Final Protective Fire

Wednesday, March 19, 2003

 

This is an interesting piece, found sort of above the fold on Drudge, which describes several interesting things. The first was an interesting tactic to pressure Iraqi operatives operating outside Iraq to "turn". Interestingly, the Iraqis evidently put a lot of knowledgable people out of country to frustrate attempts by Blix's Keystone Kops to interview them.

A handful of eleventh-hour recruits have come from among Iraqi scientists abroad who have also been approached lately by U.S. agents. The Baghdad government sent some of them overseas and elsewhere late last year to prevent their questioning by U.N. inspectors. Still other knowledgeable Iraqis have been detained at border points this month as they sought to flee the country before shooting started.

But another interesting tidbit is that evidently the administration changed its mind about using UN ( ie., Blix's people ) to help disarm Iraq in the short term after completion of the occupation.

From the article: As a substitute for the U.N. expertise, the Bush administration has scrambled to recruit former inspectors from the U.N. Special Commission, or UNSCOM, the agency that carried out inspections in Iraq in the 1990s. These inspectors may join military-civilian "exploitation teams" that will interrogate Iraqi weapons scientists and assess captured documents, but the first of them are just arriving in the region, and their roles remain undefined.

From certain actions, I've long believed that the administration believed that the current UN inspection teams were compromised but this makes me think that something recently led the administration to think that their compromise was even more serious.

Robin 10:57 PM