Although he has two more weeks before he must report to the Security Council, Hans Blix, the head of the United Nations’ weapons inspection team in Iraq, has already announced that his team has found “no smoking gun.”

It is certain that his team, as constituted at present and with its current work-frame, will not find any smoking gun even after the cows have come home.

Blix’s inspectors have visited a total of 123 sites in nine Iraqi cities over the past two months, an average of two sites a day. The inspectors spent an average of 80 minutes in each site, part of which was spent on filling forms and negotiating with the Iraqis responsible.

Working down a list of 813 sites, established in an agreement between the UN Secretary-General Kofi Annan and Iraqi Deputy Premier Tareq Aziz in 1998, the inspectors, have over 700 more sites to visit. At the current rate, such an operation could take a year to complete. It is almost certain that the sites listed in the agreement are precisely those that Iraq had already sanitized five years ago. If Aziz agreed to open them in 1998 it was because he was sure that they did not contain any smoking gun.

One thing the Iraqis learned from their now defunct Soviet allies is the art of “skriti” or camouflage landscaping to hide sensitive weapons and strategically vulnerable sites. A green and peaceful pasture complete with grazing sheep, flute-playing shepherds, and peasant girls in folkloric dress, could hide an underground weapons factory or missiles depot. A discotheque or a restaurant could be sitting on top of an underground laboratory. (Such sites, containing SS-20 missiles, were uncovered in Central Europe after the fall of the Soviet empire.)

It would be incredible if Saddam Hussein, who loves conspiracy, intrigue and secretiveness, did not use that art with the help of his Soviet allies. At least some of the estimated 18,000 Iraqi military personnel who trained in the Soviet Union between 1972 and 1980 may have specialized in that bizarre art. In September 1980, a squadron of Israeli jets, repainted in Iranian colors, raided the Iraqi nuclear center of Tammuz and left it as a heap of debris. That even alone must have persuaded Saddam to hide his precious assets more carefully.

The story of the UN weapons inspectors in Iraq shows that between 1990 and 1998, when the inspectors left — and not kicked out by Iraq as some claim — merits to be revisited. The inspectors found absolutely nothing that was not indicated to them by the Iraqis themselves. The only times that they did find something that the Iraqis did not want to show was when some Iraqi defectors, including two of Saddam’s sons in law, provided the information.

Richard Butler, a far more aggressive chief inspector than Blix could ever be, came close to smelling the smoking gun on a number of occasions. But even he did not succeed in providing the kind of cast-iron evidence for Iraqi bad faith that some members of the Security Council, notably France, seem to demand. At times Butler found the gun, but there was no smoke. At other times he found the smoke but there was no gun.

Thus Blix resembles the blind man who is sent into a dark room to look for a black hat that isn’t there.

Is there anyway in which a UN inspection can establish whether or not Iraq is still engaged in programs related to weapons of mass destruction? The answer is: yes, theoretically.

The inspectors could be granted access to Iraqi military intelligence headquarters and the key offices of the seven other security services run by President Hussein’s regime. They should get the secret codes and work down endless quantities of data covering two decades. They would then be able to identify the men and women who have been working on the suspected projects and persuade them to talk.

In other words, the full truth about Iraq’s weapons of mass destruction can be known only when and if there is a new regime in Baghdad, willing to cooperate with an inspection mission. The most that Blix can do is to announce that he has not found anything illegal in the agreed sites that he will complete inspecting by the end of the year. For the rest, he would have to use the Arab phrase: Only God knows the truth of things.

Blix may, of course, get a break if a senior Iraqi official or scientist involved in the illegal weapons’ projects decides to spill the beans. This could happen. (There are rumors that Rihab Taha, the wife of Gen. Amer Al-Rashid, who has just been sacked as oil minister, was thinking of talking to the inspectors. Ms. Taha is a biologist and has already been interviewed by the UN inspectors about her role in developing biological weapons.)

But even if one or more individuals decide to talk, it is not at all certain that they would be able to offer anything more than isolated and unrelated pieces of this deadly jigsaw puzzle.

Accounts of weeks of interrogations of Iraqi defectors over the past decade, and the books written by some of them, show how little an individual could know about Saddam’s grand design. Even the late Gen. Hussein Kamel, Saddam’s son-in-law who defected in 1995, was not able to provide the CIA with anything resembling a complete picture of programs that were nominally under his own control.

The Iraqi system is designed in such a way as to make sure that only one person, the leader, has a full picture of anything at any given time. Thus even one or more sensational defections and revelations would be hardly enough to reveal the full truth.

At the same time it would be hard to persuade public opinion, especially in the West, that an attack on Iraq is justified because of one or a few more lies from a system entirely based on deception. It is important to note that Saddam Hussein has never committed himself not to develop, and if needed, use the banned weapons.

The core of the Iraqi debate is simple: can the outside world trust Saddam Hussein not to acquire, and when the time comes not to use, weapons of mass destruction if he can? Those who urge war must show that he cannot be trusted. Those who oppose war must do the opposite: prove that Saddam Hussein can be trusted.

All else is so much hot air. And Blix is at best irrelevant.

Arab News Opinion 10 January 2003