Long road to hell america in iraq
and some foreign officials appear conflicted about the value of such visits. Now, however, even as OSI is more widely accepted and its tools sharper, U.S. facilities do not merit even cursory notice in local media.įor most of the past half-century, at a time when it was being rejected by the Soviet Union, the United States argued that OSI was the sine qua non for arms control. Inspections are now so widespread and routine that teams of Russians and international inspectors visiting U.S. Over the years, these tools have been applied to a growing number of situations, from stabilizing the arms control competition between the United States and the Soviet Union (and later Russia) to multilateral organizations such as the Organization for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons (OPCW) to specialized regimes such as the Container Security Initiative.
As Jacques Baute, the head of the IAEA effort in Iraq wrote recently, such inspection “benefits the international community, which receives the level of assurance it seeks, and also the inspected party, which is given the opportunity to demonstrate the reality of its compliance.” Policymakers need to pay greater heed to the potential benefits of OSI in promoting confidence that legal controls are working and in promoting global security. Inspections are but one imperfect tool in the arms control and nonproliferation toolbox, but as the Iraq example shows, they can play a singularly useful role in assessing the credibility of intelligence gathered by other means, such as satellites. The public, the media, and government officials must avoid the twin perils of becoming disillusioned by expecting too much from OSI, on the one hand, and gaining false confidence from it, on the other. Indeed, although Powell’s presentation was front-page news around the country and the world, less attention was paid to information that the UN’s chief weapons inspectors, Hans Blix, head of UNMOVIC, and International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) Director-General Mohamed ElBaradei provided a week later to the Security Council.Īs the country strives to digest the recent Iraq Survey Group (ISG) report by Charles Duelfer and implement the recommendations of the 9/11 Commission with respect to the gathering and use of information related to weapons of mass destruction, part of this effort could usefully be given to gaining a better understanding of the possibilities, limitations, and proper use of on-site inspections (OSI). Other pieces of evidence-a “truck caravan” near a facility thought to be related to biological weapons, drone aircraft, suspicious activity at a ballistic missile factory, and so on-were items about which inspectors already had, or could probably have relatively easily obtained convincing explanations. It turned out that the vehicles were likely water trucks-not that unusual in a desert land-that inspectors had earlier seen up close at that facility.
#Long road to hell america in iraq verification#
This was offered as proof that Iraq both possessed chemical weapons and was attempting to deceive inspectors from the UN Monitoring, Verification and Inspection Commission (UNMOVIC), the body charged by the Security Council with carrying out inspections in Iraq. In the dramatic speech Secretary of State Colin Powell made to the UN Security Council on Iraq and its alleged weapons of mass destruction on Feburary 5, 2003, a key piece of the evidence presented was images of decontamination trucks at a presumed chemical weapons facility.