I’ve always wondered why the warbloggers among us are so convinced that inspections can’t possibly work, given their successes in the past. In some cases, it’s clear that they just want a pretext for invasion, but in others they simply appear to have forgotten.
For example, Glenn Reynolds links to Oz warblogger Paul Wright who asks what happens if the weapons inspectors, by some miracle, actually find something? Reynolds continues “His rather chilling answer suggests that either (1) the powers-that-be have no real expectation that this will come to pass; or (2) they haven’t thought about this hard enough. I’m guessing it’s (1).”James Lileks goes over much the same hypothetical ground
These would be fascinating hypotheses to kick around, if it weren’t for the fact that it’s already happened
. As Michael O’Hanlon of Slate notes, inspections are the only reason Saddam doesn’t already have the bomb:
“As is well known, Iraq was disturbingly close – perhaps only months away – from building a nuclear weapon at the time of Desert Storm. After Israel bombed its Osirak nuclear reactor a decade earlier, Iraq had embarked on a program to develop less visible technologies for enriching uranium from domestic and possibly foreign sources?its “basement bomb” project. In numerous ways, this effort resembled the difficult and tedious approach taken in the 1940s during the Manhattan Project in the United States, particularly the effort to build uranium-235 devices such as the one dropped on Hiroshima. U.N. inspectors found and destroyed most of the equipment believed to have been involved in Iraq’s effort before the Gulf War of 1991.”
To restate the obvious, inspections will only work with free and unfettered access, and it’s up to the Security Council to ensure this.
John Quiggin 