Maha note: This is an article by David Kay published last January in the Washington Post. It is on the web site of the United States Mission to the European Union. A note on the web page says permission is granted to republish. Well, thanks, USEU! I hope you won't mind if I boldface some stuff and add commentary! Those who want to read the article without my improvements can click here.

Date:  January 19, 2003

The following article by former United Nations weapons inspector David Kay first appeared in The Washington Post January 19. Permission has been granted for distribution and further republication, in English and in translation abroad and in the local press outside the United States.

Below is the byliner:

It Was Never About A Smoking Gun 

By David Kay

(David Kay is a senior fellow at the Potomac Institute for Policy Studies. In 1991, he served as chief nuclear weapons inspector of UNSCOM, the U.N. Special Commission on Iraq.)

When it comes to the U.N. weapons inspection in Iraq, looking for a smoking gun is a fool's mission. That was true 11 years ago when I led the inspections there. It is no less true today -- even after the seemingly important discovery on Thursday of a dozen empty short-range missile warheads left over from the 1980s.

So what have you been doing in Iraq these past three months, Dave? And why do you need $600 million to continue doing it?

The only job the inspectors can expect to accomplish is confirming whether Iraq has voluntarily disarmed. That is not a task that need take months more. And last week's cache is irrelevant in answering that question, regardless of the U.N.'s final determination. That's because the answer is already clear: Iraqi is in breach of U.N. demands that it dismantle its weapons of mass destruction.

Can we take this as an admission that you've had enough time already, and since you haven't found anything we can spend the $600 million elsewhere? I guess not.

I am no apologist for the Iraqis, but not only are those warheads irrelevant to the larger argument, they could well be remnants that were overlooked, found as they were in a 25 square mile site that has a huge number of conventional warheads and rockets on it, rockets used principally in the Iran/Iraq war. The discovery was small -- the kind of thing inspectors often find -- and there's not much to be made of the warheads unless the testing shows they were once filled with VX gas.

Except as I recall, Dave, it wasn't the UN weapons inspectors who made a big bleeping deal out of the empty war heads. It was George W. Bush's and his staff of empty war heads who handed out the press releases.

The real problem lies with the way the searches are being conducted, period. The fact that day after day, the inspectors go to sites, most of which were inspected in the 1990s and put under long-term monitoring, has served Iraq's claims that it is complying with the inspections. It also ensures that these non-threatening inspections will continue for some time. Hans Blix, the chief U.N. weapons inspector, said last week that his required Jan. 27 report (stating whether Baghdad is fully complying with U.N. demands to disclose and dismantle any weapons of mass destruction program) will simply be an interim one. It will mark, Blix said, "the beginning of the inspection and monitoring process, not the end of it."

So let's see -- Hans Blix and the UN weapons inspectors began their prewar round of inspections November 27, 2002. This article I am commenting on was published January 19, 2003. That means, Dave, you gave Hans Blix just two months before you declared his mission a "fool's errand." Now you've had three months before your interim report, and you want more time -- and you've been a little hazy about how much. 

So you want a little roast crow to go along with that $600 million, Dave?  

That statement no doubt came as a surprise in Washington: Many members of the Bush administration have told me they were expecting the report to provide the basis for Security Council endorsement of military action to compel Baghdad to disarm. Blix appears to be drawing a very different conclusion: In the face of Iraq's denials that it has weapons, the inspections must continue.

I love this. Hans Blix, who was actually in Iraq, drew a conclusion about weapons that was different from what a bunch of hothouse ideologues in Washington expected, which means Blix must have been wrong. Uh-huh.

What Blix and Mohamed ElBaradei, director general of the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA), are not doing is even more damning. Recall that Iraq was required to submit a "full and complete declaration" of all its weapons programs to the U.N. Security Council early last December. But that 12,000-page declaration was hardly complete, and its omissions (as well as gaps identified in 1998 -- more about that in a moment) should have become the focus of the inspections process.

