The worst piece of journalism I’ve ever read in OD

From The Sun:

Saddam: What a fiasco

By WILLIAM SHAWCROSS

ARE the UN inspections in Iraq useless? They have been there for ten days and have found no traces of Saddam’s weapons of mass destruction.

But both the US and Britain KNOW that Saddam has chemical, biological and nuclear programmes.

He has had years to hide them. The problem is there are too few inspectors, they are poorly led and they are not looking in the right places.

Unless the inspection process is toughened up, it risks descending into farce.

Meanwhile, Saddam is trying to bury the truth even deeper under thousands of pages of documents.

With tomorrow’s deadline for declaring all his weapons of mass destruction, Saddam is trying to run rings around the UN and the inspection process the US reluctantly endorsed.

There is a real danger he could succeed. Unless the inspection process is dramatically toughened up, it does not appear capable of achieving anything more than a fiasco.

While the inspectors search without success, the US is just giving Saddam enough rope to hang himself with his deceitful report before they tell the UN team exactly where they should be looking and what for.

Under last month’s UN Security Council Resolution, Saddam was given a “final opportunity” to confess to all his chemical, biological and nuclear weapons programmes.

The unanimous Security Council demanded he allow back the UN inspectors and produce a full declaration by tomorrow.

Hunt goes on … but UN inspectors in Iraq are unlikely to

find anything unless they start getting tough

The Iraqis have now said they will deliver sackloads of documents — 13,000 pages — to the UN today.

Is Saddam finally going to reveal the truth? Never. He constantly produced “full and final declarations” in the 1990s — all lies. These 13,000 pages will be in Arabic and you can bet almost all will be irrelevant.

One problem is that many things have peaceful and military uses. The inspectors have to decide whether chemicals and cauldrons are being used to make fertilisers or bombs.

You can expect a lot about baby food and paint in the documents, far less about anthrax spores and sarin gas.

Few of these pages will help the UN find the weapons. And they will take a long time to translate and analyse. Saddam knows time is on his side. He divided the west in the 1990s and he is trying to do so again.

There is also concern about the inspectors. Hans Blix, their leader, is a former Swedish foreign minister.

In the 1980s, as head of the Atomic Energy Agency he declared Iraq had no nuclear weapons programme. This was rubbish.

After the Gulf War we discovered the Iraqi dictator was only months away from producing a bomb.

With such a record, Blix was not the UN’s first choice for this job. But Iraq wanted him and their friends on the Security Council, France and Russia, rejected a chief inspector with a proven track record.

Blix started the process with far too few people. Only 17 inspectors have so far been on the road in Iraq.

He is apparently set on being the hero who avoids war. But a weak inspection process WILL lead to war.

Until now, Blix’s inspections have been easy. The UN teams have been to a grotesquely self-indulgent palace which Saddam built for himself as his people starved.

In 1998 he put such huge complexes out of bounds to the UN so there is a symbolism in being allowed in this time.

But no one expected Saddam to have anything serious hidden there.

The inspectors also visited the Nasr State Establishment and Al-Daura Foot And Mouth Vaccine Facility — both part of the biological weapons programme. But that does not mean weapons were actually made there.

For example, the Nasr State establishment made aerial bombs that were later filled with chemical and biological agents elsewhere.

Many weapons are believed to be on trucks, constantly moving.

There are reports that Saddam ordered Iraqi scientists to take incriminating material home — so there are families with barrels of anthrax in the back yard, suitcases of radioactive isotopes under the bed.

US reaction to the inspection process is mixed. Colin Powell, the Secretary of State, has said the inspectors had made “a good start”.

But George Bush has said the inspections are “not encouraging”.

Asked if war was coming, Bush replied: “That’s a question you should ask Saddam Hussein.” Now the real action begins.

Once Washington has looked through Saddam’s 13,000 pages, it can tell the inspectors where to search for the “smoking guns” — nuclear triggers, vats of poison, missile warheads — all the parts of weapons the documents do not mention.

If Blix is to be seen to be serious he must order much more aggressive inspections. Then the Iraqis will suddenly become much less co-operative.

And that will trigger and justify Anglo-American action.

The latest UN resolution says that false statements and a lack of co-operation together would constitute a “material breach” of the resolution — which would authorise military intervention by the US and Britain.

We are not there yet. But the UN process, very necessary for diplomatic reasons, cannot compel Saddam to surrender his deadly weapons. Only US and British pressure can do that.

Success could have many forms. US Secretary of Defence Donald Rumsfeld said: “A nice outcome would be for Saddam to leave the country.”

Many of Iraq’s Arab neighbours are secretly prepared to help the US get rid of Saddam. But they have to know that this time it is for real and the US will not falter.

The timetable is not yet certain. But finding and destroying Saddam’s biological, chemical and nuclear weapons programmes is essential.

And as the Foreign Office’s chilling report on Saddam’s human rights abuses this week made clear, there can be no stable, decent Iraq until Saddam is removed forever.

William Shawcross is an expert on international affairs and author of Sideshow: Kissinger, Nixon And The Destruction Of Cambodia.

Course it could just be that the inspectors haven’t found anything because there’s nothing to find.

You think?

Will