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Ex-chief inspector: Iraq using 'smoke screen'
SYDNEY, Australia (CNN) -- A team of 17 U.N. weapons inspectors arrived Monday in Iraq to search the country for weapons of mass destruction. The inspections -- the first since 1998 -- will begin Wednesday. Some 80 to 100 inspectors are eventually expected to take part. The inspectors will provide an initial report to the United Nations within two months. Richard Butler, the man who led the last U.N. weapons inspection team in Iraq, spoke Monday from Sydney, Australia, with CNN Anchor Paula Zahn about what the new team of inspectors can expect to find. ZAHN: This team that's going in [has 11] folks who specialize in the chemical and biological weapon arena and then six in the nuclear weapons arena. What will be their biggest challenge in the early days of these inspections? BUTLER: They will go and check the base line. They'll see if some of the equipment that was left there before is still operating. I'll be intensely surprised if it were. And you know, they will begin to scope out what they need to do in this 60-day period that they've got before the first report goes back to the Security Council. They will look first at relatively simple sites. But fairly soon, before Christmas, I would predict that they will need to go to some of the serious places. And here's the real challenge. They will need to run to ground what is now widely accepted to have been the practice of Saddam [Hussein] in the last four years without inspections, namely to make mobile some of his production facilities for biological and chemical weapons, literally to put those labs in trucks and drive them around the country. And that will be their biggest challenge -- to run to ground this whole new challenge of mobility, of, you know, manufacturing processes. ZAHN: Well, if these labs are so mobile, what are the chances that these inspectors, given the number of them on the ground in such a vast space, will be able to find them? BUTLER: Well, that number will expand before Christmas. It will reach about 100. When we were there in the past, we had something like about 100 inspectors at any given time, and over the period of a year, we would use about 1,000 people. Sometimes it would go a little over 100. Their chances, you know, it's hard to assess. Their chances are in some measure a bit better than the chance we had because they've got better equipment and they've got better surveillance from the sky -- satellite as well as U-2 aircraft. But on the other hand, they're facing a new challenge, which is this whole commitment by Iraq to not just putting things underground, as they did with us, but actually putting them on the back of trucks and moving them around. They will rely greatly on surveillance from the sky to watch the movement of vehicles. But you know, Iraq is a big place, and it's got many, many vehicles. I want to talk a moment, if I can, about what the [Iraqi] Foreign Minister [Naji Sabri] said about the declaration on weapons. I think quite frankly it was like from a Gilbert and Sullivan opera. It was just hilarious. ZAHN: Hilarious or disturbing? BUTLER: Well, it's both. But look, just bear this in mind. Two weeks ago, the Iraqis were saying, "We have no weapons of mass destruction." And I think you and I talked about the possibility that, logically speaking, that means that when they make their declaration, it would be a blank sheet of paper. Now the foreign minister has written a critical letter saying that this resolution will require them to submit thousands of pages of documents. How does that reckon with their claim that they have no weapons of mass destruction? What are these thousands of pages of documents going to say? Now I favor the thousand pages, by the way, because it's clear that they do have weapons of mass destruction, and the blank sheet of paper would have been ridiculous. Now then he goes on to say, "If we make just one inaccuracy -- one inaccuracy -- and we're in trouble big time." I want to make this point: There is no room for inaccuracy. There is one person in the whole world who knows exactly what weapons of mass destruction Iraq has got, and that's the president of Iraq. He has the ability to instruct that that document have no inaccuracies in it, be absolutely truthful, absolutely accurate. See what I mean? This is a black comedy. The trouble is -- it's not just funny; it's potentially deeply serious. ZAHN: Yes, and as you've just given us your interpretation of what you think the statement is like, I'm just curious whether you think that that was just for domestic consumption. BUTLER: It's the Iraqi propaganda technique, and there's little I admire about them, but my god, they're good at that. You know, they rely on people having short memories, short institutional memories. You know, I spent the weekend studying some of the statements they've made recently in conjunction with this new resolution, you know, helping prepare to have a good talk with you. And it's amazing the number of misleading statements they've been writing, claims they've been making, which rely basically on the idea that we will forget what happened in the past. What they have put together in accepting this resolution, and now in this new statement, is a classic piece of Iraqi propaganda, a big smoke screen, lots of claims that aren't true, and avoidance of the central realities that I pointed out to you a moment ago. They know exactly what weapons they've got. They know exactly. They can write it accurately on a piece of paper, if they choose to. But what they're doing is smoke screen. It is muddying the water, saying that this is all going to be very, very difficult. And they know that there are at least some people out there in the world who will receive that propaganda positively.
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