So what about it, Dave? Don't you have that same 12,000-page declaration, too? Hans Blix did say there were inconsistencies in the report, and that more information was needed. And now it appears the report was inconsistent not because the Iraqis were hiding weapons, but because they had no documentation to show that the weapons had been destroyed. Whoops!

UNMOVIC, the U.N. Monitoring, Verification and Inspection Commission, should use its limited resources to examine the seven gaps in the United Nations' knowledge and understanding of Iraq's weapons of mass destruction, which were identified in 1998 by UNSCOM (the now defunct U.N. Special Commission) and an independent technical evaluation group. The gaps were alarming. They had to do with such things as anthrax, artillery shells filled with mustard gas, mobile biological weapons agent facilities and efforts to procure uranium.

And now we all know about those mobile weapons facilities and the efforts to procure uranium, don't we, Dave?

By failing to address these concerns, Iraq mocked the United Nations with its declaration. It rejected what the Security Council, in Resolution 1441, insisted it must do -- that is, answer all outstanding questions about the program. And it had the gall to contend that it hasn't had a prohibited weapons program since the end of the Gulf War.

And you had the gall to call 'em liars before you knew the facts.

How quickly the experience of the first attempt to disarm Iraq by international inspections has been forgotten. That attempt, starting in 1991, also began with weapons declarations filled with lies and misstatements. As a result, the UNSCOM team I led was also forced to search for a smoking gun. It is a nearly impossible task, which is why it should never be the standard of mission success. Only two smoking guns were found during all the UNSCOM inspections in Iraq in the 1990s. The first -- Iraq's nuclear weapons complex -- came quickly in the summer and autumn of 1991. We were going after very large physical complexes that had been designed to deceive spy satellites -- but whose purpose could be detected by inspectors armed with good intelligence and aided by key Iraqi defectors.

And the lesson is that it's easier to find stuff that actually exists than it is to find stuff that doesn't.

In the next six years of UNSCOM inspections only one other such discovery was made -- when the existence of an Iraqi biological weapons program was finally uncovered in 1995. But it is often forgotten that the weapons themselves were not found by the inspectors. Iraq told the inspectors that it had destroyed the biological munitions, which, it said, had been stored inside abandoned railroad tunnels and buried along the runways at two military airfields. Even the best inspectors have almost no chance of discovering hidden weapons sites such as these in a country the size of Iraq.

If the best inspectors can't be expected to find weapons, then what hope does a fool like you have, Dave? No wonder you need more time and $600 million.  

We UNSCOM inspectors simply did not have the resources to win a game of hide and seek. The same is true today. The number of inspectors was always terribly small -- seldom more than 300 in the country at any one time. And we were totally outclassed by Iraqi security, which had managed to infiltrate the United Nations in Vienna and New York, as well as the Bahrain office of UNSCOM. In late 1991, when we seized more than 100,000 pages of information on Iraq's nuclear weapons program, we found one particularly surprising document. In it, the head of Iraqi security warned the chief security official of the facility holding the documents that in 10 days I would be leading a team to search his building and he should remove all sensitive material from this facility. The document was dated less than 48 hours after the decision had been made that I would lead this team! At the time fewer than 10 people in the United Nations and IAEA knew about this mission.

Ah, the good old days are gone, never to return. But let's haul ourselves back to the recent past and present. Your argument appears to be that since Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction in 1991, he must have them in 2003. By that logic I should still be able to touch my toes. Unfortunately, as the Buddha taught, the physical universe is always in flux. You really can't justify going to war in 2003 because of the way the world was in 1991, can you?  

Much has been made of the value of surprise inspections, but little has been said about how hard they are to conduct. Between 1991 and 1998, UNSCOM conducted almost 500 inspections. Of those, only about six truly surprised Iraq. Then as now, the inspectors operated in an environment that was thoroughly monitored by Iraq. Hotel rooms, restaurants, offices and cars were all bugged. We understood that only with the most extraordinary measures could any of our conversations or documents elude Iraqi security officials.

