Okay, so now the game is truly afoot. Iraq has its declaration to the United Nations, and now the fun starts.
First, an observation: Why does the AP story on this event say the following:
The Iraqi government presented to the rest of the world Saturday a mass of documents detailing its nuclear, chemical and biological activities and formally declaring to the United Nations that it has no weapons of mass destruction.
What we know of this document is that it is apparently 12,000 pages long, and that, as of now, nobody but the Blix team has access to it (not even the Security Council — but hold that thought).
Now, yes, the story quotes Lt.-Gen. Hossam Mohammed Amin, the Iraqi general who prepared the document, as stating flatly that they have no WMDs.
But that doesn’t count. The only thing that counts is what is actually in the document, as I understand it. And bottom line is, we won’t know that for several days, at least.
(Absurd, you say, why would he say that if the declaration didn’t actually back it up? First, think about who you are talking about here, and second, you don’t think there’s a vast amount of room for arguments of definition (“The Iraqi people do not consider sarin gas a WMD…”) in this situation?)
Bottom line: is it clearly premature to be saying that Iraq has “formally declared” that they have no WMDs. We just don’t know that.
But ok, let’s assume for the sake of argument that the declaration does say, in terms everybody can agree with, that Iraq has no WMDs. What happens then?
Well, one of two things happen:
1) The Bush administration presents some very hard evidence that it has been holding in reserve as to specific Iraqi violations, thereby showing all those who have been whining about the lack of specifics up until now exactly why they haven’t gotten them yet. (And not incidentally, restoring some of my faith that this President is serious).
2) Nothing much at all happens for a few weeks, in which case I start getting very, very worried.
Incidentally, about this whole flap regarding the disclosure of the declaration to the Security Council. Seems to me this is likely a communications snafu, not any serious disagreement.
I say this partly because, when I heard of it, the idea of not wanting to release the full document to a wide audience actually made some sense. The argument, as I understood it, was that the disclosure could very well take the form of something close to a how-to guide for a nation that wanted to pursue nuclear, chemical, and biological weapons.
When you remember that currently, Syria is on the Security Council, it starts to make a bit more sense why maybe giving that document out to everyone might not be such a hot idea, doesn’t it?
But this, of course, just points out a basically insoluable problem; you can’t get around the fact that Syria is a SC member, so they’ve got as much of a right as anyone to see the sensitive info, according to UN rules. Just yet another problem with ascribing moral and legal authority to a body that is nothing more than the sum of its (rather imperfect) parts…