Kyle_S
01-09-03, 07:02 PM
So the first 60 days of inspections in Iraq are coming to a close. The inspectors didn't find anything, which is not really surprising. The heads of UNMOVIC and the IAEA are about to report back to the UNSC, and what they'll say is that they don't think that Iraq's umpteen-thousand-page declaration was really complete but that they didn't find any "smoking guns".
The government of Iraq is trumpeting the fact that the inspections prove that they have no weapons. Others who oppose war are trying to claim that there's no provocation and thus that war isn't yet justified, and we need to give the inspections "time to work".
Those people are shifting the burden of proof. They're moving the goal posts.
The original inspection process, which lasted several years, developed into an adversary process. Iraq spent the entire time resisting and hiding and lying and the inspectors found and destroyed much despite all that. But it was slow, and uncertain, and eventually the entire process fell apart when the Iraqi government ceased even a semblance of cooperation.
The point of the resolution which passed in November was that this new round of inspections would not be permitted to be adversarial. Given that Iraq had several years without any external supervision by UN monitors, and many months warning that something like this might be coming, anything and everything they had which might be incriminating has long since been moved from where you'd ordinarily expect to find it, and craftily concealed in non-obvious places. Since the UN inspections involved checking exactly the places that the Iraqi government would have cleaned up, it's hardly surprising that nothing was found. (Especially since the inspectors didn't really, truly, want to find anything that might give the US a pretext for war.)
That doesn't mean that there's nothing to find. What it means is that the Iraqi government still isn't cooperating. The terms of the UNSC Resolution was not that we would return to the status quo ante of adversarial inspections, but rather that Iraq would formally change its policies and come clean, and actively assist the inspectors by telling them where to look.
UNMOVIC and the IAEA and the Iraqi government say there have been no smoking guns. That is a smoking gun. If Iraq had actually complied with UNSC 1441, they would have found a great deal by now.
We know that they still have such weapons, and they were given one last chance to admit it and come clean. It's not just that they haven't admitted to weapons our intelligence agencies know about; it's that they also haven't admitted to weapons which are publicly documented as not yet having been accounted for in 1998 when the last inspections process fell apart.
Instead, what's happened is that they are yet again delaying and denying. Iraq and the UN and others have asked us to tell them where to look, to tell them what we know about. What the Iraqi government doesn't know is how much we know and how we found out. If we tell them, then they could admit to the ones we finger, while continuing to conceal the ones we prove we didn't know about, while working on eliminating the means by which we discovered their secrets.
All of which means that Iraq is in material breach of the fundamental philosophy of UNSC 1441. To comply with it, the government of Iraq was required to give up its ambition to somehow retain at least some of its WMDs. Clearly it hasn't done so.
Should we give the inspection process longer to work? No. If the government of Iraq had actively cooperated, there would already have been progress and in that case more time might have been justified. But given the clear fact that the government of Iraq is still lying, still resisting, then there's no justification in giving them more time. They've had plenty of time to demonstrate a change of heart, and it's clear there hasn't been one.
This was their last chance. Sometimes "last" really does mean last.
Which is why we're going to be at war soon, and why there has been a massive increase in movement of troops and equipment to the region.
But the writing for that's been on the wall for a long time now, and even those whose job it is to try to prevent war have pretty much accepted that this one is inevitable. Which is why the UN and its member agencies are starting to make plans (http://abcnews.go.com/wire/US/reuters20030107_357.html) for dealing with this one.
As many as half a million Iraqis could require medical treatment as a result of serious injuries suffered in the early stages of a war on Iraq, U.N. emergency planners said in a document disclosed Tuesday.
The total includes some 100,000 expected to be injured as a direct result of combat and a further 400,000 wounded as an indirect result of the devastation, according to estimates prepared by the World Health Organization, the document said.
The confidential U.N. assessment was drafted a month ago but an edited version was posted Tuesday on the Web site of a British group opposed to sanctions on Iraq
U.N. officials confirmed the authenticity of the document, which assumes that unlike the 1991 Gulf War, a new war in Iraq would develop beyond an initial aerial bombardment into a large scale and protracted ground offensive.
