Stardate 20021206.1621

(On Screen): I've been blindsided. I'm concerned. I'm worried. I'm apalled. I'm actually a bit pissed off. I did not expect that when Iraq filed its omnibus "We don't have any weapons" report this weekend that the report would first have to go through weeks of processing and evaluation by UNMOVIC and the IAEA before copies of it were given to members of the Security Council.

That's not mandated by the language of UNSC Resolution 1441, but apparently the members of the council agreed today to let the report be checked, evaluated and censored before copies of it are given to UNSC members. The concern, apparently, is the ten non-veto powers, because the information in the report could conceivably help them learn to make WMDs. It's hard to see how there could be any danger in giving the raw report to the veto powers, since all five of them already know how to make all the kinds of weapons that Iraq has had in the past and is thought to have been trying to make recently, but I guess the idea of treating the ten transient members differently wasn't acceptable.

The first concern I had wasn't actually justified. I worried that given UNMOVIC's apparent commitment to the primary goal of making sure to not give the US any excuse to attack (as opposed to trying to actually find what Iraq is concealing) that it might go beyond merely removing information which could help spread knowledge about making WMDs and also redact anything that could be used as an excuse by the US to attack. But the reality is that our excuse will not be what is in the report, but rather what isn't, and as such UNMOVIC can't actually do anything about that.

More of a worry is the time this is going to take. They're talking about weeks of work, especially if the majority of the material is in Arabic. It's expected to top 10,000 pages, and it would have to be translated, and then painstakingly checked against records UNMOVIC and the IAEA already have, and we could be talking weeks or even months.

All of which means that my prediction of war before the end of the year just went into the trashcan. It's not going to happen, unless Bush decides to claim that UNMOVIC itself is stalling, and moves anyway. (For example, by using something else entirely as a provocation, or outright deciding to move without any provocation.)

Donald Sensing has been saying that conditions in Iraq are not optimal for war now anyway. He has always thought that February was more realistic both in logistical terms and also in terms of ground conditions. I hope he's right.