[Nasional-e] The inspection trap

[Ambon]

IHT


The inspection trap

  The Washington Post Thursday, September 19, 2002
It's not hard to see why the United Nations secretary-general, Kofi Annan,
warmly congratulated the Bush administration Monday on Iraq's sudden pledge
to accept unconditional UN weapons inspections - and why the administration
hardly considered that development a victory. Without doubt, Saddam
Hussein's regime never would have agreed to new inspections had it not been
for President George W. Bush's forceful address to the General Assembly last
week, and for the support it quickly engendered for the enforcement of the
UN resolutions. But a decade of experience shows that Iraq's nominal
concession is a defensive maneuver, designed to undermine support for any
new U.S. initiative and mire the United Nations in months or years of
fruitless procedures. Fear of just such a quagmire motivated the
administration's initial inclination to take action against Iraq without any
further diplomacy. Yet Bush was right to take his cause to the United
Nations; its support could galvanize a broad coalition to destroy Baghdad's
weapons of mass destruction and replace Saddam Hussein with a stable and
progressive government. The administration must now, with patience and
determined diplomacy, push the Security Council to avoid Iraq's tactical
traps and demand genuine enforcement.
.
It can begin to do so by insisting that the Security Council not repeat the
failures of previous inspection missions. Inspectors worked in Iraq from
1991 to 1998; though they detected and arrested Iraq's nuclear weapons
program, and eliminated large stocks of chemical and biological weapons, the
mission never located all of Iraq's weapons of mass destruction and was
repeatedly blocked in its efforts to do so. That's not just the conclusion
of Bush administration hawks; that's what the inspection mission itself
officially reported to the Security Council. The council itself passed at
least 10 motions condemning Iraqi obstructionism and demanding full
cooperation; all were ignored. Most of the senior members of the inspection
team now say that a new group could never overcome Saddam Hussein's
resistance to disarmament; even their former chief, Rolf Ekeus, who argues
otherwise, advocates backing any new inspections with a military
"implementation force."
.
Such a force, originally proposed by a task force of the Carnegie Endowment,
may or may not be a workable idea - but the principle behind it is vital.
The Security Council cannot simply dispatch the current inspection force,
which was created in 1999 but has never visited Iraq. Accepting its
procedures would mean that even with full Iraqi cooperation - something that
is simply inconceivable - an official determination of whether and how Iraq
is stockpiling weapons of mass destruction could take up to a year. Any plan
for inspections must be accelerated and provided with specific triggers that
allow for enforcement with the first act of Iraqi noncompliance.
Preparations for a possible military campaign, which are under way, should
parallel the UN process so that dilatory action will invite consequences
beyond toothless statements from the Security Council.
.
The messy and difficult debate that was already beginning Tuesday - as
Russia, Germany and other appeasers of Saddam Hussein hurried to endorse his
latest gambit - will probably tempt the administration to return to a
unilateralist course. The urge should be resisted for now, because the Bush
administration will have a much better chance of achieving its ambitious
aims in Iraq if it can build a broad coalition. This may take time, more
time than Bush seems to have built into his brisk march toward action.
Though it almost certainly won't work, devoting several weeks or months to a
last attempt at the peaceful implementation of the Security Council's
resolutions is an intrinsically valuable step if the alternative is a war
that could cost many thousands of lives. If the administration tries with
the United Nations and fails, it will be far closer than it is now to achiev
ing a strong consensus with key allies and the American public on military
action. The president is right in insisting that Iraqi disarmament, not UN
inspections, is the appropriate objective. Now he must do his best to
convince the Security Council.