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Perle doubts inspectors { November 13 2002 } Original Source Link: (May no longer be active)
http://www.guardian.co.uk/international/story/0,3604,838728,00.htmlhttp://www.guardian.co.uk/international/story/0,3604,838728,00.html
UN inspection team 'cannot prevent war'
Threat of war: Richard Perle, a key Bush adviser, has little faith in Hans Blix's ability to succeed against Saddam
Ewen MacAskill and Edward Pilkington
Wednesday November 13, 2002
The Guardian
A key foreign affairs adviser to the Bush administration expressed serious doubts last night about the ability of the United Nations inspection team to hunt down Iraq's weapons of mass destruction and thus avert an war.
Richard Perle, a Pentagon adviser and a close associate of the defence secretary, Donald Rumsfeld, and his deputy, Paul Wolfowitz, said in an interview with the Guardian that the inspectors had only a slim chance of competing against Saddam Hussein. He criticised the chief arms inspector, Hans Blix, saying he was an unsuitable candidate for such a crucial task, and warned that the inspection team would be outnumbered and outwitted.
With less than one week to go before Unmovic (UN Monitoring, Verification and Inspections Commission) reaches Baghdad, the sharp criticisms of such an influential voice on Iraq reveal the depth of scepticism within Washington about the ability of the UN to avoid war.
According to Mr Perle, the only real hope of success for Unmovic in the face of such an enormous challenge was to use the full powers it has been given under the UN resolution. In particular, the arms inspectors must use their right to remove Iraqi scientists, along with their families, to a safe haven outside the country. Unless that new power is used, Mr Perle says, the lives of informants would be put at risk. He predicted that no new information would be offered - condemning the inspections to almost certain failure.
Removing experts
He was also alarmed by recent comments from Mr Blix about the practicality of squirrelling huge extended families across borders. Mr Blix has told the UN security council: "We see some practical difficulties in implementing this authority unless the Iraqis go along with it."
Mr Perle said so much was at stake that there should be no qualms about taking out entire families, even if they included hundreds of people. "It is vital that the inspectors can take people who have the knowledge and their families to safe places outside Iraq. Only then would they have the confidence to tell the truth. That's our only hope of learning something real."
Mr Perle, a former assistant defence secretary under Ronald Reagan who has the reputation of being Washington's leading hawk on Iraq, openly questioned the suitability of Mr Blix to head such a crucial mission. "If it were up to me, on the strength of his previous record, I wouldn't have chosen Hans Blix."
He said Mr Blix was appointed under the Clinton administration which he accused of lacking seriousness on the Iraq issue, and noted that as the former head of the International Atomic Energy Agency, Mr Blix had failed to detect Iraq's nuclear weapons build-up before the Gulf war. He said he hoped the unanimous vote in the UN security council for a resolution including the right to take experts out of Iraq would force Mr Blix to change his mind.
Asked whether the inspections were doomed to failure, he replied: "I am deeply sceptical that inspections by themselves can produce a result. They are a system for cooperating regimes to show their compliance, not for ferreting out arms in a regime determined to hide them."
Unmovic, numbering little more than 200 inspectors, would be grossly outnumbered by the 1,000-strong special unit set up by President Saddam specifically to run rings around the UN. They would have no chance of covering a country the size of France with up to 3m dwellings each capable of hiding documents and chemicals.
Baghdad had an array of tactics at its disposal to foil the inspectors, from orchestrating traffic jams to closing bridges to prevent inspectors reaching key sites. Mr Perle said the most revealing documents had already been moved from obvious locations such as the presidential palaces into people's homes. "Saddam is many things, but he is not a fool."
Despite all these hurdles, Mr Perle believes that it will soon become clear whether President Saddam intends to conform or whether he will continue to flout UN rules and face war. A key date will be December 8, the deadline for Iraq to present the UN with an inventory of all of its weapons of mass destruction.
There were a number of possible triggers which would see the end of arms inspections and the start of war. "We will know it clearly when the inspectors bump against locked doors or when an individual Iraqi with specific knowledge refuses to meet them or has passed away or has been killed in an automobile crash."
Any attempts by the Iraqis to fire on British or American planes would also act as an instant trigger.
For many years Mr Perle was seen as a colourful but maverick voice in US foreign policy. Now several of his proposals - not just on Iraq - have become perceived wisdom within Washington.
He has long advocated an end to the US ban on assassinating dictators whom he regards as posing a threat to their own people and to the world at large. "I absolutely believe in assassinations. I have always thought an absolute prohibition was unnecessarily inflexible and the easy argument is that it would have been right to assassinate Hitler."
Asked if the same applied to President Saddam, he replied: "Yes. Saddam has killed tens of thousands of people."
Last week, an unmanned US drone killed six al-Qaida suspects in Yemen in a clear indication that the Bush administration no longer regards assassinations as being beyond the pale.
Richard Perle spoke last night in London at the Intelligence Squared Debate, "This House Believes that Bush's Cure is worse than the Disease ".
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