Fine. So what's your excuse for not finding weapons now?

By 1996, UNSCOM and the IAEA had switched almost entirely from searching for specific weapons to trying to limit the ease with which Iraq could use its permitted dual-use facilities to produce them.

First you say that looking for weapons was a fool's errand. Now you complain that the UN inspectors were spending less time looking for weapons than they were preventing Iraq from producing weapons. And today the Bushies have their panties in a twist over weapons programs and dual-use facilities.

Sounds like you are about to catch up to where the UN inspectors were in 1996. Way to go, Dave!

The former inspectors I know react with disbelief to the list of sites the current inspectors have visited in the past seven weeks -- Taji, Daura, Al Hakam, Fallujah, Tarmiya, Rashdiya, Al Furat, Al Muthanna. No one, they say, should have believed that Saddam would ever let inspectors back into the country without ensuring that these sites, well monitored by UNSCOM until it left in '98, were thoroughly sanitized. Let's not forget that UNSCOM was never denied entry to a site it was monitoring. Far from denial, Iraq wanted UNSCOM and the IAEA to concentrate on the monitored sites and stop searching for clandestine facilities.

Let me guess -- the former weapons inspectors you've been talking to are also neocon ideologues. Am I right?

How did the inspectors get back into a game of hide and seek with the Iraqis?

How did you get into the game of "cover Shrub's butt"?

This time, the Bush administration was determined that, rather than a search and find mission, the inspections would verify Iraq's willingness to be disarmed.

Now that we know they already were disarmed, the Bush administration looks pretty damn stupid, doesn't it?

This would be completely unlike the long, frustrating game the Iraqis played and ultimately won with the first U.N. inspection regime. This was to be Iraq's last chance. Any "false statements or omissions" in its December declaration were, according to Resolution 1441, supposed to "constitute a further material breach of Iraq's obligations." And "material breach" is the Security Council's standard for measuring whether military force is required to compel disarmament.

Sure would have saved us a lot of trouble if Shrub had given Hans Blix more time before he decided to disarm Iraq with military force, since Iraq really didn't have WMDs. So when do we, the citizens of the United States, get an apology from the White House for making one of the most colossal blunders in all of our history?

Inspections were not supposed to begin until 15 days after the declaration was due, in other words on Dec. 21. Instead, and this has gone almost completely unremarked, Blix and ElBaradei began the inspections on Nov. 27, 11 days before Iraq was to submit its declaration.

So you wanted them to wait to give Saddam more time to hide stuff if he'd had something to hide? Do you want to start making sense one of these days? Oh, wait, I'm sorry. Your point was that looking for actual weapons was a fool's errand; instead, the inspectors should have looked for evidence of disarmament. Well, these days, that ought to be real easy.

So much for President Bush's injunction that the inspectors were there to confirm Iraq's voluntary disarmament. Thus the hunt for the smoking gun was on. The United States did not object to this change of strategy. In fact, it urged Blix and ElBaradei to make their search more effective, use their full powers and find the smoking gun.

Can you explain to me now why George Bush was in such an all-fire rush to go to war last March? Why giving Blix and ElBaradei a few more months would have hurt anybody?

It is easy, if painful, to see how the United Nations slid back into the fool's game of trying to find a smoking gun inside a totalitarian country such as Iraq. What is much harder to understand is why the Bush administration, which so clearly seemed to have understood that this was not a game that they wanted to play or could win, let itself be trapped like this. But trapped it is.

They weren't trapped, really, then. But they sure as hell are trapped now.

Even such tantalizing discoveries as last week's should not be seen as a promise of more compelling evidence to come if we would only give the inspectors more time. The only evidence of Iraq's weapons program we need has been clear since early December, when it filed yet another weapons declaration that was anything but full, final and complete. Iraq continues to ignore its international obligations. Let's not give it more time to cheat and retreat.

