WITH THE RELEASE of the Duelfer report on Iraq’s weapons programs, now is a good time to review what role the international inspections had in verifying Iraq’s disarmament–a role Senator Kerry and others appear to have confusion about. The inspection regime established by the U.N. Security Council in the wake of the Gulf War was never about the number of inspections conducted or, for that matter, whether U.N. inspectors could independently determine the status of Iraq’s weapons programs. It was about verifying that Saddam Hussein actively engaged in disarmament, and providing positive evidence of that disarmament to the U.N. team. Given Iraq’s history of successfully hiding its illicit weapons activities in a country the size of California, there could be no certainty that Saddam Hussein had disarmed unless and until Iraq fully cooperated in documenting its disarmament. As Clinton administration Defense Secretary William Cohen put it in November of 1998:
President Clinton stated that “it is incontestable that on the day I left office [in January 2001], there were unaccounted for stocks of biological and chemical weapons [in Iraq].” In fact, Saddam never met his obligation to account for them.
On January 27, 2003, head U.N. weapons inspector, Hans Blix, stated the following to the UN Security Council:
As we know, the twin operation “declare and verify,” which was prescribed in resolution 687 (1991), too often turned into a game of ‘hide and seek’. Rather than just verifying declarations and supporting evidence, the two inspecting organizations found themselves engaged in efforts to map the weapons programmes and to search for evidence through inspections, interviews, seminars, inquiries with suppliers and intelligence organizations.
On February 14, 2003, Blix told the Security Council that:
And again, in its February 28, 2003 report, UNMOVIC informed the Security Council that: “During the period of time covered by the present report, Iraq could have made greater efforts to find any remaining proscribed items or provide credible evidence showing the absence of such items.”
On March 6, 2003, UNMOVIC–confronted with the same list of unaccounted for weapons and weapons-related material that President Clinton had cited in explaining the reason behind his 1998 bombing of Iraq–reported to the Security Council that: “The onus is clearly on Iraq to provide the requisite information or devise other ways in which UNMOVIC can gain confidence that Iraq’s declarations are correct and comprehensive. . . .”
In April, 2003, Secretary Cohen flatly stated that he believed that Saddam had weapons:
And in its first post-war (May 30, 2003) report to the Security Council, UNMOVIC acknowledged: “The long list of proscribed items unaccounted for and as such resulting in unresolved disarmament issues was not shortened either by the inspections or by Iraqi declarations and documentation.” To the contrary, as UNMOVIC also reported in its May 30 report:
Missile imports, however, were more substantial and could have contributed significantly to any missile development programme. One example was the importation of 380 Volga engines that Iraq planned to use in the production of the Al Samoud 2 missile, a missile system UNMOVIC later determined to be prohibited since its range exceeded 150 km. In its declaration of 7 December 2002, Iraq declared that it had imported 131 such engines but failed to supply any information about their origin (suppliers, exporting countries) until inspectors observed 231 such engines at an Al Samoud production facility.
A trend that was especially pronounced in the missile area (but to a lesser extent also present in the biological and chemical fields) was the use of the term “local market” to classify the import of some very sophisticated pieces of equipment. . . . UNMOVIC came to understand that Iraq used the term “local market” when an Iraqi import company imported a commodity and then sold or transferred it to a government facility, which suggested that Iraq was trying to conceal the extent of its import activities and to preserve its importing networks.”
Daniel McKivergan is deputy director of The Project for the New American Century.
