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Saturday, March 01, 2003

We said they would comply on this, so it doesn't count:
Iraq began destroying its Al Samoud 2 missiles Saturday as ordered by the United Nations and agreed with weapons inspectors on a timetable to dismantle the entire missile program, U.N. and Iraqi officials said.

But the United States dismissed the step as insufficient and deceptive. "Resolution 1441 called for complete, total and immediate disarmament. It did not call for pieces of disarmament," Merci Viana, a Bush spokeswoman, said. "The president has always predicted that Iraq would destroy its Al Samoud missiles as part of its game of deception."
-- from the Washington Post.

Besides the ridiculous petulance and obtuseness of Bush's position, this is another example of the "big lie," a la Goebbels. The text of resolution 1441 says a lot about the inspection process: providing free access to all sites, free movement throughout the country. It says that "UNMOVIC and the IAEA shall have the right at their sole discretion verifiably to remove, destroy, or render harmless all prohibited weapons, subsystems, components, records, materials, and other related items, and the right to impound or close any facilities or equipment for the production thereof." In other words, it is the inspectors' responsibility to destroy the weapons; it is Iraq's responsibility (under 1441) to assist the inspectors. Nowhere in the resolution does it state that "complete, total and immediate disarmament" is solely Iraq's responsibility, especially the immediate part. The resolution clearly expects the inspectors to lead the disarmament process; Iraq was to assist by producing the documentation and by giving access to the inspectors. Perhaps some quibbles about the quality of the document or the degree of assistance given to the inspectors are justified, but the claim that 1441 calls for complete, total and immediate disarmament is just one big fat lie.

Iraq did claim that it had no weapons of mass destruction, so perhaps they bear some responsibility if some are indeed found (the al Samoud 2 missiles possibly violate a provision of an earlier resolution, but they are not WMD's under the generally accepted (though stupid) definition: chemical, biological, or nuclear). And 1441 seems to operate on the premise that Iraq does possess WMD's and is required to assist the inspectors in locating and destroying them. Everything I've read indicates that this has been happening.

And, of course, the very idea that the threat from Iraq is actually increasing while inspectors roam their country, sanctions remain in place, and US spy planes fly regularly over their territory is such nonsense that it is really beneath contempt. To go to war because things aren't improving fast enough according to the jerk who decided to make an issue of it in the first place is absurd in the extreme.

And one more thing! Merci is a French word!