Iraq team's work begins - U.N.'s first inspections this week to offer more practice than evidence

WASHINGTON - The campaign to eliminate Iraq's most deadly weapons officially begins on Monday when 18 U.N. inspectors are scheduled to arrive in Baghdad toting thick dossiers on hundreds of potential weapons sites, from warehouses and clinics to breweries and petrochemical plants.

The team plans to make its first inspection on Wednesday, when it will scour an undisclosed site for telltale equipment, chemicals and documents that could provide clues that Iraq has rekindled covert biological, chemical and nuclear programs since 1998, when U.N. inspectors last withdrew.

These initial searches will probably involve well-known sites long associated with Iraq's weapons programs and are expected to be essentially warm-up exercises unlikely to produce confrontations or much evidence, U.N. officials and other arms-control experts said.

"I think Blix is under immense, quiet pressure from the United States," said Anthony Cordesman, an Iraq expert at the Center for Strategic and International Studies in Washington.

"If he doesn't go to core inspection areas quickly, he understands he will be in a quiet confrontation with the United States," Mr. Cordesman said.

What concerns U.S. and U.N. officials most are potential Iraqi innovations for hiding weapons: mobile biological weapons labs and underground or urban facilities for chemical and nuclear weapons.

Weapons experts say the new urban sites are probably housed in ordinary-looking warehouses and commercial buildings in densely populated areas, where they would be harder to detect by spy satellites and somewhat shielded from American bombs.

"It would be like something from The Man From U.N.C.L.E., where you go in a plain storefront and suddenly find yourself in a weapons lab," said David Albright, a former nuclear weapons inspector who is president of the Institute for Science and International Security in Washington.

Former inspectors and U.N. officials say inspectors first will search for clear evidence of weapons production that could lead directly to charges that Iraq is in "material breach" of U.N. resolution 1441 requiring it to disarm.

Given President Saddam Hussein's expertise at hiding weapons, though, officials say it is more likely that violations will be documented incrementally, through painstaking detective work that could take months.

To that end, inspectors will be meticulously documenting two other types of evidence: patterns of deceit and attempts to obstruct inspections. These could range from disabling jeeps to destroying documents to refusing to account for weapons materials that inspectors are certain exist.

"The strategy is to come up with a dossier of deception," said Raymond A. Zilinskas, a former U.N. weapons inspector now with the Monterey Institute for International Studies in California.

A crucial point will come on Dec. 8, when Iraq is required to produce a comprehensive list of all its weapons sites and dual-use installations.

Among them are industrial plants, agricultural sites, medical labs and research centers that could have both civilian and military uses. Iraq has hundreds, possibly thousands of such sites.

The declaration must also account for weapons materials that inspectors had documented before 1998: hundreds of artillery shells potentially filled with mustard gas, Scud missiles capable of carrying chemical or biological warheads, hundreds of tons of poison gases and seed stock for biological agents such as anthrax or botulinum toxin.

"The declaration will be huge," said Gustavo Zlauvinen, the New York representative of the International Atomic Energy Agency, which will handle the nuclear weapons inspections. "It will take weeks to get through."

The declaration will immediately be sent to New York, where a team of 17 analysts will begin checking it against a vast archive containing 1 million pages of procurement records, blueprints, satellite photos and intelligence cables compiled over the last decade.

"If the declaration is patently false and everybody can see it," Secretary of State Colin Powell said on Thursday, "if he does not let the inspectors do their job, then the president is fully ready to take the necessary step, which is military force."

Another important task for the inspectors will be to interview Iraqi scientists and search for defectors. One such defector helped inspectors discover and nearly dismantle Iraq's nuclear weapons program in 1991. Many experts say the more bellicose the United States is about an invasion, the greater the likelihood of high-level defections. With an economy that is heavily reliant on the petrochemical industry, Iraq has a large number of dual-use plants that could be involved in manufacturing chemical weapons. Typical of these is Fallujah II, a major producer of precursor agents for blister and nerve gases before the 1991 Persian Gulf War. The plant, northwest of Baghdad, has been upgraded in the last two years and production of chlorine and phenol, which also have civilian uses, has increased, Western intelligence officials say.

Tracking Iraq's nuclear weapons sites is considered less complicated because of the radioactivity they emit and because the United Nations compiled a detailed picture of Iraq's program in the early 1990s.

Inspectors are likely to check nuclear research centers at Tuwaitha and Al-Furat, where construction work has been detected and where gas centrifuge equipment for enriching uranium may be hidden, Western officials assert. They will also inspect nuclear medicine clinics to account for radioactive materials that could be used in so-called dirty bombs.

Biological weapons materials are another matter, because they can be smaller, harder to detect and easier to move. Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld warned earlier this year that Iraq had created mobile biological labs that would be difficult to bomb.

Major sites historically involved in biological weapons production include Al Dawrah Foot and Mouth Disease Vaccine Facility, which was recently renovated, and the castor oil production plant at Fallujah III, which can be used to produce ricin toxin.

Western intelligence officials also say that Iraq's efforts to develop missiles capable of traveling from 372 and 621 miles have been reinvigorated. Under U.N. resolutions, Iraq is allowed missiles with ranges under 93 miles.

British and American intelligence agencies have recently released satellite photos showing construction at two sites that might be used for building and testing longer-range missiles: Al Mamoun solid rocket motor production plant and Al Rafah/Shahiyat liquid propellant test site.

At some point, the inspectors will also try to search eight so-called presidential palaces. Iraq placed restrictions on the inspectors' access to the palaces before they left in 1998.

These are huge complexes, each with official residences, Republican Guard barracks and dozens, even hundreds of support buildings. Mr. Hussein also has direct control of dozens of smaller office buildings and complexes that are on the inspectors' list.

Weapons experts say the new urban sites are probably housed in ordinary-looking warehouses and commercial buildings in densely populated areas, where they would be harder to detect by spy satellites and somewhat shielded from American bombs.
"It would be like something from The Man From U.N.C.L.E., where you go in a plain storefront and suddenly find yourself in a weapons lab," said David Albright, a former nuclear weapons inspector who is president of the Institute for Science and International Security in Washington.

re:
".."It would be like something from The Man From U.N.C.L.E., where you go
in a plain storefront and suddenly find yourself in a weapons lab," said David Albright,
a former nuclear weapons inspector who is president of the Institute for Science
and International Security in Washington...."

Hummmm...

So they're saying that with all Iraq's income from oil sales; all their high-tech
efforts to be "covert", Iraq is going to make and store this stuff in the usual
hiding places, instead of bunkers...... Or instead of buying the finished product?

"The Man from Uncle", during a commercial, maybe.....

Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.