No matter what, Iraq will not disarm
Hans Blix can’t seem to decide whether Iraq truly is disarming itself, whether Saddam Hussein is earnestly shutting down his programs to develop weapons of mass destruction and ballistic missiles.
One day this week, the chief United Nations weapons inspector said he had received some “positive” new elements from Iraq, including a letter from Baghdad informing inspectors that — wonder of wonders — they have found two R-400 aerial bombs containing a liquid “that appears to be biological.”
The next day, Blix said that there has not been either “full cooperation or a breakthrough” with Baghdad, which still has not made a “fundamental decision to disarm” despite United Nations Security Council Resolution 1441 that gave Saddam’s regime “a final opportunity to comply with its disarmament obligations.”
“Is it the right time to close the door?” asked Blix, in remarks published in the German weekly Die Zeit. The chief weapons inspector seemed to suggest Saddam be given at least another few months to get his act together before the U.S. and other willing nations resort to military action against Iraq.
But the only defensible justification for cutting Saddam even another few minutes of slack is if his regime fully, and verifiably, commits itself to disarming. That means acknowledging and destroying whatever forbidden weapons it has in its arsenal and confirming, as well as dismantling, whatever secret programs it has under way to develop weapons of mass destruction and ballistic missiles.
And if Saddam doesn’t know what is expected of his regime, he need only look at South Africa, which voluntarily disarmed itself a decade ago. In 1993, President F.W. de Klerk told the world that Pretoria had secretly built nuclear weapons, but that his government had dismantled them. He invited international weapons inspectors to come to South Africa and substantiate his claims.
The International Atomic Energy Agency took de Klerk up on his offer. And the South African president ordered Waldo Stumpf, chief executive of the state-controlled Atomic Energy Corporation, to be at once forthcoming and cooperative with the 20 or so IAEA inspectors as they traveled about the country checking out nuclear facilities, test sites and uranium stocks.
That’s what the United States and its like-minded allies expect of Iraq: full cooperation with U.N. inspectors so that it can be ascertained — beyond a reasonable doubt — that Saddam’s chemical, biological and nuclear weapons programs have been completely terminated and dismantled.
Iraq has hardly satisfied those conditions of disarmament in the estimation of the Bush administration. Not when Baghdad has undertaken a highly organized concealment effort led by Saddam’s son Qusay, who controls the regime’s Special Security Organization. Not when Baghdad has dumped thousands of pages of obfuscatory documents on the United Nations that offer anything but an “accurate, full and complete” accounting of its past and present arsenal and its programs to develop weapons of mass destruction.
Saddam has had more than enough time to comply with U.N. demands that his regime disarm. He will not take those demands seriously — no matter how many resolutions the Security Council passes — until they actually are backed up by force.
(Joseph Perkins is a columnist for The San Diego Union-Tribune and can be reached at [email protected].)