U.N. abolishes Iraqi weapons inspection team

UNITED NATIONS — The Security Council on Friday shut down the weapons-inspection program that was at the heart of the United Nations' effort to find Iraqi President Saddam Hussein's weapons of mass destruction.

The team of inspectors, known as the U.N. Monitoring, Verification and Inspection Commission (UNMOVIC), had tried — and failed — to find weapons that the U.S. and Britain insisted posed an imminent danger that led to their 2003 invasion of Iraq.

The U.S. barred the team from returning to Iraq after the invasion and informed the council in May 2003 that it and Britain would take over disarmament duties. But the inspectors have continued their work at the U.N., using satellite images to pinpoint remnants of chemical- and biological-weapons programs from the 1990s that might be cannibalized by insurgents, training inspectors and cataloging the information it had accumulated in years of scouring Iraq for arms.

But Friday, 14 of the council's 15 members declared the inspection team's job done and its work no longer relevant. Russia abstained, saying it is up to the U.N. to declare that Iraq has been disarmed, not the U.S. or Iraq.

The United States and Iraq have pushed since 2005 for the abolition of the inspection team, which has been funded by Iraqi oil revenue held in trust. The team's budget is about $10 million a year, and it has reserves of about $63 million, which will be returned to Iraq.

U.S. Ambassador Zalmay Khalilzad was asked if he would credit UNMOVIC for its work and for having what turned out to be better intelligence than the U.S. and U.K. had about Iraq's weapons capabilities.

"That is something that historians will have to work with," Khalilzad said.

He did say the team should be recognized for helping destroy "a substantial amount of Iraqi WMD capabilities" after the 1991 Persian Gulf War.

The inspectors, who had argued that their expertise could be put to use in a permanent U.N. department for monitoring and verification, must figure out what to do with 1 million megabytes of data and classified formulas for chemical weapons, not to mention a stray scud-missile engine occupying a cubicle in the UNMOVIC office.

On Thursday, the commission published a 1,200-page account of Iraq's weapons programs and the lessons learned in the verification process.

The team was the latest generation of an inspection process created after the 1991 war to ensure that Iraq dismantled its weapons systems.

In the 1990s, U.N. inspectors uncovered Iraq's secret chemical- and biological-weapons programs and production of long-range ballistic missile engines. The U.N. dismantled and destroyed much of the material, including the nerve agent VX.

Nuclear inspectors from the U.N.'s International Atomic Energy Agency helped reveal the extent of Iraq's covert nuclear program, which never succeeded in producing a working weapon, despite U.S. intelligence reports that claimed it had the capability.

The head of UNMOVIC, Demetrius Perricos, told the council Friday that "a residue of uncertainty" remains that Iraq has been disarmed fully. He said that insurgents in Iraq still might try to acquire toxic agents to make weapons, citing the use of chlorine bombs with scavenged materials. He also warned that there are still people in Iraq with weapons-making knowledge, blueprints and "cookbooks" that should be monitored.