- The United States is continuing this weekend to block
the return of United Nations weapons inspectors to Iraq, even though its
own teams of experts have so far failed to find any definitive evidence
of banned biological, chemical or nuclear materials in the country, let
alone any actual armaments.
-
- The UN inspectors, headed by the Swedish diplomat Hans
Blix, did not even warrant a mention in the sweeping draft resolution on
Iraq submitted by the US and Britain to the UN Security Council on Friday,
giving them power to adminster and control its oil revenues for at least
12 months. France and Russia, in particular, may push to remedy the omission.
-
- US officials remain adamant, however, that the coalition
forces in Iraq have no need for Mr Blix, who is due to retire at the end
of June as chairman of Unmovic - the UN Monitoring and Verification Commission
- or for his teams of inspectors.
-
- Yet the work done so far by America's own technical experts
in Iraq has hardly been comprehensive. Some critics are voicing suspicions
that the hunt for weapons has a lower priority than the Bush administration
previously claimed.
-
- Of the list of about 900 suspected sites compiled by
Washington for inspection at the outset of hostilities, only about 75 have
been visited so far, Pentagon officials conceded last week. And a new team
of technical experts, dubbed the Iraq Survey Team, charged with several
tasks besides looking for evidence of proscribed weapons, is not due in
Iraq until late May.
-
- If Washington truly believed that Iraq's "weapons
of mass destruction" might fall into the hands of terrorists, critics
say, it would have done more to protect the sites where such materials
might have been available. Instead, seven nuclear facilities in Iraq have
been ransacked by looters, while the US has yet to reply to a request from
the International Atomic Energy Agency to visit the sites. Looting has
also scattered much of the evidence that might have existed about WMDs.
-
- US officials are also beginning to acknowledge that their
efforts may never turn up any weapons. Before the war, political leaders
in London and Washington conjured visions of their soldiers finding stashes
of banned material such as anthrax and mustard gas. Now the best that Washington
may be hoping for is that they discover evidence that the ability to produce
such materials once existed.
-
- This new reality was alluded to at the end of last week
by the head of the 75th Exploitation Task Force, which has been spearheading
the hunt on behalf of the coalition powers. Colonel Richard McPhee refused
to predict that weapons would be found, suggesting instead he would be
satisfied with evidence of pre-existing programmes to produce them.
-
- "There's no doubt ... that what we have stopped
here in Iraq is a WMD programme that was being run, that was capable of
producing chemical weapons, biological weapons as needed by [Saddam Hussein]
now or in the future," he said. "I believe clearly there was
a capability here that would have kept going." So far Col McPhee's
teams have been unable to find any proof that Iraq was indeed involved
in the production of illegal weapons.
-
- Some US officials, however, have pinned their hopes on
an abandoned lorry trailer found at a missile-testing site near Mosul.
A team from the 75th Exploitation Task Force left Baghdad yesterday to
inspect the trailer, which could turn out to have been one of the mobile
biological or chemical production vehicles alluded to by the the US Secretary
of State, Colin Powell, in his presentation to the UN Security Council
in February.
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- © 2003 Independent Digital (UK) Ltd
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- http://news.independent.co.uk/world/americas/story.jsp?story=405122
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