When UN weapons experts begin Wednesday to hunt for clues that President Saddam Hussein’s government has or is developing weapons of mass destruction, they will be heading into previously out-of-bounds territory in a quest to avert a U.S. military attack.
The inspectors, reinforced by a new Security Council resolution, say they finally will have the chance to visit any place in Iraq, including secret military research laboratories and Hussein’s presidential palaces, without giving advance warning to Iraqi officials, a power that eluded their predecessors during seven years of inspections in the 1990s.
In Washington, White House spokesman Ari Fleischer said President Bush “hopes the inspectors will take their responsibilities very seriously, and he knows they will, to find out whether Iraq has indeed disarmed. And the president thinks this is a healthy process.”
If Iraq doesn’t cooperate, Fleischer said, “the president has said he has a policy of zero tolerance, and Saddam Hussein will have to figure out exactly what zero tolerance means.”
Iraq’s government, secretive and immensely nationalist, says it is willing under the resolution to open itself up to foreign officials in ways never before imaginable. If it follows through on promises to cooperate, the government will be required to allow the United Nations inspection teams to walk through some of the country’s most sensitive installations — where not even many Iraqis can go — and permit top scientists to be taken abroad for interviews.
The degree of Iraqi compliance with the new inspection requirements, laid down Nov. 8 in a unanimous resolution, remains to be seen. It also is unknown whether Hussein’s government is telling the truth when it say it no longer has weapons of mass destruction or programs to build them. But Baghdad so far has vowed to abide by the new rules, and several signs point to a response that will be markedly different from the way Iraqi officials handled inspections from 1991 to 1998.
An adviser to the Iraqi leader said Tuesday that “every ministry, every site in the country that the inspectors might want to visit, has received instructions to cooperate fully.”
“This is the first time the government has given this directive,” he said. “They have been told, `Prepare the keys. Prepare the person to accompany the inspectors. Prepare the gates to be opened 24 hours a day.”‘
UN officials said they were told by Iraqi officials that such orders have been issued. One of the inspection leaders, Mohamed ElBaradei, director of the International Atomic Energy Agency, has said the Iraqi government promised to provide the inspectors “full cooperation and full transparency.”
Hans Blix, the chief UN inspector, told the Security Council on Monday that Iraqi officials informed him during his visit to Baghdad last week that, despite the pledge of cooperation, inspections of sensitive laboratories and presidential sites cannot be as routine as those of more mundane sites. But he did not specify what conditions the Iraqi government might impose, and his lieutenants emphasized the promises of cooperation.
“Things look different this time,” said Demetrius Perricos, leader of an 11-member team from the UN Monitoring, Verification and Inspection Commission, Blix’s organization charged with inspecting Iraq’s chemical, biological and missile programs. Inspectors from the IAEA, who will work alongside those from UNMOVIC, will be responsible for nuclear issues.
U.S. officials are skeptical of Iraq’s promises to cooperate, noting that Iraq has failed repeatedly in the past to provide an honest accounting of weapons programs. They also contend that although Iraq may have destroyed much of its production capacity, it also may have secreted small caches of chemical and biological weapons that would be hard to find in a country of 168,000 square miles.
