Stardate 20021124.1603

(On Screen): It is now a foregone conclusion that the crisis with respect to Iraq will center on the report they are required to file on December 8, because it is now a foregone conclusion that it will be a pack of lies. Their diplomats are already trying to lay the groundwork for that report, because it's going to say that they have no forbidden weapons. When that happens, they're trying to make sure that as many gullible, or self-interested, or anti-American governments as possible out there are aligned to their point of view. They're trying to cast this primarily as American bullying, which is consistent with past policies.

The Iraqi Foreign Minister, Naji Sabri, has written a letter to Kofi Annan criticizing UNSC resolution 1441, more or less complaining that it stacks the deck against Iraq. In a sense that's true; it tries to set conditions for the inspections in such a way that Iraq no longer has any reasonable way to evade and deceive and hope to get the inspections ended and the sanctions lifted without actually having to disarm. But what's more important is that it makes clear that the government of Iraq has no intention whatever of actually being truthful or of actually cooperating, not to mention of actually disarming.

In fact, it outright denies that Iraq has any forbidden weapons at all. Excerpts from the letter have been published, and it includes the following:

Operational paragraph 3. This paragraph is based on an imaginary assumption of the existence of mass destruction programs in Iraq. Iraq has strongly denied this claim and the United States and Britain failed to give one credible proof on this matter.

Paragraph 3 is the one which requires Iraq to produce, by December 8, a report declaring every WMD it has, every delivery system it has, and every component or material which could be used to make either as well as all programs currently operating working on any of that.

Sabri is complaining to Daddy that the Brits and Yanks aren't playing fair. They were supposed to list what they thought Iraq had before now, so that Iraq would know what hadn't yet been discovered (and be able to deduce how they'd learned what they did, so as to better be able to conceal in the future). I think there can be no doubt that credible proof will appear after December 8, but of course the Iraqis (and certain others) won't agree that it's adequate, and from Iraq's point of view that's worse than useless because our governments will produce that proof as part of an announcement of the beginning of hostilities.

Iraq's government is warning everyone now that the December 8 report is going to be substantially incomplete, so as to give its friends time to prepare the diplomatic groundwork to prevent that from provoking war. (And there's evidence that their friends are already working in that direction, for instance in France also claiming that no evidence of Iraqi WMDs actually exist, and that a failure to declare them on December 8 won't actually be enough to justify war. And there's been yet another German threat to forbid use of German facilities and German airspace.) There will be massive and critical omissions in the report. Major stashes of chemical weapons which exist won't be declared. Entire development programs won't appear in it. Sabri attempts to work on the idea that Iraq should be cut some slack on this.

Operational paragraph 4. This paragraph makes a false assumption that Iraq might make false statements or fail to comply with the resolution. This false assumption leads to another false assumption, that this act represents a material breach of U.N. resolutions. This arbitrary decision as stated in this paragraph represents an unprecedented act because it considers the giving of inaccurate statements taking into consideration that there are thousands of pages to be presented in those statements is a material breach.

"Hey, man, this is going to be a hell of a big report and we've only been given a short time to create it. It wouldn't be fair to attack us just because we overlooked a bottle of bleach on a shelf somewhere in an obscure closet." Bush has been making speeches claiming "zero tolerance"; Sabri is attempting to maneuver the discussion into the realm of permitting Iraq some errors in the report, so that diplomacy can bog down in nuanced debates about just how many errors and what kind will actually be tolerated, and whether any given failure of compliance is really serious enough to justify an attack or maybe we should just frown real hard at Iraq and given them yet another chance.

But the report isn't going to just be missing a few details; it's going to be a total fabrication, a brazen attempt to deny that anything exists at all to find. That's a lot more than just a minor mistake on some unimportant detail on page two thousand, nine hundred and twenty seven in footnote 14.

Iraq's other major complain about this new inspection process is that they can't actually prevent it from finding things. The original inspection process went on for frustrated years, with the inspectors constantly being impeded and diverted at every opportunity. The new resolution was written to deliberately make