VINCENT BROWNE: Nothing revealed at the UN Security Council on Monday offers justification for the slaughter of thousands of Iraqis, the devastation of the lives of millions more and the chaos which threatens the Middle East and beyond which war would bring.
Mohamed El Baradei, the head of the International Atomic Energy Agency, said the agency had made "good progress" in examining Iraq's nuclear capability. He addressed an issue raised by George Bush and Tony Blair of rebuilding activity at the sites of the past Iraqi nuclear programme - both used this as evidence of the immediate and terrifying menace of the Iraqi regime. The weapons inspectors visited these sites, and Dr El Baradei said: "The IAEA has found no signs of nuclear activity at any of these sites."
He also addressed the "hot" issue of the aluminium tubes. George Bush said last October 7th: "Iraq has attempted to purchase high-strength aluminium tubes and other equipment needed for gas centrifuges, which are used to enrich uranium for nuclear weapons." This was referred to in the British dossier of September last and since repeated by the State Department and the CIA. The Iraqis had claimed that the attempts to acquire these tubes were related to a conventional weapons programme.
Dr El Baradei said on Monday: "It appears that the aluminium tubes would be consistent with the purpose stated by Iraq and, unless modified, would not be suitable for manufacturing centrifuges." He said they had conducted 139 inspections over the last two months. They found that "no prohibited nuclear activities have been identified during these inspections" and "to conclude: we have to date found no evidence that Iraq has revived its nuclear weapons programme since the elimination of that programme in the 1990s". So on the most critical issue in contention - whether Iraq had acquired or was about to acquire nuclear weapons capacity - the alarms raised by George Bush and Tony Blair were found to be groundless.
Hans Blix, the head of Unmovic, the UN Monitoring, Verification and Inspection Commission, the body responsible for investigating whether Iraq has chemical or biological weapons, said Iraq had co-operated "rather well". Access was provided to all sites they wanted to inspect whenever they wanted. They also received "great help" in building the infrastructure of Unmovic in Iraq.
He qualified these compliments with complaints over small demonstrations at some inspection sites and Iraqi propaganda on the role of the inspectors. He also acknowledged that the Iraqi declaration of December 7th contained "a good deal of new material and information covering the period from 1998 and onward".
However, Blix went on to make several points which have served to bolster the US case for war. He said there were "indications" that Iraq had worked on purifying and stabilising the nerve agent, VX, and that the agent had been weaponised. These "indications" were evident to the UN weapons inspectors before they ceased their inspections in 1998.
The International Institute for Strategic Studies last September in its Strategic Dossier, which was given much attention then, concluded: "Any VX produced before 1991 is likely to have decomposed over the past decade." Nobody has claimed - so far - that Iraq has been in a position to manufacture chemical weapons in the meantime.
SO WHATEVER evidence there is or was of Iraqi attempts to manufacture VX and whatever failures there are on the part of Iraq to account for all the chemical bombs manufactured before 1991, especially during the Iran-Iraq war from 1981 to 1988 (Blix made a big point of the "missing" 6,500 chemical bombs), is of no discernible significance. The bombs and weapons are now useless.
Blix also complained there were "strong indications" Iraq had produced more anthrax than it had previously declared to the weapons inspectors and that "at least some of this was retained over the declared destruction date". Even if this is true what does it prove? The Centre for Strategic Studies concluded in 1998 that anthrax produced in bulk before 1991 would be effectively weaponised. It said the evidence was that the type of anthrax capable of being produced was of a type that would degrade over a few years.
What is of most significance from the two reports to the Security Council is that no conclusive evidence has been produced at all that Iraq has any weapons of mass destruction and that much of the claims of Washington and London have been wildly exaggerated. But this does not seem to matter.
The American political and military timetable requires war within six weeks, and war is what the Iraqis are going to get.
With several of the peace protesters, I stood at the perimeter fence at Shannon Airport coming up to midnight last Thursday. Three passenger aircraft - one in the Aer Lingus colours - were stationed at the terminal, carrying over 1,000 troops and two military cargo planes ("cargo" obligingly written on the side but what "cargo"?), one about to take off.
One had a sense of despair that at the time of Ireland's good fortune, we were stealthily participating in bringing such anguish and desolation to others.