It is hardly surprising that Washington has welcomed the UN Security Council’s decision to wind up its UNMOVIC Iraqi WMD inspectorate. The Bush administration will no longer be haunted by the inspectors’ quiet insistence that they could find no evidence of the WMD programs that the president used to justify the 2003 invasion and the toppling of Saddam Hussein. Now the White House can carry on with the work in progress of trying to bury the shameful lies that have plunged Iraq into bloody chaos. UNMOVIC teams pulled out of Iraq shortly before the US invasion. The UN inspection effort, first as UNSCOM with which Saddam broke off cooperation in 1998 and then as UNMOVIC which re-started work in Iraq four years later, was always widely acknowledged to have been thorough and businesslike. Under its chief weapons inspector Hans Blix UNMOVIC maintained a regime of spot searches throughout Iraq, all of which threw up no evidence that Saddam had maintained any of his earlier WMD program. Nevertheless Blix was not prepared to say that he could yet verify completely that no such programs existed. As the war clouds gathered, he requested more time to complete his work. Washington could not afford to let him have that space, because we know now that it would have exposed the only grounds on which Bush could justify what was actually illegal regime change. In the final weeks, the Baathist regime abandoned their long-standing reluctant compliance within UNMOVIC requests and offered to facilitate an accelerated inspection process. But by then it was too late. What may well have been Saddam’s conceited pretence that he still did have some WMD capacity somewhere had played directly into Bush’s hands.
After the invasion, while the country still lay shattered and shaken by the military onslaught, the US-led Iraq Survey Group (ISG) began its own WMD search, going absolutely wherever it wanted. Early pictures of its investigators in chemical suits standing beside piles of suspicious drums suggested the ISG has succeeded where UNMOVIC had failed. In the event however, despite their huge advantages, the ISG was never able to produce a shred of evidence to justify the WMD revelations the Bush administration had used to justify the invasion. The only semblance of WMDs discovered were in old Howitzer shells filled with Sarin whose lethality had long-ago expired — the remnant of chemical weapons whose precursors were supplied to Saddam by US and European companies during Iraq’s war with Iran in the 80s. The US policy on the transfer of these WMD precursors at the time was “don’t ask, don’t tell.”
This week, only the Russians were unhappy about UNMOVIC’s end, but they contented themselves with abstaining in the Security Council vote. Their objections also appeared to be merely technical: They complained that a proper record of the fate of several dozen Iraqi missiles was not available. UNMOVIC ceased to exist immediately, though its website with most but not all the damning documents contradicting the Bush White House lies, is still live. In truth its investigators have had little to do for the last fours years except look at satellite pictures. The Americans never allowed them back into Iraq. But if the administration imagines UNMOVIC’s end will bury the truth, the Bush White House is as mistaken as usual.
