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.
Right-wing political scientist Laura Fernandez on Sunday won Costa Rica’s presidential election by a landslide, after promising to crack down on rising violence linked to the cocaine trade. Fernandez’s nearest rival, economist Alvaro Ramos, conceded defeat as results showed the ruling party far exceeding the threshold of 40 percent needed to avoid a runoff. With 94 percent of polling stations counted, the political heir of outgoing Costa Rican President Rodrigo Chaves had captured 48.3 percent of the vote compared with Ramos’ 33.4 percent, the Supreme Electoral Tribunal said. As soon as the first results were announced, members of Fernandez’s Sovereign People’s Party
EMERGING FIELDS: The Chinese president said that the two countries would explore cooperation in green technology, the digital economy and artificial intelligence Chinese President Xi Jinping (習近平) yesterday called for an “equal and orderly multipolar world” in the face of “unilateral bullying,” in an apparent jab at the US. Xi was speaking during talks in Beijing with Uruguayan President Yamandu Orsi, the first South American leader to visit China since US special forces captured then-Venezuelan president Nicolas Maduro last month — an operation that Beijing condemned as a violation of sovereignty. Orsi follows a slew of leaders to have visited China seeking to boost ties with the world’s second-largest economy to hedge against US President Donald Trump’s increasingly unpredictable administration. “The international situation is fraught
MORE RESPONSIBILITY: Draftees would be expected to fight alongside professional soldiers, likely requiring the transformation of some training brigades into combat units The armed forces are to start incorporating new conscripts into combined arms brigades this year to enhance combat readiness, the Executive Yuan’s latest policy report said. The new policy would affect Taiwanese men entering the military for their compulsory service, which was extended to one year under reforms by then-president Tsai Ing-wen (蔡英文) in 2022. The conscripts would be trained to operate machine guns, uncrewed aerial vehicles, anti-tank guided missile launchers and Stinger air defense systems, the report said, adding that the basic training would be lengthened to eight weeks. After basic training, conscripts would be sorted into infantry battalions that would take
GROWING AMBITIONS: The scale and tempo of the operations show that the Strait has become the core theater for China to expand its security interests, the report said Chinese military aircraft incursions around Taiwan have surged nearly 15-fold over the past five years, according to a report released yesterday by the Democratic Progressive Party’s (DPP) Department of China Affairs. Sorties in the Taiwan Strait were previously irregular, totaling 380 in 2020, but have since evolved into routine operations, the report showed. “This demonstrates that the Taiwan Strait has become both the starting point and testing ground for Beijing’s expansionist ambitions,” it said. Driven by military expansionism, China is systematically pursuing actions aimed at altering the regional “status quo,” the department said, adding that Taiwan represents the most critical link in China’s
RSS