Ian Davis, Trevor Findlay: Iraq, who should the public believe?

By Ian Davis and Trevor Findlay
Global Beat Syndicate
(KRT)
LONDON – President Harry Truman once said, "I trust the people because when they know the facts, they do the right thing."
After the January 27 reports to the Security Council by the U.N. inspection and the International Atomic Energy Agency, facts about Iraqi non-compliance with Security Council Resolution 1441 seemed to some to speak for themselves.
The U.S. and British Governments seemed to think so.
U.S. Secretary of State Colin Powell presented his case to the U.N. Security Council Feb. 5, insisting that Iraq’s refusal to disarm still threatens international peace and security and that inspections will prove fruitless due to Saddam Hussein’s game of hide and seek. British Foreign Secretary Jack Straw had earlier declared Iraq in "material breach" of U.N. disarmament demands and concluded that war had become more likely.
But there is another way to look at the evidence – the glass may be half full, rather than half empty. First, Saddam Hussein seems to be hearing the message that "the game is up." And there is more.
The IAEA report says there is no evidence that Iraq is producing nuclear weapons — by far the most destructive of the three categories of nuclear, biological and chemical weapons that are the focus of efforts to disarm Iraq. This is a rather embarrassing finding because the U.S. and British government dossiers published last year made the case that Iraq was indeed developing nuclear weapons. Moreover, if the U.S. news media has it right in reporting that the Bush administration is seriously considering attacking Iraqi underground facilities with nuclear weapons, U.S. moral and legal high ground appears to have been squandered.
Without question, Saddam’s full, final and complete declaration to the U.N. is a sham. Baghdad is obliged to provide full details about past and current activities and if these have been destroyed, by whom, when, how and where. But, importantly, inspections have already clarified some key questions and have a track record of success: more weapons were destroyed by U.N. inspectors between 1991-1998 than during the Gulf War.
Iraq must certainly be more forthcoming about its prohibited weapons programs. But accounting gaps and irregularities are not exclusive to Iraq: in 1988, U.S. authorities discovered several intermediate-range nuclear missile components in a warehouse long after they were required to declare and destroy them under the 1987 INF Treaty.
The report by the IAEA, because it does not fit the established "facts," has been downplayed, and the focus switched first to the U.N. inspection team report by Hans Blix, and the more recent charges leveled by Secretary Powell. Both are more damming toward Iraq. Blix and Powell pointed to a number of outstanding questions regarding Iraq’s past chemical and biological weapons programs, and the fact that Iraq probably retains some of these weapons today is a genuine concern. But most of what has been discovered so far is militarily insignificant.
Much more serious is the Iraqi failure to account for missing quantities of VX nerve agent. In 1998, the U.N. Special Commission on Iraq found evidence that Iraq had weaponized this potent biological weapon. Baghdad later claimed that the 1.5 tons of VX agent was discarded by dumping it on the ground, and despite finding traces of it in January 1999, UNSCOM inspectors were unable to verify that all of the agent was destroyed. However, because VX degrades over time, any stocks Baghdad concealed from UNSCOM are likely to be of little use by now. Similarly, many of the biological weapons that Iraq is said to possess have short shelf lives.
The inspectors have only recently begun receiving the necessary equipment, personnel and intelligence from states to perform inspections at their full capacity (although the U.S. has been parsimonious enough with its intelligence to arouse suspicions that it might want UNMOVIC to fail or to use the information to discredit UNMOVIC later). As Blix himself noted at the end of his report "We now have an inspection apparatus that permits us to send multiple inspection teams every day all over Iraq, by road or by air."
Any deadlines set should be based on the practical realities of conducting inspections, which could take several more months to provide a full picture of Iraq’s past and current NBC capabilities. Diplomatic and political pressure calling for Iraq to provide further cooperation is essential, but military action under the U.N. Charter cannot yet be justified.
The people of the United States and Britain instinctively seem to know this, which may be why our political leaders seem unable to trust us with the facts.