In a letter to the Wall Street Journal today, the French ambassador to the US writes, “Opposing a military intervention in Iraq at a time when U.N. inspections were working and Iraq was not an imminent threat to peace was a decision my country is proud of, one based on principles and shared by many other nations. The behavior of my country and the French diplomatic approach toward Iraq deserve respect, not insults or innuendoes.” Someone at the Journal may want to point the ambassador to this report, which quotes extensively from United Nations inspection reports.
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…. [T]he 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…. Iraq was required to declare the import of dual-use items and supply UNMOVIC with details as to their origin. However, Iraq’s recent semi-annual monitoring declarations, starting with the ‘backlog’ of declarations since 1998 supplied to UNMOVIC in October 2002, showed a trend of withholding pertinent information….The biological imports were of a slightly more significant kind, and included the import of a dozen autoclaves, half a dozen centrifuges and a number of laminar flow cabinets. 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 ‘ocal 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…. There has been a surge of activity in the missile technology field in the past four years….
