Giving Up the Search
Posted on | June 18, 2007
Another reminder: still no WMDs found.
UNITED NATIONS, June 16 — The search for Saddam Hussein’s weapons of mass destruction appears close to an official conclusion, several years after their absence became a foregone one.
The United States and Britain have circulated a new proposal to the members of the United Nations Security Council to “terminate immediately the mandates” of the weapons inspectors. Staff meetings on the latest proposal have already taken place, and officials say that the permanent Council members, each of whom has veto power, seem ready to let the inspection group — the United Nations Monitoring, Verification and Inspection Commission — meet its end.
In the heat of the debate leading to the Iraq invasion, the commission’s vaguely Slavic-sounding acronym, Unmovic, rang out almost nonstop through the halls of the United Nations. Its inspection teams, at the very center of the worldwide debate over the war, supervised the destruction of rocket engines and fuel tanks.
But the inspectors left Iraq in March 2003, shortly before the invasion, and have not been allowed to return. October will be the third anniversary of the American-led Iraq Survey Group’s finding that the Hussein government had destroyed its stockpiles of illicit weapons just months after the Persian Gulf war in 1991.
“Suddenly they got in a hurry,” the acting executive chairman of the group, Demetrius Perricos, 71, said of the push to disband. His contract is up at the end of the month, and he says he plans to move back to Vienna. The other staff members’ contracts run until July 10.
Still no exit strategy.
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