RE: [Futurework] Saddam's capture and Blair's body language

[Karen Watters Cole]

We have not seen an broadcast or announcement from the White House yet, although one should be forthcoming. Since Bush heard from Condi at 5am it was confirmed and aides rushed in early, they may be waiting to preempt Sunday news shows. Bush cancelled plans to go to church just across the street (there is snowfall in DC area). Early analysis is that they don’t want to gloat while US troops are still under fire, although this is a major boost for Bush2. Also, as one of the news reports reminded me, they may be wishing he had been killed in the raid to avoid the angst of who gets to bring him to trial now, especially since Chalabi has already announced he will be tried by the Iraqi people.  Ha’aretz is reporting that the Israeli stock market rose 3% on the news, so expect better here tomorrow morning. Because of the timing and delay to broadcast, Paul Reynolds at BBC is the only analysis I’ve caught so far. http://news.bbc.co.uk/go/pr/fr/-/1/hi/world/middle_east/3113417.stm   Here’s the latest on the WMD angle, written by veteran journalist Pincus, no less: U.N. Inspector: Little New in U.S. Probe for Iraq Arms By Walter Pincus, Washington Post Staff Writer, Sunday, December 14, 2003; Page A27 The United Nations's top weapons inspector says most of the weapons-related equipment and research that has been publicly documented by the U.S.-led inspection team in Iraq was known to the United Nations before the U.S. invasion. Demetrius Perricos, acting chairman of the U.N. Monitoring, Verification and Inspection Commission (UNMOVIC), said in an interview and in a report to the U.N. Security Council that the only significant new information made public by the U.S. search team was that Iraq had paid North Korea $10 million for medium-range missile technology, which apparently was never delivered. Perricos's assessments were his first public comments on the U.S.-sponsored search for weapons of mass destruction since he took over as acting chairman from Hans Blix, who retired in June. Perricos cautioned that his assessments were preliminary and made without access to classified working documents compiled by the Iraq Survey Group, the U.S. government team led by David Kay that is searching Iraq for evidence of weapons of mass destruction. Still, the assessment shows that, even after Kay disclosed his preliminary findings, U.N. weapons inspectors remain skeptical of the Bush administration's prewar statements that Saddam Hussein had seriously breached U.N. resolutions barring chemical and biological weapons, and that such Iraqi weapons programs posed an imminent threat. A senior U.S. intelligence official said the Iraq Survey Group stands by its report, and emphasized that Perricos had seen only the unclassified version of the report. He also said the investigation is not yet complete. In the months leading up to the attack on Iraq last March, the Bush administration cited Iraq's possession of chemical and biological weapons and a reconstituted nuclear program as primary reasons for military action, after the U.N.-sponsored weapons inspections regime had failed to verify Hussein's claims that he had disarmed. Since major combat was declared over in May, Kay's 1,400-member group has found no chemical or biological weapons. Kay told Congress last month the team determined that Iraq's nuclear program was in only "the very most rudimentary" state. He said his group, however, had "discovered dozens of WMD-related program activities and significant amounts of equipment" that Iraq had hidden. He said he believes "there was an intent . . . to continue production at some point in time." Among those discoveries were scientific documents that could have been useful in restarting weapons programs, a clandestine network of laboratories and safe houses in Iraq Intelligence Services (IIS) facilities, a laboratory complex hidden in a prison, and evidence of a program for ballistic and land-attack missiles with ranges prohibited by the United Nations. Last week, Perricos delivered an official quarterly report to the Security Council in which he said the findings made public by Kay were, for the most part, documented by the United Nations before the war. "Most of the findings outlined in the [Kay] statement relate to complex subjects familiar to UNMOVIC," he said in the report. He qualified that by adding, "In the absence of access to the full [Kay] progress report . . . [the U.N. team] is not in a position to properly assess the information provided in the [Kay] statement." Perricos said, for example, that U.N. inspectors had investigated reports that the prison lab was used to test effects of toxins on prisoners, but found no evidence of that. The U.N. inspection team knew about most of the Kay group findings on Iraqi missiles, Perricos said. U.N. resolutions had restricted Iraq to delivery systems that could carry missiles no farther than 150 kilometers. Kay wrote that his findings to date were sufficient to