So Far So Good For Iraq
On the ground and able to peer "under the roofs" of suspected weapons storage sites once visible only in satellite photos, U.N. weapons inspectors have gone to work with brisk efficiency and found the Iraqis opening doors for them.
The true test of Iraq's cooperation will come, however, when the disarmament teams begin to dig for answers to what they call the "open question" - whether Iraq still has weapons of mass destruction.
At the White House, officials took a wait-and-see approach, saying they saw nothing particularly alarming or promising in the first two days of inspections.
"This is the beginning of a process," White House spokesman Sean McCormack said.
"There can be no peaceful disarmament without the willingness of Saddam Hussein's regime to cooperate in that process and every day is an indication of the regime's willingness to cooperate," McCormack said. "But, if the regime is not disarmed through peaceful means, it will be disarmed of its weapons of mass destruction by force."
United Nations inspectors pressed their hunt Thursday for the chemical, biological and nuclear weapons Saddam Hussein insists he doesn't have.
Among Thursday's targets, reports CBS News Correspondent Mark Phillips, was the al-Dawrah agricultural research center, south of Baghdad, where the Iraqis once insisted they were only making vaccines for animal diseases like foot and mouth, but where they were finally forced to admit they were producing biological weapons like botulinum toxins and some think anthrax. The inspectors combed the place looking for renewed activity.
"The facility is not in operation or at least it looks like it's not in operation," said team leader Demetrius Periccos. "We have found some rooms that we were told were freshly painted so we thought it would be a good idea to take some samples from some point."
The al-Dawrah plant not only has a history, its history sums up Iraq's credibility problem, reports Phillips. For years Iraq lied about what they were doing there. The object of this exercise is to see if they're lying again.
Even as the U.N. inspectors begin their challenging task, they're taking criticism from former inspectors, who say the new team is under-experienced.
Current and former inspectors told CBS News the U.N. conducted no background checks when it put together the current team: it relied instead on interviews and resumes submitted by the applicants.
U.S. and British warplanes attacked a "civilian and services" installation in northern Iraq on Thursday, killing one civilian, the official Iraqi News Agency said.
A coalition statement said planes dropped precision-guided bombs after being fired on by anti-aircraft artillery. The statement from the U.S.-led Operation Northern Watch headquarters in Turkey said the artillery fire came from sites south of Tall Afar, a town in Nineveh province.
The samples collected Thursday at al-Dawrah will be analyzed in the U.N.'s labs. And the search for other possible sites — even mobile labs on trucks where Iraq is now suspected of developing biological weapons — will go on.
The work the inspectors do in the weeks and months to come — to eliminate any Iraqi weapons of mass destruction, or at least to reduce the possibility of them — must be convincing enough to avert a U.S. call for international military action to disarm the Baghdad government. From Iraq's point of view, the inspections must be good enough to persuade the Security Council to lift the U.N. economic sanctions crippling its economy.
But first the arms monitors must make a dent in a list of hundreds of sites potentially connected with programs to produce chemical, biological or nuclear weapons. They have begun by returning to important facilities surveyed and "neutralized" by U.N. inspectors in the 1990s.
Under U.N. resolutions after the 1991 Gulf War, arms inspectors uncovered and destroyed tons of Iraqi chemical and biological weapons and the equipment to make them, and dismantled Iraq's nuclear weapons program. But the monitoring collapsed in 1998 amid disputes over U.N. access to Iraqi sites and Iraqi complaints of U.S. spying from within the U.N. inspection agency.
Nuclear inspectors from the Vienna-based International Atomic Energy Agency visited a complex of the government's al-Nasr company, 30 miles north of Baghdad, where they checked on sophisticated machine tools that can, for example, help manufacture gas centrifuges. Such centrifuges are used to "enrich" uranium to bomb-grade level — a method favored by the Iraqis in their bomb program of the late 1980s.
Both Perricos and the IAEA's Baute said they were satisfied that all sensitive equipment from both sites had been accounted for.
The arms monitors visited seven sites Wednesday and Thursday. They resume the field missions Saturday after devoting Friday, the Muslim sabbath, to office work.