What goes on behind the scenes in the search for Iraqi weapons of mass destruction? Michael Jansen in Baghdad follows the inspectors The most important point about the discussions early this week between Iraq and the heads of the United Nations weapons inspectorate was made by Amir Saadi, the head of the Iraqi monitoring agency. He stated "when we talked, we forgot all about the threats of war." The discussions were "constructive and cordial" and dealt with "practical aspects" of Iraq's effort to "facilitate the work of the UN" in order to reach a "credible" conclusion to the inspection and monitoring effort. The operative word here is "credible". Saadi's statement demonstrates that the confrontation between the Bush administration and Iraq has little to do with the efforts to eliminate Iraq's weapons of mass destruction. The UN is pushing on an open door, while the United States continues to insist that the door is closed. Iraq is ready to cooperate and provide UN weapons inspectors with full access to places and people, but the inspectorate -- the inspectors on the job here and their bosses in New York and Vienna -- is under constant immense pressure from Washington to provide evidence that Iraq is in major "material breach" of Security Council Resolution 1441, thus giving the Bush administration the casus belli it so eagerly seeks. Baghdad and Washington are worlds apart. Iraqis simply do not understand what the Bush administration is doing. An Iraqi friend observed, "people live from day to day. We have no future. When are these sanctions going to end? They are crushing us. People don't do their jobs properly because there's no point. They do just enough to get by. Over the past 10 years 70 per cent of the people have changed for the worse. We are not the same people who went into the 1991 war. We're not as honest, hard-working or responsible. Many children leave school to get a job to earn enough to eat." This disparity all too clearly affects some of the weapons inspectors as well. They are concerned that their efforts may amount to nothing since the US and Britain appear to have already opted for war, pretext or no pretext. The inspectors have seen "a lot, resolved many issues, and got reasonably good cooperation" from the Iraqi government, a source within the tight-lipped inspectorate revealed. They are not permitted to speak to the press. The inspectorate's only voice is its official spokesman. The source, breaking silence, countered US charges that Iraq is not cooperating and is not prepared to document its programmes fully. He said that the technical report on Iraq's nuclear capabilities was finished last weekend and dispatched to Hans Blix, the head of the UN Monitoring, Verification and Inspection Commission (UNMOVIC), and Mohamed El- Baradei, head of the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA), who will supervise the drafting of the interim report. The report is due to be submitted to the Security Council on 27 January. The source did not believe the inspectors' assessment will be taken seriously. The source stated, "the press and George W [Bush] don't seem to realise that negative findings are still findings. If the CIA says a building is a nuclear facility, and you visit it, and it is not a nuclear facility, then you 'found something'. Didn't you?" he asked. He said the inspectors had carried out "dozens of such tasks and... have lots of findings ... Inspectors go places more than any other thing. With no reactor and centrifuge plant [they] are down to trying to catch a machining operation or a computer in some lab doing centrifuge calculations. I doubt if [the Iraqis] are doing it at Tuwaitha [a major facility in the nuclear programme], or some other well known place -- if they are doing it at all!" The weapons inspectors' task, the source said, involves convincing other people they are doing their job, which is not that easy. The drama created over 3,000 pages of documents found last week at the home of Faleh Hassan Hamza demonstrates this clearly. An Iraqi nuclear scientist now living in the West told Al-Ahram Weekly that Hamza was never a major figure. He "was involved in small scale laser [uranium] enrichment research in the 1980s" and then "dabbled at the physics department in the Tuwaitha Research Centre itself". But this was not part of the main Iraqi nuclear programme. The scientist said Hamza quit his laser research around 1988 since his work "was not yet viable to pursue on a production scale", after which he went into other research. The documents discovered at his home, the informant said, covered little-used research which was mentioned in the October 1997 International Nuclear Verification Office report. "What pathetic mileage Blix is getting," the source observed. A good example of this "mileage" is a visit made last weekend by the inspectors to the Al-Qaqa munitions and explosives "campus" about 45 kilometres from Baghdad. Thirty- two inspectors in 12 white vehicles swept out of their headquarters at the Canal Hotel followed by at least a dozen vehicles from the Iraqi monitoring organisation and a gaggle of journalists. The process of uncovering Iraq's alleged banned weapons capability has become a game called "chase the inspectors". The early morning journey to target sites is a car rally through Baghdad's heavy traffic. The inspectors stayed at the sprawling, walled Al-Qaqa rural facility for nearly six hours. According to Omar Ahmad Hoja, its liaison officer, they visited the entire complex, examined the stores and took half a dozen samples. This was their 14th visit to the site. I was the only newspaper journalist to remain to the chilly end. The others who stayed on were Iraqi television teams. Andre Brie, a socialist member of the European Parliament from Germany, had come along with me. We had a good opportunity to get a sense of the place as we stood outside its massive yellow brick gates, built in the style of ancient Babylon. The first and most important thing we noticed was that there was almost no security. Vehicles came and went. The identities of employees, both men and women, were cursorily checked when they entered the grounds of the facility, most carrying large plastic bags containing food. Reddish-yellow smoke poured from a plant within the grounds throughout our stay while our attention was diverted for a few minutes by flares from somewhere at the centre of the vast complex. Once the inspectors left, we were given a brief tour by Hoja. The land was topped by a thin layer of salt which has poisoned much of the area. It was a place of desolation. Facilities currently in use stood beside those bombed during the 1991 war and the December 1988 blitz. There were two new storage sheds. Outside one were boxes of munitions. Hoja took us to a field of bombs. Small red bombs, medium-sized green bombs and large silver bombs. "All empty. These have been here since 1989," he said, since well after the end of the 1988 Iran-Iraq war. "These are bombs meant to be dropped from planes. We make all kinds of munitions here, for defence. We make sulphuric and nitric acid, nitroglycerine and other explosives. We do not have anything to do with weapons of mass destruction." Brie, a member of the Foreign Affairs, Human Rights, Common Security and Defense Committee and an active member of the Pugwash movement, observed, "Although I am cautious, I think I can see that Iraq is in no position to make weapons of mass destruction." In his view the "1991 war, the 1998 US bombing campaign and a decade of sanctions have deprived Iraq of the ability to make such weapons." He agrees with expert assessments that Iraq never had the ability to build nuclear weapons. "For chemical weapons to make sense, you have to have a lot of them," he asserted, discounting any major chemical weapons programmes. "Due to sanctions and the strict verification procedures [carried out by the UN] it was impossible for Iraq to engage in programmes of any militarily relevant extent." He concluded, "Iraq's military capabilities do not constitute a danger to its neighbours, Israel or America." Furthermore, he stated, "I have visited six to eight factories producing precursors for chemical weapons and even precursors need a high level of security. There is an almost total absence of security" at Al-Qaqa. The inspectors here on the ground, Blix in New York, El-Baradei in Vienna and the Iraqis are doing their best to avert war. But their best efforts may not be good enough for the hawks in the Bush administration. And, ultimately, as, Blix said during his press conference here, the inspectorate "is the servant of the Security Council".
