Arms hunter Charles Duelfer's report, in concluding Iraq might have resumed weapons-building "after sanctions were removed," left out the crucial fact that the UN Security Council had planned controls over Baghdad for years to come, UN officials say.
The council, led by the US, had decreed that inspections and disarmament of Iraq were to be followed by tough, open-ended monitoring.
"It's been a little disturbing," said Demetrius Perricos, chief UN weapons inspector. "All the arguments say that when sanctions ended, Saddam Hussein would have had a free hand. By the council's own resolutions that wasn't so."
In his Oct. 6 report, CIA adviser Duelfer discredited US President George W. Bush's stated rationale for invading Iraq, saying his Iraq Survey Group found no weapons of mass destruction there. But he suggested Iraq might still have posed a threat.
Saddam "wanted to recreate Iraq's WMD capability -- which was essentially destroyed in 1991 -- after sanctions were removed," the report said, though adding that no such formal plan was uncovered.
This Duelfer finding became a new focus for the Bush administration. Vice President Dick Cheney said on Oct. 7, "As soon as the sanctions were lifted, [Saddam] had every intention of going back" to weapons-building.
An academic expert on the Iraq inspections regime was among those disputing this, noting that lifting the UN embargo would not have opened that door. "This is not the case under Resolution 687 and later ones," said Yale University's James Sutterlin.
Years of Security Council resolutions preceding last year's US-British invasion mandated that UN arms monitors would remain in Iraq once Baghdad's WMD programs were shut down -- as Duelfer now acknowledges they were in the 1990s. With unusual powers and the best technology, the monitors in this second stage would "prevent Iraq from developing new capabilities," said a blueprint for the Ongoing Monitoring and Verification program.
Resolutions also stipulated that UN trade sanctions would not be lifted until the monitoring program was in place, and lifted then only for civilian goods.
The Security Council, where Washington has a veto, would decide how long to keep monitoring in place. Perricos said it was expected to last years. "You couldn't have disarmament and stop monitoring afterward," he said.
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