The UN Security Council decided on Friday to terminate the mandate of UNMOVIC – the UN Monitoring, Verification and Inspection Commission, itself the successor to the UN Special Commission (UNSCOM) established in 1991 to oversee post-war dismantlement of Iraq’s CBRN arsenal. Condi Rice and Margaret Beckett had written wrote a joint letter to the Security Council – the latter less than a week before her departure – saying:
“Together with the government of Iraq and other Member States, the United States and the United Kingdom … have been working since March 2003 with the objective of locating and securing, removing, disabling, rendering harmless, eliminating or destroying weapons of mass destruction … developed under the regime of Saddam Hussein … We wish to inform the Security Council that all appropriate steps have been taken to secure, remove, disable, render harmless, eliminate or destroy … all known elements of Iraq’s known weapons of mass destruction.”
There’s a certain amount of predictable sniggering at the news in many quarters. Well, sure they’ve been ‘secured, removed, disabled, rendered harmless, eliminated or destroyed’: there were none, right?
But in case you were thinking that UNMOVIC’s demise looked like an exercise in closing the stable door four years after the horse had bolted, Richard Weitz at World Politics Review argues that in fact, closing UNMOVIC down was a serious mistake.
Far from CBRN weapons being a non-issue in Iraq, he notes that insurgents in Iraq are already using chlorine bombs and appear to be on the lookout for even more serious chemicals. Where might they be getting such technologies, he wonders?
According to [UNMOVIC] … satellite photos show that most of the dual-use chemical production equipment Saddam used to manufacture weapons has been removed from its original locations. These revelations embarrassed coalition forces responsible for securing the sites and led to speculation that at least some of the equipment might have been diverted for insurgent or criminal use.
The fear of chemical weapons use by terrorists or rogue states extends far beyond Iraq. In recent months, U.S. federal and state homeland security officials have become increasingly concerned that terrorists and other groups might imitate … Iraqi insurgents and employ chlorine bombs within the United States. European governments have also become alarmed by the recent use of chlorine weapons in Iraq. For example, since February 2007, British police have monitored the movement of industrial chlorine as a precaution against possible efforts by terrorists or other non-state actors to hijack trucks transporting the chemical.
So why was UNMOVIC closed down, if the CBRN threat in Iraq is ongoing and UNMOVIC’s expertise about the country’s former WMD programs is so valuable? Weitz argues that the reason was simple: the US and UK wanted to avoid embarrassment.