No more time to cheat and retreat. I like that. So let's apply it to you -- no more time, no more money. We're done playing this game. Go home.

(Distributed by the Office of International Information Programs, U.S. Department of State.)

Six astronauts are escorting one of the Keating Five into space for one very simple reason: NASA is willing to prostitute itself for the senior Senator from Ohio. ...

Now it seems that NASA doesn't mind having scum ride the space shuttle. The farce of his trip being for scientific purposes was recently laid to rest when Glenn was found unfit to swallow a melatonin pill for one of the experiments he is supposedly involved with. There is no question that Glenn is going into space for political reasons.

Was John Glenn ever an American hero? I would say not. In the 1950s he drew the national spotlight onto himself by appearing on Groucho Marx's quiz show, "You Bet Your Life" while he was a Marine Aviator. Had he been dedicated to the dream of spaceflight, there is little doubt that he would have remained in the program after his first orbital flight. Instead, he entered politics, joining thousands of other scum who prefer to spend other people's money rather than create any wealth of their own. ["Scum on the Shuttle," In Space Today, October 25, 1998]

It is no secret that General Clark's relationship with the Pentagon was strained during that conflict. So it is also not surprising that reporters have begun to mine that period for the sort of score-settling anecdotes that often serve as fodder for political profiles....Since General Clark announced his intention to run for the presidency last month, a number of partial and even misleading accounts of the war have emerged. [Michael Gordon, "Wes Clark's War," The New York Times, October 2, 2003]

Gordon, who covered the Kosovo war from NATO headquarters and was able to observe Clark closely, came away praising Clark's judgments and the way he handled the job. There's no question Clark was a controversial figure, but anyone doing that job effectively would be a controversial figure. Most Clark slimers have very little understanding of what was at stake or what Clark's role actually was; they just take whatever negatives they can find and turn them into slime.

Somebody found out that Clark (in his civilian occupation of investment banker) is on the board of directors of the National Endowment for Democracy. And Frank Carlucci of The Carlyle Group is on that board, too. Omigosh -- Clark is associated with The Carlyle Group! But other members of the board include Senator Bob Graham (how come they aren't sliming Graham, too?), former ambassador Richard Holbrooke, and the vice president of the United Steelworkers of America.

There are web articles that indicate NED had a slimy past, and perhaps it did. But the Carlyle connection is silly -- it's right up there with the stories about Paul Krugman being a stooge for Enron. And it's only slightly less tortuous than the Wall Street Journal's labored efforts to connect Saddam Hussein to al Qaeda. (al Qaeda big shot Khalid Sheikh Mohammed is related to Ramzi Yousef, who worked with Abdul Yasin in the 1993 WTC bombing, and Yasin is an Iraqi who may have been given sanctuary from U.S. law enforcement by Saddam Hussein; and Kevin Bacon was in Footloose with Dianne West, who was in The Birdcage with Gene Hackman ...).

Anyway, I just left a rant by some slimers who are convinced Wesley Clark killed Caesar Chavez, which is what made me think of John Glenn. I say "guilt by association" is a hobgoblin of little minds. John Glenn is a genuine hero and was a good Senator. Paul Krugman was never a stooge for Enron. Saddam Hussein, for all his flaws, is not part of al Qaeda.

I don't know if Wesley Clark would be a good president or not; let's see how he does in the campaign. But if the slimers bring him down with lies and innuendo, it will be a great injustice.

The hypocrisy here is breathtaking. Republicans have repeatedly impugned their opponents' patriotism. Last year Tom DeLay, the House majority leader, said Democrats "don't want to protect the American people. . . . They will do anything, spend all the time and resources they can, to avoid confronting evil."

But the true test of patriotism isn't whether you are willing to wave the flag, or agree with whatever the president says. It's whether you are willing to take risks and make sacrifices, including political sacrifices, for the sake of your country. This episode is a test for Mr. Bush and his inner circle: a true patriot wouldn't hesitate about doing the right thing in the Plame affair, whatever the political costs.

