Advantage with the UN arms inspectors as they return

IRAQ: More development equipment should allow the UN arms inspectors greater chances of success than their predecessors, suggests Tom Clonan

Hans Blix and the UN Monitoring Verification and Inspection Commission (UNMOVIC) return to Iraq with a strengthened hand.

After an absence of four years, the former UNSCOM weapons inspection teams are now armed with a strongly-worded UN resolution combined with a comprehensive intelligence dossier on suspected weapons facilities.

This provides the UN with both the means and the wherewithal to complete the mission.

The most potent and coercive factor working in favour of the renewed inspection regime is the deadline set for December 8th requiring the Iraqis to provide a comprehensive account of their weapons of mass destruction (WMD) programmes.

This deadline allows for no ambiguity or obfuscation on the part of Saddam Hussein's regime. It is a final demand for a full inventory of Iraq's WMD and missile development programmes to date. This inventory would also include a full account of developments prior to the Gulf war in 1991.

Significantly, one of the conditions of the 1991 Gulf war cease-fire was for the Iraqi regime to provide a "full, final and complete declaration of its nuclear, biological and chemical capabilities". The Iraqi regime never delivered such a declaration, and the period of UNSCOM's weapons inspections up to 1998 was marked by obstruction, deception and interference on the part of the Iraqi authorities.

As a result of President Saddam's refusal to provide such a list or to co-operate meaningfully with the inspection regime, the UNSCOM headquarters in Iraq had to engage in painstaking investigative and detection work in order to unearth President Saddam's WMD programmes.

Despite the immense logistical problems this presented, prior to its departure in 1998 UNSCOM had built up a comprehensive profile of Iraq's attempts to acquire nuclear, biological and chemical weapons.

The new UNMOVIC inspection teams will have a different modus operandi to that of UNSCOM four years ago. The new teams will be highly mobile and no longer confined to laboratory facilities in Baghdad.

New technology will enable the teams to make on the spot analyses of nuclear, biological and chemical materials in unrestricted snap inspections throughout Iraq.

This will include unannounced and random inspections of President Saddam's presidential palaces along the river Tigris.

Of particular concern to the UN inspectors is the prospect of a renewed biological weapons programme by the Iraqi regime. For the Iraqis, biological agents would represent a viable and easily-concealed route to WMD capability.

In order to combat this threat, the US has identified Iraq's top microbiologists and has developed a detailed intelligence profile of the facilities within which they work. When monitoring these facilities, UN inspectors will have miniaturised biological assay kits allowing them to carry out on-site, real-time analyses of biological production facilities.

Using this new technology, UNMOVIC inspectors will be able to identify potential weapons facilities within 20 minutes of arriving at a given location. This would allow for the immediate cataloguing of "material breaches" of the UN resolution and would allow for the immediate destruction of such facilities.

In relation to chemical weapons, the inspection teams will carry newly-developed chemical spectrophotometers allowing for the instant identification of chemical agents. The capability to instantly identify chemical substances independent of centralised laboratory facilities would allow UNMOVIC to detect chemical WMD facilities in location.

In terms of their nuclear and missile development programmes, the US and Britain have gained a great deal of intelligence through satellite imagery and from air intelligence.

In short, despite the immense size of Iraq, the renewed search for WMDs does not represent a "needle in a haystack" exercise.

As the UNMOVIC teams assemble in Baghdad over the coming weeks, the Iraqis will come under intense pressure to provide an exhaustive inventory of their weapon stockpiles by December 8th.

This date will provide Iraq the last opportunity to avoid invasion. Based on the past performance of the Iraqi regime however, it is likely that the approach of this date will take on the character of a countdown to war.

Tom Clonan is a retired army officer who lectures in the school of media at the Dublin Institute of Technology