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By Root 3693 0

1983, “understood the Iraqi view.”26 French leaders in industry, and perhaps some in politics, not only “understood” Iraq; they came to profit handsomely from it. President Jacques Chirac, for one, seemed comfortable with Saddam, whom he had shown around French nuclear power facilities in the 1970s. He had also negotiated an agreement to sell Iraq a nuclear reactor. In the decades that followed, France sold some $1. 5 billion of military equipment to Iraq.27 I don’t doubt that Iraq’s intransigence in defying the United Nations had been at least in part a result of Saddam’s belief that the UN Security Council was ineffective, and that his friends there would continue to give him political cover. He was right—almost.

By the end of 2002, the United Nations had reached a new low. The organization’s members seemed to have abandoned judgment and elected Libya, one of the world’s most backward dictatorships, to chair the UN Commission on Human Rights. To top that, the UN made Iraq the chair of the UN Disarmament Commission. This put Saddam in the driver’s seat of a body responsible for examining whether he was complying with disarmament obligations to the UN. And when it came to Iraq, the UN Oil-for-Food program had become a sad story of corruption and lies, as a later independent investigation established.*

As frustrating as the organization could be, it was not in America’s interests to see the United Nations follow the path of its predecessor, the League of Nations, the organization that watched as Italy’s Fascist forces invaded Abyssinia in 1935. President Bush wanted to rally the United Nations to support a U.S.-led effort to enforce the Security Council’s resolutions on Iraq. British Prime Minister Tony Blair, a persuasive advocate, buttressed Bush’s efforts. Bush and Blair, Powell and British Foreign Secretary Jack Straw coaxed and cajoled the members of the UN Security Council on the matter. Finally, on November 8, 2002, the Security Council voted 15-0 to support Resolution 1441. The resolution condemned Iraq’s weapons programs, demanded that Iraq reopen suspected weapons facilities for inspection, and threatened “serious consequences” if Iraq failed to provide the UN a comprehensive list of the WMD it retained. The resolution stated that this was Iraq’s “final opportunity” to comply with the international community.29

There had been no fewer than seventeen UN resolutions demanding that Saddam comply with various requirements since 1991. They specified that his regime demonstrate that it had: destroyed its WMD arsenal; ended support for international terrorists; stopped threatening neighbors; and ceased oppressing Kurds and Shiites. Because nothing seemed to result from their noncompliance with the earlier resolutions, Iraq concluded, not unreasonably, that it could safely respond to this latest, UN Resolution 1441, with still another shrug.

Weeks later Saddam Hussein’s regime produced a contemptuously incomplete declaration of their weapons programs. In December 2002, President Bush concluded that Iraq was in “material breach” of UN Resolution 1441.30 United Nations weapons inspector Hans Blix reported to the UN that “Iraq appears not to have come to a genuine acceptance, not even today, of the disarmament which was demanded of it and which it needs to carry out to win the confidence of the world and to live in peace.” Blix also said that based on an Iraqi Air Force document and Iraq’s former claims, one thousand tons of toxic nerve gas, one of the most lethal chemical weapons, remained “unaccounted for.” Since Iraq had actually used nerve gas before in the Iran-Iraq War, there was every reason to believe the regime still possessed it.31

Though Resolution 1441 was written as Iraq’s last chance to come into compliance with its obligations to the United Nations—the tip-off to most people was the phrase “final opportunity”—some members of the Security Council proceeded to insist that there needed to be still another vote on an additional “this time we really mean it” resolution before they would sign onto any military