Worse Than a Farce: The danger and lunacy of U.N. inspections.

At a committee hearing on the eve of the 9/11 anniversary, Republican congressman Edward Schrock of Virginia paid an unusual tribute when he expressed his gratitude for the witnesses' chilling accounts of Saddam Hussein's arsenal of nuclear, chemical, and biological weapons: On behalf of the members of the House Armed Services Committee, he thanked the former U.N. weapons inspectors for "scaring us to death."

Nor was Schrock, a House freshman, reacting as a nervous newcomer to military realities: He is a retired Navy captain with 24 years' service, including two tours in Vietnam. During a closed-door briefing on the scariest scenarios, and in a scary-enough open session, the veteran experts agreed that if the Iraqi dictator isn't removed from power, he will almost certainly use his weapons of mass destruction to launch a devastating first attack against the U.S. and its friends.

The witnesses were Dr. David A. Kay, who was chief nuclear-weapons inspector in Iraq for the United Nations Special Commission (UNSCOM) immediately following the Gulf War, and Dr. Richard O. Spertzel, who headed up the biological-weapons inspection team until UNSCOM was booted from Iraq in 1998. Their informed case for the ouster of Saddam Hussein rests on their experiences with the severe limitations of the U.N.'s inspection regime, the fecklessness of the inspectors' overseers on the U.N. Security Council, "the gigantic scope and indigenous nature of Saddam's weapons program," and the coercive power wielded by his brutal dictatorship.

"We ought to give that inspection thing one more shot," former president Bill Clinton recently declared on Larry King Live. Others calling for another round of cat-and-mouse with Saddam share Clinton's ignorance of the fundamental nature of the U.N.'s "inspection thing," and ignore the Security Council's record of playing self-serving politics with the commission's mission and methods.

The U.N.'s weapons inspectors were charged with confirming that Saddam was fulfilling his post-Gulf War commitments to disarmament. Having been designed to verify the actions of a cooperating state, the inspection regime wasn't up to the task of catching a duplicitous dictator bent on hiding evidence of prohibited weapons in every nook and cranny of Iraq. Gary Milhollin, director of the Wisconsin Project on Nuclear Arms Control, explains, "It is a different proposition altogether to wander about a country looking for what has been deliberately concealed. That is a task with no end."

Having spent years in Iraq at precisely such an endless task, Dr. Kay says that it would take "tremendous resources, actually . . . resources beyond anything I can imagine," to prevent Saddam from thwarting inspections. The totalitarian Iraqi regime did a far better job of keeping track of the inspectors than the inspectors were able to do of keeping track of weapons. A recent analysis of the 280 inspections of facilities and sites that UNSCOM conducted from 1991 to 1998 found that fewer than a half dozen were surprise visits, catching the Iraqi minders off guard. Kay points out that Saddam has spent 20 years and an estimated $40 billion on a weapons-of-mass-destruction program that involves 40,000 Iraqis. To counter these enormous resources, any effective inspection force would be, in Kay's words, "very much like an occupation."

Furthermore, in their attempts to discover Iraq's deadliest weapons the inspectors actually had to fight a two-front war. The inspection teams were undercut by members of the Security Council eager to make business deals with Iraq, and cited an irresponsible buck-passing attitude of "if it were a serious problem, the U.S. would take care of it." By the time the U.N. capitulated in allowing Saddam to refuse inspectors access to "sensitive sites," Kay claims, UNSCOM had become so emasculated it "had almost become a shielding force for Iraq's weapons- of-mass-destruction development program."