Here, John is right:
... the purpose of inspections is to assure the rest of the world
that Iraq did not retain any WMD stockpiles or programs. This
assurance was impossible to make under the inspections.
In January 2003, I read Blix's report on the inspections. While he
did not report active violations of the terms (as he had in the
previous report), he was also unable to provide assurances that the
Iraqi government did not have radiological, nuclear, or chemical
weapons or programs to create them, as they had had earlier.
Blix said, in effect, that so far, inspections had failed. Blix was
against the US invasion and argued at the time that in 6 months or a
year, he could report more accurately one way or the other, but that
at the time, he could not.
In particular, in 2002, Saddam Hussein's government in Iraq started
out by avoiding cooperation with the UN inspectors. Later Saddam
Hussein's government did cooperate more, but that cooperation was not
sufficiently evident that Blix could make assurances that he and his
inspectors were not being fooled as they had been in the early 1990s.
The January 2003 report was critical because after that time it became
harder for the US government to do something else (such as borrow the
same billion dollars a week, but use it to investigate and innovate
alternative sources of energy, as I suggested earlier, rather than
invade Iraq).
You can argue that the US government acted years previously to prepare
an attack against Iraq. The point is, both the Iraqi government and
the UN inspectors understood the situation, and in January 2003, the
UN inspectors could not provide assurances that they were not being
fooled as they had been before.
--
Robert J. Chassell
[EMAIL PROTECTED] GnuPG Key ID: 004B4AC8
http://www.rattlesnake.com http://www.teak.cc
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