 Saddam's weapons dossier raises doubts
United Nations — Saddam Hussein has tried to stop the ticking clock on his regime’s survival by providing the UN and international weapons inspectors with an exhaustive telephone book type list detailing his presumably past programs of mass destruction — which of course he claims not to have. Yet the whole point of the 12,000 page tome was saying there really is nothing, but since you want paper, I’ll give you a blizzard of facts and fantasy for your holiday reading.
At issue of course remains whether Baghdad’s declaration is genuine — or complete. Naturally the Iraqis feel that with such a formidable document, people will be dazzled and dumb-founded by the sheer size.
Saddam’s motto must be “ If you can’t convince them, confuse them.”
The documents have all the veracity of a plagiarized college term paper — one of those suspiciously long and well presented papers which just don’t seem right, given the previous performance and record of the student. The logic was that if Saddam no longer has any weapons and says well, we have nothing but I can’t give you a blank document. So Iraq then presents something so overwhelming and complicated that it causes enough confusion to buy time and perhaps sow division among Council members.
The UN Security Council saw feathers fly after the U.S. gained early access to the material. The episode was genuinely the grist of a diplomatic caper. Originally the dossier after being flown from Baghdad to Cyprus and then Frankfurt, arrived at UN HQ in New York Sunday evening into the hands of Chief Arms Inspector Hans Blix. The material was supposed to first be analyzed and later distributed to members of the Security Council.
Well Washington through a bit of should we say friendly persuasion got its hands on the cache first, through the assistance of the Colombian Ambassador who is this month’s president of the Council, and the tacit acquiescence of Blix, whisked one of two copies off to Washington late Sunday night, and later then distributed the photocopied tomes and CD-Roms to the other four permanent of the Council-China, France, Russia and the United Kingdom.
Part of the problem rests with the dossier lengthy information concerning nuclear matters—information which was presented to the Councils other permanent members which happen to be declared nuclear power and who quite frankly have the technical and scientific expertise to analyze the data presented. The ten other non-permanent members of the Council would, previous arrangement, later receive a “sanitized version” of the dossier nuclear information. Still many members, such as Syria, were not amused.
UN Secretary General Kofi Annan, was outraged, and privately said to be furious.
American UN Ambassador John Negroponte later advised, “This is not a question of asserting some special privilege…it’s more a question of drawing on the expertise of declared nuclear weapons states” which could in effect expedite the analysis of the enormous declaration. In fact the nuclear-related sections of the declaration alone contained 2,400 pages.
The Russians backed him up; “the sole purpose of the exercise, is to make sure that non-proliferation treaties are respected. Nothing else is behind the process,” added Amb. Sergey Lavrov.
By presenting the dossier and keeping to Security Council timetables, Baghdad is not yet in “material breach” of the tough resolution.
Yet sources indicate there’s really little new data, a possibly quite a lot of disinformation. It not so much what Baghdad says, but what they don’t say. Saddam’s sins of omission in other words. Vital intelligence for the UN weapons inspections now roving round Iraq, a country the size of California, will not likely be found in Saddam’s latest declaration.
John J. Metzler is a U.N. correspondent covering diplomatic and defense
issues. He writes weekly for World Tribune.com.
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