"The resultant devastation would undoubtedly be great," the U.N. planners concluded. The estimates were based on material from several different U.N. organizations.
Those numbers are beyond belief. Of course, any statement of the form "As many as..." is highly suspect because it means someone's quoting worst-case numbers.
But more to the point, that kind of estimate is extremely dependent on fundamental assumptions about how the situation will develop and what strategy will be used and how well things will go. My own guess is that those numbers are high by at least a factor of 20:1, and maybe 100:1. And in some conceivable scenarios, civilian casualties might be "as low as" (ahem) zero, goose egg, not a single civilian harmed.
In fact, it isn't possible for anyone outside the US government to actually make anything like a reasonable estimate, because only our government (and certain trusted friends) know what the real plan is, and what weapons we'll use to fight it, and how they'll work.
But it's noteworthy that there were similar inflated estimates of civilian casualties before and during the operation in Afghanistan. (You remember those, right?)
The key assumption they seem to be making is that there will be a "protracted ground offensive". I can't reach the document in question (which has been posted) so I can't tell for sure, but this either means they think that the Iraqi army will meet our army on the ground and actually put up a credible fight, or that they're expecting us to engage in serious city fighting.
I no longer think so. At one time I was much more concerned about that, and I am fully aware that defense of the cities and use of the cities as combat zones is a linchpin of the Iraqi military strategy (as their best means of neutralizing our air power). But it's not at all clear that we even need to bother with them. The fact that an enemy defends somewhere doesn't imply we have to attack it.
This will not be a war against the Iraqi military. It's going to be a war against the Iraqi command. Our goal isn't really going to be to kill huge numbers of Iraqi soldiers; it's going to be to induce them to surrender in hordes after we kill their leaders. If a few thousand die-hard loyalists spread themselves through Baghdad and wait for us, why would we care?
If Saddam is dead and there is no longer any Baathist government and it's clear that resistance has become moot, who would those loyalists still have to be loyal to? Some would continue to hold out, but most would take the better part of valor.
To some extent the WHO has to make its evaluation based on plausible worst cases, because it needs to have contingency plans in place for disaster. But that doesn't mean that their worst case scenario is actually the highest likelihood outcome, and in fact, it's virtually certain that things will be much less bad than that.
The government of Iraq is trumpeting the fact that the inspections prove that they have no weapons. Others who oppose war are trying to claim that there's no provocation and thus that war isn't yet justified, and we need to give the inspections "time to work".
Those people are shifting the burden of proof. They're moving the goal posts.
The original inspection process, which lasted several years, developed into an adversary process. Iraq spent the entire time resisting and hiding and lying and the inspectors found and destroyed much despite all that. But it was slow, and uncertain, and eventually the entire process fell apart when the Iraqi government ceased even a semblance of cooperation.
The point of the resolution which passed in November was that this new round of inspections would not be permitted to be adversarial. Given that Iraq had several years without any external supervision by UN monitors, and many months warning that something like this might be coming, anything and everything they had which might be incriminating has long since been moved from where you'd ordinarily expect to find it, and craftily concealed in non-obvious places. Since the UN inspections involved checking exactly the places that the Iraqi government would have cleaned up, it's hardly surprising that nothing was found. (Especially since the inspectors didn't really, truly, want to find anything that might give the US a pretext for war.)
That doesn't mean that there's nothing to find. What it means is that the Iraqi government still isn't cooperating. The terms of the UNSC Resolution was not that we would return to the status quo ante of adversarial inspections, but rather that Iraq would formally change its policies and come clean, and actively assist the inspectors by telling them where to look.
UNMOVIC and the IAEA and the Iraqi government say there have been no smoking guns. That is a smoking gun. If Iraq had actually complied with UNSC 1441, they would have found a great deal by now.
We know that they still have such weapons, and they were given one last chance to admit it and come clean. It's not just that they haven't admitted to weapons our intelligence agencies know about; it's that they also haven't admitted to weapons which are publicly documented as not yet having been accounted for in 1998 when the last inspections process fell apart.
