Aside from a handful of lunatics, everyone in government — both parties, both chambers, both ends of Pennsylvania Avenue — knows that Iraq did not have WMD stockpiles before Bush launched an invasion in 2003. The administration ended its search for the illicit weapons years ago, after officials realized the arsenal that sparked the war didn’t exist.
But that doesn’t mean that the search is over. On the contrary, U.N. inspectors are still around.
More than four years after the fall of Baghdad, the United Nations is spending millions of dollars in Iraqi oil money to continue the hunt for Saddam Hussein’s alleged weapons of mass destruction.
Every weekday, at a secure commercial office building on Manhattan’s East Side, a team of 20 U.N. experts on chemical and biological weapons pores over satellite images of former Iraqi weapons sites. They scour the international news media for stories on Hussein’s deadly arsenal. They consult foreign intelligence agencies on the status of Iraqi weapons. And they maintain a cadre of about 300 weapons experts from 50 countries and prepare them for inspections in Iraq — inspections they will almost certainly never conduct, in search of weapons that few believe exist.
The inspectors acknowledge that their chief task — disarming Iraq — was largely fulfilled long ago. But, they say, their masters at the U.N. Security Council have been unable to agree to either shut down their effort or revise their mandate to make their work more relevant.
That’s right — these experts know that there are no weapons, but they’re stuck. The U.N. is spending millions to finance the work of inspectors who are searching for an imaginary arsenal.
I’m the last guy to bash the United Nations, but this story is a case study in bureaucracy gone horribly awry.
Russia insists that Iraq’s disarmament must be formally confirmed by the inspectors, while the United States vehemently opposes a U.N. role in Iraq, saying coalition inspectors have already done the job.
“I recognize this is unhealthy,” said Dimitri Perricos, a Greek weapons expert who runs the team, known as the U.N. Monitoring, Verification and Inspection Commission (UNMOVIC), and manages its $10 million annual budget. But, he added, “we are not the ones who are holding the purse; the one who is holding the purse is the council.”
The inspectors want the search to stop, but are waiting for the U.N. The U.N. wants the search to stop, but is waiting for Russia. Russia wants the search the search to stop, but is waiting for the inspectors’ final report. Inspectors would finish the final report, but they’re waiting for the Iraq Study Group.
“This is really absurd. We’re approaching five years now of this exercise in futility,” said Feisal Amin al-Istrabadi, Iraq’s deputy permanent representative to the United Nations.
To be sure, the weapons experts believe they could be useful in Iraq, conducting investigations of munitions that actually exist, but that would take a U.N. mandate, which currently seems unlikely.
And so the pointless exercise continues.