Posted on 04/03/2003 7:39:04 AM PST by DWPittelli
The German paper Die Zeit has reported that the UN inspectors in Cyprus blame French, German and Russian appeasement for necessitating the war!
Translation:
The Mediterranean waves lap against the narrow sand beach in front of the Flamingo Beach Hotel. In front of the plain tourist hotel's entrance in Larnaka on Cyprus, bored policemen stand with their submachine guns dangling at the hip. The UN weapons inspection team is staying here, an hour and a half west of Baghdad by plane, after its hasty departure from Iraq. In the lobby, CNN war reports run 24 hours a day. For three and a half months, the inspectors were the focal point of world events. Now they are only spectators. Time to think about what was, and what could have been. The UN inspectors talk, but only anonymously. Orders from New York are strict: No interviews with journalists.
Could this war have been prevented? Yes, say some [inspectors]. But with a surprising argument: Germany, France and Russia made war unavoidable with their purported peace politics. Gerhard Schroeder's categorical 'no' to military deployment was simply "crazy." "We might have been able to fulfill our mandate," one hears in the hotel lobby.
When the UNMOVIC (United Nations Ongoing Monitoring and Verification) inspectors opened their headquarters on November 27 last year ... they believed Resolution 1441 was a potent tool to uncover Saddam Hussein's terror arsenal: access to all installations. Unannounced inspections, even of presidential palaces. Interviews with scientists. Absolute freedom of movement, helicopters with high-tech sensors.
The 120 inspectors noticed soon, though, that they would not reach their goal without the full cooperation of Iraqis. But they waited in vain to be approached. A warning presentation by Hans Blix on January 15 in the Security Council didn't change things. Iraq made its first concessions when Secretary of State Colin Powell presented sensational pictures, videos, and tape recordings of mobile bioweapons labs, rocket launching ramps, and munitions bunkers. And as the American threat of war became more and more clear and found more support.
The excessive surveillance of the inspectors by minders of the Iraqi National Monitoring Directorate (NMD), which UNMOVIC had long objected to, then dropped off. For the first time, three interviews took place with Iraqi scientists with no minders present. The Iraqis also delivered some weapons programs documents that had been demanded in vain until then.
Why no German troops?
Blix delivered a more conciliatory situation assessment on February 14. This was the basis for Germany, France and Russia to speak of "functioning inspections" and to increasingly distance themselves from America and Great Britain. The governments in Berlin, Paris, and Moscow felt confirmed in the conviction that their peace strategy would lead to success.
The inspectors in Baghdad saw things completely differently: their position was suddenly weakened. Documents were held back again. Scientists appeared -- if at all -- only with their own tape recorders. After the conversations they had to deliver the cassettes to the NMD. The hope for greater assertiveness that had grown following Powell's speech diminished again. "After February 14 we didn't get much any more."
In hindsight a clear pattern emerged, from the viewpoint of the UN inspectors: "Saddam Hussein followed every step in the Security Council closely. As soon as divisions appeared, cooperation diminished." [emphasis added] The officials in Baghdad only became more cooperative when military pressure increased. Rhetoric never impressed Saddam Hussein, the inspectors say, the deeper the quarrels split the international community, the surer he felt more himself.
Hans Blix himself got a taste of the revived self-confidence of the Iraqi leadership following February 14. When the chief inspector asked General Amir Al-Saadi, head of the NMD, where 550 mustard gas artillery grenades were that the UN suspected were still in country, the officer claimed baldly that they had been been lost to a fire in the arsenal. But curiously there were no residual traces of that.
"We were dependent on military pressure", an inspector emphasizes. They made no progress without the US aircraft carriers in the Persian Gulf and without the troop deployments to Kuwait. They experienced the diplomatic tug-of-war between Washington and the European peace axis as a historical irony: from their point of view, every demand for a peaceful solution reduced the pressure on Iraq and made peace more unlikely. Success was less a question of time than one of the credible threat of the use of force. "Where," the inspectors ask today, "were the teeth?" More time, the demand of Germany and France for inspections, would have been well and good. But: "They should have sent their own troops and ships." In their opinion, installing the kind of traffic monitoring system important to effective control would only have been possible with a united Security Council backing them up. But to threaten force as a last resort, without seriously preparing for it -- in their view, that could not impress Baghdad's dictator.
Many times important details about Iraq were brought to the inspectors unofficially, or they learned more over a confidential coffee-table discussion than from official scientist interviews: this, too, a clear indication that the state apparatus was withholding information systematically. In one-on-one discussions, the UN personnel would hear again and again how the Saddam Hussein regime had ruined the lives of a whole generation. The academic elite, educated in the West and cosmopolitan, had to watch as their children were impoverished materially and spiritually in a totalitarian system.
Saddam Hussein's dictatorship retained one capability despite the destruction of the Iraqi middle class: weapons production. The most visible sign for that were the Al Samoud rockets, which broke the permitted maximum range of 150 kilometers. Their destruction in the first weeks of March was interpreted by many not just as a signal, but as true progress on the way to disarmament. The laconic comment of one inspector: "Too little, too late."
Iraqi concessions, inspectors report, were no longer in any relation to the American pressure. Iraq underestimated the resolve of the superpower. After George Bush announced his last ultimatum, NMD officials surfaced one last time at the Canal Hotel [UNMOVIC headquarters]. But even these papers contained nothing that could have stopped the course of events.
Was the mission programmed to fail? No, say the inspectors: a united Security Council might have forced a peaceful disarmament. But even then an ambivalent thought that sounds surprisingly hard coming from an inspector: "How does one best handle a tumor -- with a quick surgical procedure or with long, difficult chemotherapy whose success is doubtful?"
The original German copy is at:
http://www.zeit.de/2003/14/Waffeninspektoren
Abbreviation: Dips.
Yes, but since the source is a German newspaper, I think it appears credible even to most who would be skeptical. (Whereas if it were in the Washington Times, or Fox or maybe any U.S. source, the Euro-pinkos would not believe it.)
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.