Absence of UN inspectors fogs debate on Iraq

The prolonged absence of UN arms inspectors from Iraq creates uncertainty that paradoxically fuels the arguments of both sides in the debate over whether to overthrow President Saddam Hussein.

If the US or British advocates of "regime change" possess conclusive evidence of what Saddam has been up to in the 44 months since the experts left Iraq, they have yet to produce it.

US President George W. Bush says he will outline the "serious threat" posed by Iraq at the United Nations next week.

He will deliver that speech the day after the anniversary of the September 11 attacks that triggered a "war on terror" led by a US administration that views Saddam as a leading target.

Critics of Bush's doctrine of pre-emptive action to forestall the perceived threat from Baghdad have demanded evidence that might justify a war to oust Saddam and eradicate the peril posed by his alleged quest for doomsday weapons.

To date, hawks such as US Vice President Dick Cheney and British Prime Minister Tony Blair have made their case in terms that are long on assertion about Iraq's biological, chemical, nuclear and missile activities, but short on hard fact.

Blair has promised to release a long-awaited dossier on the subject in the next few weeks, but British newspaper reports suggest this will contain little new information.

Iraq says all its banned weapons programmes have been destroyed or discontinued since the 1991 Gulf War - an assertion open to question, as are some claims to the contrary.

Some clues have surfaced since Richard Butler, then chief UN weapons inspector, pulled his teams out of Iraq in December 1998 just before a US-British bombing blitz aimed to punish Baghdad for its alleged obstruction of their work.

One Iraqi defector, Adnan al-Haideri, said in December 2001 he had helped renovate Iraqi chemical and biological weapons sites, some of them hidden, as recently as a year earlier.

US Defence Secretary Donald Rumsfeld said in July Iraq had mobile missiles and radars, and it was "reasonable" to conclude it had mobile laboratories to make biological weapons.

German intelligence director August Hanning said in April 2001 German companies had apparently delivered components for poison gas production to Iraq's Samarra plant.

Worries about Iraq's possible nuclear capacity have recently come to the fore in remarks by US and Israeli leaders.

"Many of us are convinced that Saddam Hussein will acquire nuclear weapons fairly soon," Cheney said in a hard-hitting speech last month. "Just how soon, we cannot really gauge."

Bush's insistence that inaction is "not an option" chimes with Cheney's attack on the idea that pre-emptive strikes should be ruled out until Saddam was proved to possess a nuclear bomb.

But such an approach alarms many European, Muslim and other countries who believe that invading a nation simply on suspicion, especially if such an attack were launched without UN authorisation, would set a pernicious precedent.

"The danger is that if the UN is sidelined, you will have a unilateral action which will stoke resentment in the region and may not produce the result the Americans desire," said Toby Dodge, a researcher on Iraq at London's Royal Institute of International Relations.

The demise of intrusive UN inspections and sophisticated monitoring kit set up from 1991 to 1998 left a blind spot for which satellite imagery, defectors' tales and reports on Iraqi attempts to procure dual-use items cannot fully compensate.

"Inspectors can see a lot that the satellites cannot see," Hans Blix, head of the UN Monitoring, Verification and Inspection Commission (UNMOVIC), told NBC News last month.

UNMOVIC is the body set up to replace the former UN Special Commission (UNSCOM) established in 1991 to verify Iraq's compliance with Security Council resolutions on disarmament.

How effective it might be in detecting weapons of mass destruction (WMD) if Iraq decided to readmit inspectors in a bid to avert US military action is hotly debated.

"The effectiveness of inspections is proportional to the degree of access," said a London-based security analyst.

"Partial access means partial effectiveness. Given the risks of WMD use and the potential damage these weapons can inflict, partial effectiveness may be too low of a standard."

He said past UNSCOM activities had been hampered by a requirement to notify Iraqi authorities in advance of inspections, allowing them to "sanitise" target sites.

"To the extent that inspections have been successful, they have been prompted by information provided by defectors and carried out under the threat of air attacks," he argued. US and British leaders have contended that even unfettered inspections may be inadequate to ensure Iraqi compliance and may even provide a false sense of security.

Iraq has its own suspicions - well-founded according to former UNSCOM chief Rolf Ekeus and former American weapons inspector Scott Ritter - that the United States and other powers sought to influence inspections for their own ends, including spying and deliberately provoking crises.

Iraqi leaders now question why they should welcome the inspectors back if Bush is bent on "regime change" anyway.

Dodge said Iraq might be induced to accept inspectors if the United Nations or the Security Council's five permanent members offered it security guarantees in return, though this would involve a climb-down for Bush administration hawks.

"The bottom line is survival for the Iraqis," he said. "Inspectors are the only trick they have left up their sleeve to buy time and reduce the chances of military attack."