Disarming Iraq, monitoring power and resistance

Disarming Iraq, monitoring power and resistance

Michael V. Deaver

Library of Congress

The flickering image of a boiler-like machine on a television screen at a United Nations office here [Baghdad] indicates that the monitoring system imposed on Iraqi industry four years ago [1991] is achieving its aim of preventing President Saddam Hussein from building weapons of mass destruction.... A little green line, constantly expanding and contracting at the bottom of the screen at the United Nations office, means the picture is being relayed live from a camera trained on an instrument known as a vacuum furnace on a factory floor somewhere in Iraq.1

Last month [December 1997], the United Nations weapons inspectors thought they were closing in on a long-sought prize: computer hard disks that contain the records of Iraq's entire program of weapons of mass destruction.... But the Iraqis stalled for 20 minutes, as inspectors watched from a distance while the old hard drives were whisked away and replaced with new ones. When the inspectors finally got permission to enter, the equipment ran only computer games.2
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