The UN weapons inspectors are now at work in Iraq, trying to determine how many weapons of mass destruction have been developed in the last four years. If the track record of previous inspections holds true, Iraq will not come clean, and the inspectors will have to work their way through a maze of deception and distortion.
In 1991, a team from the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) visited Tarmiya to check out rumors that the site was part of Iraq's nuclear weapons program.
According to Dr. Abdul-Qadir Ahmed, the Iraqi official in charge that day, the huge magnets attached to giant spools of copper wire were simply part of the maintenance equipment for Iraq's power stations. How else could Iraq have managed to put its power stations back in production after the Gulf War? The inspectors looked over the huge winding machine and concluded that there were really no grounds for the rumors.
At the same time, however, a defector was telling a different story to US intelligence. Having been refused permission to transfer out of the clandestine nuclear weapons program, Dr. Ibrahim Bawi had put his family in his government-supplied car and driven north. He wound up at the US Air Force base in Incirlik in southern Turkey. From there, he was whisked to the US to begin his debriefing.
Soon thereafter, the inspectors returned to Tarmiya. This time, they knew exactly what the huge magnets were for: to produce weapons grade nuclear materials. This time, Ahmed, the Iraqi counterpart, realized the game was up. Some of the inspectors he knew well, having dined with them on collegial terms during visits to Vienna. That he would lie to them so brazenly was incomprehensible to his friends on the inspection team. Nothing personal, he told them, he was under orders. The word had come down: a lie under orders is not a lie, it is just following orders.
In fact, the much-touted accomplishments of both the IAEA and UN inspectors came only after major defections from within the Iraqi weapons program and a lot of follow-up by the inspection teams. Though the teams were staffed by capable weapons experts on loan from their governments, it still took four years to force Iraq to admit to conducting a biological weapons program. Only the 1995 defection of President Saddam Hussein's son-in-law, Hussein Kamel, brought definitive proof of the existence of Iraq's huge nuclear weapons program.
Hans Blix, the director of the new inspections effort, has been fooled twice before by the Iraqis. In 1990, before Iraq's invasion of Kuwait, he declared that there was no nuclear weapon's program in Iraq.
In 1994, Blix accepted the Iraqi story that there was no real nuclear weapons program, only a small research effort. The huge Iraqi uranium enrichment program was only meant to produce fuel for future nuclear power stations. Of course, the story changed after Hussein Kamel's defection.
The problem now is that Kamel was the last major defector to come out of Iraq. None of the inspections or gadgetry can match the value of an insider who changes sides. The inspectors have very little information, and Iraq has the upper hand. All the research and production facilities are under Iraqi, not UN, control.
British and American intelligence can only provide circumstantial evidence of what Iraq is doing in the weapons area. For inspections to work, the UN will have to get inside information.
Accounting for this information gap, UN Security Council Resolution 1441 empowers the inspectors to talk to Iraqi scientists without government minders, outside of Iraq if necessary, and accompanied by their families. Most Iraqi scientists I knew would consider this a blessed opportunity to escape the confinement and threats that shadow their lives.
Saddam is aware of their value to the UN and recently ordered the resettlement of their families to high-security camps. Incredibly, the UN inspection team leaders indicate that they do not plan to bring the scientists out of Iraq. They will rely for now on physical inspection, not private interviews with the people most directly responsible for building Iraq's weapons.
The new inspections regimen has already been compromised by its passive approach. To join the inspectors, weapons experts are obliged to resign from their national postings, but few are ready to give up their careers to work in the UN bureaucracy. Thus, the UN team is much smaller and less experienced than its predecessors, and faces Iraqi counterparts steeped in the art of deception.
I fear that the inspections effort is not intended to uncover the full extent of Iraq's illegal weapons program.
The Europeans are treating Iraq as a prize to be denied the US, not as a strategic danger. What drives the inspections is fear of an American invasion. The Americans will be accommodated up to the point that their attack is forestalled.
On Dec. 8, Iraq is obliged to declare formally its full weapons program. We can expect the inspectors to be flooded with information about everything but the actual weapons. It is will be vintage Saddam: diversion with no real revelations.
The real test will be for the Americans. Either they get the information they need, or the game will be over. Saddam will be the winner, ready to play another day.
Khidhir Hamza is a former advisor to the Iraqi Atomic Energy Organization and former director of Iraq's Nuclear Weapons Program. He is the co-author of Saddam's Bombmaker.
Copyright: Project Syndicate
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