, said the coercive inspection plan is flawed. Experience, he said, shows that the Security Council’s resolve buckled under pressure from countries that trade with Iraq, particularly Russia and France, during the inspections.
“A number of the countries that are pushing the rest to go back to inspections as an alternative [to invasion] are the ones that were part of the problem,” Spertzel said. “If you can’t have absolute, total support by the Security Council, with some teeth if Iraq doesn’t do what they’re supposed to do, you don’t have a chance.”
