The US is preparing to intensify its efforts to find weapons of mass destruction in Iraq, sending in 1 000 scientists, intelligence analysts and others, straining further the international disagreement over who should verify that the country is WMD-free, it was revealed yesterday.
The Iraq Survey Group will be led by a US general and equipped with mobile laboratories to do tests on site, the Wall Street Journal reported. An American official told the newspaper it would be ”a much more muscular organisation” than Unmovic, the UN inspections body.
The announcement will exacerbate disagreements between Washington and France, Russia and other security council members, who want the verification to be undertaken by Unmovic, led by the UN’s chief weapons inspector for Iraq, Hans Blix.
Britain is urging an alternative plan in which a neutral country or representative would rule on the matter, much as the Canadian general John de Chastelain has succeeded in maintaining the respect of all sides in Northern Ireland.
Blix has complained of being shut out by the allies and warned that purported discoveries of banned weapons by their own investigators will lack credibility.
In an interview with the German news magazine Der Spiegel, a frustrated Blix said the coalition had not given the UN weapons inspectors ”any prospect of co-operation”.
He also used the interview to express scepticism about President Bush’s claim that Syria has chemical weapons.
”Anyone claiming this should, in the interests of credibility, present the relevant proof very quickly,” he said. ”I doubt that [Syria] would have been enthusiastic to serve as a depot of weapons of mass destruction for Baghdad.”
The UN inspectors were sent into Iraq last November, but withdrawn before their work was completed, when the US invaded. Washington argued that Iraqi prevarication and evasion proved Saddam Hussein’s regime had weapons of mass destruction.
”Now we will see whether London and Washington were right,” Blix said.
He also asked why, if General Amir al-Saadi — a close ally of Saddam captured by the coalition — told the truth when he denied that Iraq had such weapons, ”Iraq played this wholly nasty game with the international community”.
The US has sent in its own team and, according to Blix, had tried unsuccessfully to lure away some of the UN’s inspectors.
He added: ”Apart from our expertise, we would have something [else] to offer: credibility … The coalition came as liberator and occupier … If its experts really do now discover weapons of mass destruction, the authenticity [of the finds] may be called into question.”
Reports on Iraqi weapons programmes that inspectors received from intelligence agencies were ”pathetic” and led to no WMD discoveries, he said.
The chief nuclear weapons inspector, Mohamed ElBaradei, said before the outbreak of war that he had been passed forged documents meant to show that Iraq had imported uranium from Niger. – Guardian Unlimited Â