Isabel Hilton (Guardian Unltd): A tribute to weapons inspectors

[Jack Rabbit]

From the Guardian Unlimited (UK)
Dated Tuesday October 7

A tribute to weapons inspectors
The UN knew full well that no WMD would be found in Iraq
By Isabel Hilton

Even before Robin Cook's revelations that Tony Blair went to war without believing in the threat from Saddam's phantom arsenal, the air had been leaking out of the inflated official claims. No longer was he a dictator with concealed WMD. Instead he had morphed into someone with weapons programmes, and his lethal strategic arsenal was downgraded to the unquantified potential of unidentified battlefield munitions that "military planning" determined could be ready for use in a 45-minute time frame.
But this new formulation still allows for retrograde elasticity: "Military planning" could imply plans that are current, future or obsolete, and we still do not know which battlefield weapons it refers to. But seven months on from the attack on Iraq, it is time to stop and pay tribute to the system that the US administration so energetically derided, determined as it was to apply military solutions to a political problem: the UN weapons inspections process.
Nothing has been discovered in Iraq that was not known to exist as a result of the inspections. With breathtaking disingenuousness, Blair and Bush now deny that they ever gave the impression that Iraq was close to possessing nuclear weapons or the means of delivering them. The weapons for which we went to war, in the most recent versions, were chemical and biological. Now, even they have dematerialised - from actual weapons to a sinister but insubstantial potential.
But Iraq's potential to make chemical weapons was known to the UN as a result of its Unscom inspections in the mid-90s. According to former head of Unscom, Rolf Ekeus, it had "eliminated Iraq's capabilities fundamentally in all areas". They had accounted for and destroyed all but one of Saddam's missiles, his secret biological weapons programme and his chemical weapons programme.

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