UNMOVIC Comes Clean on Saddam’s WMD and It’s Worried

For some of us, Iraq’s possession of WMD was axiomatic. Saddam had it and used it in the late 1980s (Halabja and Iran) and early 1990s (southern Iraq after the aborted Shi’ite uprising). It was there in the mid-1990s; UN inspectors found it. It was there in the late 1990s; UN inspectors said so. There was no evidence that he had gotten rid of it. Deductive reasoning said it must still be there. For others, deduction ran the other way: If you can’t find it, it must not be there.

For some of us, Iraq’s possession of WMD was axiomatic. Saddam had it and used it in the late 1980s (Halabja and Iran) and early 1990s (southern Iraq after the aborted Shi’ite uprising). It was there in the mid-1990s; UN inspectors found it. It was there in the late 1990s; UN inspectors said so. There was no evidence that he had gotten rid of it. Deductive reasoning said it must still be there. For others, deduction ran the other way: If you can’t find it, it must not be there.

On June 9th, the UN Monitoring, Verification and Inspection Commission briefed the Security Council about the export of Iraqi WMD, missile and nuclear components shipped out of Iraq before, during and after the invasion. As reported by MENL news service, UNMOVIC acting executive chairman Demetrius Perricos told the Council, “The removal of these materials from Iraq raises concerns with regard to proliferation risks,” and said inspectors found Iraqi WMD and missile components shipped abroad that still contained UN inspection tags.

The World Tribune reported on Perricos’s briefing. “He said the Iraqi facilities were dismantled and sent both to Europe and around the Middle East at the rate of about 1,000 tons of metal a month… The Baghdad missile site contained a range of WMD and dual-use components, UN officials said. They included missile components, reactor vessel and fermenters … required for the production of chemical and biological warheads. ‘It raises the question of what happened to the dual-use equipment, where is it now and what is it being used for,’ Perricos’s spokesman, said. ‘You can make all kinds of pharmaceutical and medicinal products with a fermenter. You can also use it to breed anthrax.'”

Anthrax? Reactor vessels? Now they tell us?

Not exactly. The question was never what the world knew. The UN apparat, along with all of the world’s major intelligence services, knew the chief threat Saddam posed was in nonconventional capabilities that threatened the world, either by Iraq’s further use or by export to other countries or non-state actors. The question was, rather, what the world was willing to do about what it knew. The answer, wrapped partly in the vast corruption of the oil-for-food program and partly in fear of a terrorist backlash, was “nothing.”

The ability of the UN as an institution, and the French, Russian and German governments and their cronies to rake in illicit millions of dollars from oil-for-food contract kickbacks across the misery of Iraq’s weakest citizens required a continual program of ineffectual inspections – perpetually seeking and never finding the WMD/nuclear components.

That’s the dirty secret; that’s why they would NEVER have gone to war against Saddam and why the French double-crossed us on Res. 1441 and why they hate President Bush and resent the liberation of Iraq. It is OUR war because THEY didn’t want their cozy scheme to end.

But it did end. Oil-for-food is over and the UN’s own Mr. Perricos has blown the cover.