Standing By Your Sex-Hobbyist -Man; Because It's Your Fault Too?

WHAT ELSE SHOULD WE EXPECT FROM THE USELESS U.N.?

(this speaks for itself)

U.N. Team Still Looking for Iraq's Arsenal
Though Work Is Seen as Irrelevant, Security Council Can't Agree to End It

By Colum Lynch -- Washington Post Staff Writer

More than four years after the fall of Baghdad, the United Nations is spending millions of dollars in Iraqi oil money to continue the hunt for Saddam Hussein's alleged weapons of mass destruction.

Every weekday, at a secure commercial office building on Manhattan's East Side, a team of 20 U.N. experts on chemical and biological weapons pores over satellite images of former Iraqi weapons sites. They scour the international news media for stories on Hussein's deadly arsenal. They consult foreign intelligence agencies on the status of Iraqi weapons. And they maintain a cadre of about 300 weapons experts from 50 countries and prepare them for inspections in Iraq -- inspections they will almost certainly never conduct, in search of weapons that few believe exist.

The inspectors acknowledge that their chief task -- disarming Iraq -- was largely fulfilled long ago. But, they say, their masters at the U.N. Security Council have been unable to agree to either shut down their effort or revise their mandate to make their work more relevant. Russia insists that Iraq's disarmament must be formally confirmed by the inspectors, while the United States vehemently opposes a U.N. role in Iraq, saying coalition inspectors have already done the job.

"I recognize this is unhealthy," said Dimitri Perricos, a Greek weapons expert who runs the team, known as the U.N. Monitoring, Verification and Inspection Commission (UNMOVIC), and manages its $10 million annual budget. But, he added, "we are not the ones who are holding the purse; the one who is holding the purse is the council."

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"The reality on the ground is there is no WMD there," said Charles Duelfer, a former U.N. weapons inspector who published the landmark 2004 report of the CIA-led Iraq Survey Group, which concluded that Iraq's weapons had been destroyed. "I think they understand the distance their work is from reality."

The U.N. inspection program also stands as a poignant reminder of U.S. intelligence blunders in Iraq and the U.S. failure to secure Iraq's sensitive industrial facilities after the invasion. The commission's prewar assessment -- that there was insufficient evidence to prove that Baghdad had resumed production of weapons of mass destruction -- flatly contradicted U.S. assertions at the time and has long since been vindicated.
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"The main part of the job is done," Blix said. "But there is a valuable asset that has stood the test and could be of great use in other areas," he added, noting that no international body conducts missile or biological weapons inspections.
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"This is really absurd. We're approaching five years now of this exercise in futility," said Feisal Amin al-Istrabadi, Iraq's deputy permanent representative to the United Nations.

Carne Ross, a former British diplomat who helped draft the 1999 resolution creating the U.N. commission, agrees. "The reason for them disappeared the day Baghdad fell," he said.

But even Ross regards UNMOVIC with nostalgia. He came up with the name one night by tossing cards with the words "commission," "verification," "observation," "inspection" and "monitoring" on a table and rearranging them until he found the least clumsy acronym.

"It doesn't exactly trip off the tongue," Ross said, "but it's my piece of history, and I'm clinging to it."

FULL ARTICLE HERE


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