Instead, what's happened is that they are yet again delaying and denying. Iraq and the UN and others have asked us to tell them where to look, to tell them what we know about. What the Iraqi government doesn't know is how much we know and how we found out. If we tell them, then they could admit to the ones we finger, while continuing to conceal the ones we prove we didn't know about, while working on eliminating the means by which we discovered their secrets.
All of which means that Iraq is in material breach of the fundamental philosophy of UNSC 1441. To comply with it, the government of Iraq was required to give up its ambition to somehow retain at least some of its WMDs. Clearly it hasn't done so.
Should we give the inspection process longer to work? No. If the government of Iraq had actively cooperated, there would already have been progress and in that case more time might have been justified. But given the clear fact that the government of Iraq is still lying, still resisting, then there's no justification in giving them more time. They've had plenty of time to demonstrate a change of heart, and it's clear there hasn't been one.
This was their last chance. Sometimes "last" really does mean last.
Which is why we're going to be at war soon, and why there has been a massive increase in movement of troops and equipment to the region.
But the writing for that's been on the wall for a long time now, and even those whose job it is to try to prevent war have pretty much accepted that this one is inevitable. Which is why the UN and its member agencies are starting to make plans (http://abcnews.go.com/wire/US/reuters20030107_357.html) for dealing with this one.
As many as half a million Iraqis could require medical treatment as a result of serious injuries suffered in the early stages of a war on Iraq, U.N. emergency planners said in a document disclosed Tuesday.
The total includes some 100,000 expected to be injured as a direct result of combat and a further 400,000 wounded as an indirect result of the devastation, according to estimates prepared by the World Health Organization, the document said.
The confidential U.N. assessment was drafted a month ago but an edited version was posted Tuesday on the Web site of a British group opposed to sanctions on Iraq
U.N. officials confirmed the authenticity of the document, which assumes that unlike the 1991 Gulf War, a new war in Iraq would develop beyond an initial aerial bombardment into a large scale and protracted ground offensive.
"The resultant devastation would undoubtedly be great," the U.N. planners concluded. The estimates were based on material from several different U.N. organizations.
Those numbers are beyond belief. Of course, any statement of the form "As many as..." is highly suspect because it means someone's quoting worst-case numbers.
But more to the point, that kind of estimate is extremely dependent on fundamental assumptions about how the situation will develop and what strategy will be used and how well things will go. My own guess is that those numbers are high by at least a factor of 20:1, and maybe 100:1. And in some conceivable scenarios, civilian casualties might be "as low as" (ahem) zero, goose egg, not a single civilian harmed.
In fact, it isn't possible for anyone outside the US government to actually make anything like a reasonable estimate, because only our government (and certain trusted friends) know what the real plan is, and what weapons we'll use to fight it, and how they'll work.
But it's noteworthy that there were similar inflated estimates of civilian casualties before and during the operation in Afghanistan. (You remember those, right?)
The key assumption they seem to be making is that there will be a "protracted ground offensive". I can't reach the document in question (which has been posted) so I can't tell for sure, but this either means they think that the Iraqi army will meet our army on the ground and actually put up a credible fight, or that they're expecting us to engage in serious city fighting.
I no longer think so. At one time I was much more concerned about that, and I am fully aware that defense of the cities and use of the cities as combat zones is a linchpin of the Iraqi military strategy (as their best means of neutralizing our air power). But it's not at all clear that we even need to bother with them. The fact that an enemy defends somewhere doesn't imply we have to attack it.
This will not be a war against the Iraqi military. It's going to be a war against the Iraqi command. Our goal isn't really going to be to kill huge numbers of Iraqi soldiers; it's going to be to induce them to surrender in hordes after we kill their leaders. If a few thousand die-hard loyalists spread themselves through Baghdad and wait for us, why would we care?
If Saddam is dead and there is no longer any Baathist government and it's clear that resistance has become moot, who would those loyalists still have to be loyal to? Some would continue to hold out, but most would take the better part of valor.
To some extent the WHO has to make its evaluation based on plausible worst cases, because it needs to have contingency plans in place for disaster. But that doesn't mean that their worst case scenario is actually the highest likelihood outcome, and in fact, it's virtually certain that things will be much less bad than that.