The Daily Background

So apparently the United Nations is still spending ten million dollars per year to try and locate those oh-so-elusive weapons that Saddam Hussein supposedly had, according to Rick Santorum et al. And the worst part? The money that’s being spent is Iraqi money.

And the Iraqis know very well that it’s being wasted, but they can’t do anything about it. “This is really absurd. We’re approaching five years now of this exercise in futility” an Iraqi envoy to the United Nations has complained. But the UN Security Council can’t agree to cut end the search.

Here’s the Washington Post today:

Every weekday, at a secure commercial office building on Manhattan’s East Side, a team of 20 U.N. experts on chemical and biological weapons pores over satellite images of former Iraqi weapons sites. They scour the international news media for stories on Hussein’s deadly arsenal. They consult foreign intelligence agencies on the status of Iraqi weapons. And they maintain a cadre of about 300 weapons experts from 50 countries and prepare them for inspections in Iraq — inspections they will almost certainly never conduct, in search of weapons that few believe exist.
[…]
There was a time when the work of U.N. weapons inspectors on Iraq was the stuff of front-page news and impassioned speeches by world leaders. President Bush even argued that Hussein’s refusal to cooperate with U.N. inspectors offered legal backing for the 2003 invasion.

But the inspectors’ primary mission — ridding Hussein’s regime of chemical, biological and nuclear weapons — has become irrelevant since a U.S.-led coalition toppled the Iraqi leader and discovered that his government had destroyed its most lethal weapons shortly after the 1991 Persian Gulf War.

Shockingly enough, I actually agree partially with the Bush Administration on this one. Turns out this time, contrary to what you might think, Washington is calling for these pointless and wasteful inspections to end, and it’s Russia who is saying that they’ve got to continue- probably more to spite the US rather than because they actually believe there are still WMD hidden in Iraq.

Where I part ways with the Administration on this issue however is how to end the search. The White House seems to think that the way to wrap this whole thing up is to continue their cross-continental shouting match with Russia over the matter until they both get blue in the face.

I think the way to end the search would be to do what the inspectors actually say they need to finish the search– which is data that the US won’t hand over from inspections that the CIA finished back in 2004 and concluded that there were no weapons. The UN inspectors say that to declare “mission accomplished” with this matter, they need access to that data (or presumably they would have to get in land rovers and do the whole thing over again).

But for some reason the Administration is more interested in continuing their shouting match and accusing Russia of wanting to waste money (not an altogether unfair accusation in this case) than handing over the data and finish the matter. How stupid.

Filed under: Z-TDB Blog