United Nations Security Council and The Iraq War - Inspections

Inspections

Following the passage of Resolution 1441, on 18 November 2002, weapons inspectors of the United Nations Monitoring, Verification and Inspection Commission returned to Iraq for the first time since being expelled. Whether Iraq actually had weapons of mass destruction or not was being investigated by Hans Blix, head of the Commission, and Mohamed ElBaradei, head of the International Atomic Energy Agency. Inspectors remained in the country until they withdrew after being notified of the imminent invasion by the United States, Britain, and two other countries.

In early December 2002, Iraq filed a 12,000-page weapons declaration with the UN. After reviewing the document, UN weapons inspectors, the US, France, United Kingdom and other countries thought that this declaration failed to account for all of Iraq's chemical and biological agents. Many of these countries had supplied the Iraqi regime with the technology to make these weapons in the 1980s during the Iran-Iraq War. On December 19, United States Secretary of State Colin Powell stated that Iraq was in "material breach" of the Security Council resolution.

Blix has complained that, to this day, the United States and Britain have not presented him with the evidence which they claim to possess regarding Iraq's alleged weapons of mass destruction.

On January 16, 2003, inspectors discovered 11 empty 122 mm chemical warheads. These components had not been previously declared by Iraq. Iraq dismissed the warheads as old weapons that had been packed away and forgotten. After performing tests on the warheads, UN inspectors believe that they were new. While the warheads are evidence of an Iraqi weapons program, they may not amount to a "smoking gun", according to US officials, unless some sort of chemical agent was also detected. It never was. UN inspectors believe there to be large quantities of weapons materials still unaccounted for. UN inspectors also searched the homes of several Iraqi scientists.

On January 27, 2003, UN inspectors reported that Iraq had cooperated on a practical level with monitors, but had not demonstrated a "genuine acceptance" of the need to disarm unilaterally. Blix said that after the empty chemical warheads were found on the 16th, Iraq produced papers documenting the destruction of many other similar warheads, which had not been disclosed before. This still left thousands of warheads unaccounted for. Inspectors also reported the discovery of over 3,000 pages of weapons program documents in the home of an Iraqi citizen, suggesting an attempt to "hide" them from inspectors and apparently contradicting Iraq's earlier claim that it had no further documents to provide. In addition, by the 28th, a total of 16 Iraqi scientists had refused to be interviewed by inspectors. The United States claimed that "sources" had told them that Saddam Hussein had ordered the death of any scientist who speaks with inspectors in private. No scientist has confirmed this, and Iraq has insisted that they were not putting pressure on the scientists.