Mr. Bush is failing that test.

And Bob Herbert writes in "Shaking the House of Cards,"

Iraq is proving to be a bonanza for the Bush administration's corporate cronies even as it is threatening to become a sinkhole for the aspirations of ordinary Americans.

The vicious release to news organizations of the identity of an undercover C.I.A. officer could serve as a case study of the character of this administration. The Bush II crowd is arrogant, venal, mean-spirited and contemptuous of law and custom.

Wow, Bob, don't hold back. Tell us how you really feel.

Joe Wilson replay -- here's the New York Times column that set off Wilsongate, reprinted from July -- "What I Didn't Find in Africa."

Based on my experience with the administration in the months leading up to the war, I have little choice but to conclude that some of the intelligence related to Iraq's nuclear weapons program was twisted to exaggerate the Iraqi threat.

Imagine. There's also a long piece called "The Legacy of Black Hawk Down" that looks interesting, plus an editorial on Rush -- "Not Ready for Prime Time" -- and another editorial on Bush's missile system, "Wishing Won't Make Star Wars So." Even better, no David Brooks! Yippee!

One more preview -- E.J. Dionne writes about Rush in the Washington Post: "I cannot resist saying that ESPN got exactly what it deserved."

 

Economists are expecting 4 percent to 5 percent growth in the third quarter, and yet they don't think we'll have a single new job to show for it. That would make eight straight quarters of a growing economy with jobs lost in each of those quarters. ...

 

The numbers are not pretty: 8.9 million Americans unemployed. Another five million say they want to work, but are not counted as unemployed because they're not actively looking for work; 503,000 of that group are counted as -- quote -- "discouraged," not working and not looking because they believe no jobs are available. [Peter Viles, "Lou Dobbs Tonight," CNN, October 1, 2003]

Three things are worth noting here. First, America's deficits are certain to sop up vast amounts of the world's pool of savings. ... It will mean higher real interest rates, lower investment and lower growth, all of which will be particularly costly for developing countries.

Second, America's huge trade deficit may be a source of global instability. Will the world continue to finance this deficit willingly, to put its money into a country with a demonstrable lack of competence in macroeconomic management (to say nothing of the corporate, banking and accounting scandals)? ...

Third, in searching for others to blame, America may again enter an era of protectionism, as it did under Reagan. Bush may trumpet free markets, just as Reagan did, but just as he may exceed Reagan in fiscal irresponsibility, so he may outflank Reagan in trade hypocrisy. [Joseph Stiglitz, "U.S. Economic Folly Should Worry Us All," The Guardian, September 17, 2003]

Stiglitz says the United States is borrowing more than a billion dollars a day. And here is the peril we are in: It is not impossible that the world will cut our credit, and the money flow will turn off, and we will have to live within our means.

Paul Krugman recently told CalPundit that this was not only possible; the numbers say that's where we are heading.

Just by the arithmetic, you can either have big tax increases, roll back the whole Bush program plus some; or you can sharply cut Medicare and Social Security, because that's where the money is; or the U.S. just tootles along until we actually have a financial crisis where the marginal buyer of U.S. treasury bills, which is actually the Reserve Bank of China, says, we don't trust these guys anymore — and we turn into Argentina. All three of those are clearly impossible, and yet one of them has to happen, so, your choice. Which one? [Paul Krugman, posted by Kevin Drum on CalPundit, September 16, 2003]

It's hard to tell people this. It's sounds impossible. That's because only the very elderly remember an America that was desperately poor. Most of us were born after World War II, which means most of us think of the United States of America as an absolute, solid rock of prosperity. Individuals may live in hardship, but the nation will always be rich, rich, rich. Because as far as we can remember, America has always been rich.

'Course, until September 11, none of us could remember being attacked by a foreign enemy, either. And we've never had so many quarters of  jobless recovery in a row.