WMD, MIA?

ElBaradei -- a war skeptic -- would bring a certain amount of credibility to any WMD findings. On Sunday, ElBaradei told the German newspaper Bild am Sonntag that "so far, no evidence has been provided that Iraq still has weapons of mass destruction." He stated that it won't suffice for "suspicious substances" to be "tested in U.S. laboratories. The results must be checked by the U.N. weapons inspectors. This is the only way to make credible statements about weapons of mass destruction which possibly still exist." ElBaradei also declared that only the United Nations has the authority to destroy any of these weapons.

The Bush administration's first impulse might be to brush such proclamations aside. Fleischer has said that the Bush administration has "never ruled out the possibility of U.N. inspectors playing some type of role in the future in Iraq." But that is hardly an invitation.

Australian Foreign Minister Alexander Downer told Australian TV that the "anti-American lobby will argue that the Americans can't be trusted, but the Iraqis have always been required by international law to destroy all these materials, with or without U.N. inspectors. And so, too, will the coalition be able to destroy this material, with or without U.N. inspectors." But "anti-American" or not, ElBaradei clearly has a constituency. "If there are claims by coalition forces about discovering weapons of mass destruction, only international inspectors can make a conclusive assessment of the origin of these weapons," Russian Foreign Minister Igor Ivanov said to the Federation Council, the upper house of the Russian legislature. "No other evaluation and final conclusion can be accepted."

Or, to put it more bluntly: "George W. Bush is going to find those weapons even if they don't exist," an April 11 letter to the editor of the Bangkok Post stated. "After all, what other reason is there to justify the slaughter of so many human beings, friend and foe alike?" The letter goes on to anticipate a scenario where "the horrifying weapons" are "discovered by a few small bands of Americans patrolling previously unexplored terrain," with no one else around -- no British, Australians, or media. "But not to fret, the very resourceful Americans will just happen to have a supply of fully loaded video cameras on hand with which to record their shock and awe at just happening to stumble across this huge threat to their homeland."

An April 9 editorial in the Herald -- of Glasgow, Scotland -- made some less conspiratorial points. "The one constant among all the reasons advanced for going to war was the claim that Iraq possessed WMD," it stated. "If this is not the case, then Saddam would be seen to have been ... hiding ... nothing all along. How could he avert war by handing over what he did not have? At a stroke, Saddam will have achieved the martyrdom he craves and the Muslim world will have its worst fears about western intentions confirmed."

When Robin Cook resigned from the Blair Cabinet as leader of the House of Commons on March 17 to protest the war, he said that "Iraq probably has no weapons of mass destruction in the commonly understood sense of the term -- namely, a credible device capable of being delivered against a strategic city target." Perhaps with the knowledge of such doubters once in his own Cabinet, on Sunday, British Defense Secretary Geoff Hoon seemed to agree with the need for international verification, telling reporters that "it is important that we have an objective source of verification." Hoon said he accepted "the principle, which is that we do need to have some extraneous authority to monitor what is happening." On April 9, British Prime Minister Tony Blair also made a move in that direction, saying at the House of Commons that "plainly it would be a good idea from whatever perspective to make sure there is some sort of objective verification of any potential weapons of mass destruction."

Hoon did beg off identifying which authority he would trust for the job. UNMOVIC, he said, "wasn't particularly successful in its time in Iraq." He said the coalition governments were still deciding "whether it should be some other international body or some other country that has a tried and tested reputation for objectivity in this area."

Either way, the British seem to be pushing for the involvement of some international organization of some repute for verification. Will the Bush administration go along with this? "It would be a mistake for the administration to let irritation over the U.N. interfere with what's in our own best interest," Feinstein says. "Not that it's stopped them before."

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