The not quite 'smoking gun'

From The Wall Street Journal

Iraq's chemical weapons program is so vast that even Hans Blix can find it. Such was our initial reaction to the recent big news: The discovery, south of Baghdad, of 11 warheads in "excellent condition" designed for the specific purpose of delivering and dispersing chemical weapons.

Iraq offered contradictory excuses concerning the find, at one point saying that the warheads had been included in its weapons declaration, at another that they had been "forgotten." But a U.N. spokesman minced no words about that issue, saying, "It was a discovery. They were not declared."

So to the 12,000 pages of deception that is the Iraqi weapons declaration, we can now add the proverbial and much-demanded smoking gun, right? Not so fast says inspector Dimitri Perricos: "not a smoking gun." The shells, of course, have yet to be tested for traces of chemicals, and even a positive result might not reveal how recently they had been filled. But they most certainly are evidence of an Iraqi chemical weapons program. And their discovery in a complex built in the late 1990s only adds to the unlikelihood that they were merely an oversight of prior disarmament efforts. In all probability, the shells are exactly what they seem: an indication that many more like them stand armed and ready for use in the field.

So what explains the apparent desire of the U.N. team to downplay their fortuitous find? Quite simply, they have come to consider their main job not as disarming Saddam Hussein but as averting war and are willing to rewrite Security Council Resolution 1441 to do it. That resolution is quite clear on the Iraqi arms declaration, for example, saying "false statements" or "omissions" constitute "material breach." Yet Mr. Blix and certain governments have made it obvious that they don't consider Iraq's blanket denial to be a cause for war.

And despite language in the resolution stressing that this is a "final opportunity" for Iraq to disarm, Mr. Blix has been saying in recent days that he views his job as the continuing "containment" of Iraq. He now says that what is supposed to be his "final" report on January 27 is only "the beginning of the inspection and monitoring process." "I am operating on my own timeline," he says, which is at least truth-in-advertising.

Mr. Blix knows, to be sure, that his inspections will have to be at least credibly tough if he is going to keep stringing the U.S. along. That, along with American intelligence, likely explains yesterday's discovery, and it's why he may yet come up with more incriminating evidence. But as for the chances of him actually declaring a "smoking gun": We'd say slim to none.

The significance of yesterday's find is thus twofold. It's yet more evidence that Saddam has no intention of coming clean. If he were genuinely attempting to disarm, his government would have turned those chemical shells over to the inspectors from the very start.

More importantly, however, the inspection team's reaction to the discovery and its other recent behavior suggests that the U.N. may not be up to the challenge offered by President Bush: to live up to its ideals by enforcing its own resolutions on Iraq.