show that Iraq had "dramatically breached U.N. restrictions," in part by converting SA-2 surface-to-air missiles into ballistic missiles with a range of 250 kilometers. Perricos's report to the council, however, said U.N. inspectors had already inventoried and placed tags on SA-2 engines, so that inspectors could check later to make sure the engines were not used in delivery systems that would violate the distance restrictions. Some of the published findings by the Kay group were new to the U.N. team, Perricos said, including the $10 million payment to North Korea and the discovery of labs in IIS buildings. Kay said Iraq's failure to disclose the IIS labs represented a potential serious breach of the Security Council resolution restricting Iraqi weapons. Perricos, however, said that he has seen no evidence -- in the Kay group's public findings or elsewhere -- that the labs were used to develop weapons of mass destruction, or that they represented a serious breach of U.N. resolutions. The pertinent U.N. resolution required Iraq to disclose labs capable of being used in chemical, biological and nuclear programs that it "claims are for purposes not related to weapons production or material." Perricos, however, said UNMOVIC inspectors had advised Iraqi officials to list as many of those laboratories as was reasonable, not necessarily to disclose every one. When Perricos appeared before the Security Council earlier this month to answer questions about his report, several members asked why the United States had not shared the classified Kay report with U.N. inspectors. The United States said information may be passed on in the future, according to Ewen Buchanan, a spokesman for Perricos, who added that UNMOVIC remained prepared to work with Kay's group if asked. Perricos, in comments similar to those made by Blix, his predecessor, said he believes most of Hussein's thousands of chemical and biological weapons had been destroyed by 1993, and that nuclear facilities had been dismantled. Much of that destruction was supervised by the United Nations after the 1991 Persian Gulf War, and some was carried out independently by the Iraqis. Perricos also said he believed any remaining stocks of chemical and biological agents were destroyed well before the U.S. invasion last spring, though the Iraqis offered no evidence of what they had done. http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A62518-2003Dec13.html   208. Saddam's capture and Blair's body language The news has just come through here that Saddam has been captured. On TV we have seen Bremer's triumphalist announcement from Baghdad but also Blair's announcement from 10, Downing Street. This was far from triumphalist in tone. He spoke the measured words that everybody expected him to speak about Muslims pulling together in Iraq and so on, but what struck me very forcibly was his body language. I have never seen Blair quite so stressed before. His words were saying one thing, his facial _expression_ was saying something else. He'd been speaking with Bush a few minutes before, apparently, and I couldn't help thinking that whatever Bush had told him hadn't cheered him up much. Quite what his agonised face was saying we cannot know at this point. My guess is that now Saddam has been captured, we shall soon know whether Blix and his UN team of inspectors were correct in saying that there were probably no more weapons of mass destruction (WMDs) left in Iraq at the time of the invasion. If so, it could be that this will bring about Blair's resignation quicker than it would have been otherwise. I think he was preparing to go soon after Christmas on a separate issue (losing a vote of confidence on university students' loans) and was then hoping that Lord Hutton's report on Dr Kellys' death would have let him off relatively lightly on the matter of his agreeing to allowing Dr Kelly's name to be released. But now, it might be that events will move too fast for him. In addition, president Chirac of France is hurling vituperation at Blair for the breakdown in the European Union constitutional summit yesterday. So Blair may be thinking that, on several counts, now he'll be resigning under a cloud -- two or three of them, in fact. So far, Grand Atatollah Sistani has acted with wisdom and restraint since the invasion. Much rests now on what sort of elections he will insist upon and whether a majority Shia government will  allow secular education to continue in the schools or whether they will be now be dominated by Shia clerics as they are in Iran or as the Wahabi clerics do in Saudi Arabia. The future is still fraught with immense problems for the Americans. If they accept Sistani's demands, and a legitimate government ensues, can Bush be sure that US and UK oil corporations will be able to negotiate development contracts in the northern oilfields? Aftyer all, this is what America badly needs as a form of insurance if an insurrection erupts in Saudi Arabia. Keith Hudson Keith Hudson, Bath, England, <www.evolutionary-economics.org>