Stardate 20021226.1813

(On Screen): The government of Iraq proudly boasts that after a month of inspections, nothing has been found. That's true, but it really doesn't prove anything.

For one thing, one month is really nothing like enough for anything meaningful to have happened. But for another, the inspectors aren't really trying to find anything.

The inspectors work for the UN, and I think they view their primary job to be preventing war. So I think they really do want to find and destroy all the rest of Iraq's WMDs, including those they produced since 1998, but not soon.

In the short run, the only way they can prevent war is to not provide the US with any excuse. Which means that the last thing they want to do right now is to find anything really important. What they want to do is to delay, to calm things down, to cause a long enough pause so that (they hope) the ardor for war in the US will diminish and the forces we've moved there will be getting fatigued and will have to be withdrawn. It isn't possible to maintain forces at full readiness for months, and if the inspectors can manage to drag out the process for six months, then it will be possible for them to actually start searching for real without having to worry that doing so will set off a conflagration.

That's why they've been looking at the obvious facilities where banned weapons would have been expected to have been developed.

Now work with me here: suppose that you are Saddam and you had been producing nerve gas in a particular facility and your enemies know it. Suppose that your enemy had telegraphed his hostile intentions for nearly a year, and that you had two months warning that he intended to get the UN to restart the inspection process.

Where's the last place you're going to be storing your secret stockpiles of nerve gas? That's easy: in the facility where you made it. You're going to hide it in places like people's basements, or under schools, or buried out in the desert somewhere, or almost anyplace else which has no clear relationship to military facilities, and you'll have spent that last two months scrubbing the place where it had been made to remove any trace of evidence that any nerve gas had actually been there.

The one place in Iraq you can be sure you won't find any weaponized anthrax is a biological lab capable of producing weaponized anthrax. The one place in Iraq you can be sure you won't find any weapons-grade uranium is anywhere near a nuclear facility. (If you were Saddam, would you store those things in those kinds of places?) And that's where the inspectors have been visiting.

The inspectors have been going to exactly the kinds of places where there is zero chance of finding anything. And the inspectors know it. The whole thing is a charade, whose purpose is to try to deflect the US and make sure we don't invade.

The inspectors and the government of Iraq don't agree about what the final outcome should be, but in the short run they both have the same goal: for the inspectors to look actively but not to find anything, for the inspection process to not give the US any excuse to attack. It's hardly any wonder the Iraqi government has been so cooperative with the inspections.