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  Blog \Blôg\, n. [Jrg, fr. Jrg. "Web-log".
     See {Blogger, BlogSpot, LiveJournal}.]
     A stream-of-consciousness Web journal, containing
     links, commentary, and pointless drivel.


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Saturday, December 7, 2002
17:21 - Evil will always triumph, because Good is dumb
http://www.debka.com/article.php?aid=217

(top) link
It seems Steven Den Beste need not be worried that the UNMOVIC position of having their findings subject to censorship and weeks of vetting through Officious Channels will derail the US from getting the real answers (and fast!), because we've been doing a little inspectoring of our own.

It's like a well-written spy-movie misdirection plot: seventy-five minutes into the story, it looks like the bad guy has outsmarted the hero, who is now at his mercy, trapped, tied up, with a gun to his head... and then he looks up, grins, and delivers a smug and devastating line as the plot takes a second sharp left turn, revealing that everything is going according to his plan, that the bad guy walked into a trap just as carefully crafted as the one that it had seemed the hero had been caught by.

Running circles around the UN arms inspection headed by Swedish diplomat Hans Blix, the Iraqi government dropped a massive pile of documents – its reply to the UN Security Council demand for a full accounting of Iraq’s weapons of mass destruction – in the laps of the international media Saturday, December 7, before allowing Blix a peek. The presentation was accompanied by yet another formal denial that Iraq has no weapons of mass destruction.

The 11,880 pages on CD-Rom, landing with a thud in Baghdad, will not reach UN Headquarters in New York before late Sunday, exactly on the dot of the Security Council deadline.

Washington in any case had no expectation of substance from the UN inspectors.
Thursday, December 5, the White House declared it already had “solid evidence” that Iraq does indeed have weapons of mass destruction. Where did that evidence come from?

. . .

This project is in the hands of a special multinational task force made up of special elite units and armed with combat helicopters and aircraft, spy-planes and satellites. Unlike the Blix outfit, which is based in Baghdad, the alternative investigators are fanned out across the country. One well-placed source disclosed: “Our men in the field know where 90 percent of Saddam’s missiles and unconventional weapons systems are located, even the mobile ones that are moved from place to place every hour. We are keeping them under tight, on-site observation because when the war begins we want to be there before Saddam orders his men to hit the triggers.”

According to our sources, this highly sensitive, elaborate and secret inspection project has been going for more than three months. Its success could pre-determine the course of the war before it begins. Its members are drawn from the United States, Britain, Jordan and Turkey and possibly Israel. They operate under the Special Forces command at Al Udeid in Qatar and its sub-command in the Jordanian base of Mafraq.

For the purpose of the search, Iraq has been divided into 16 squares, each the province of an elite unit for a set period. The Talil air base complex in north Iraq, for instance, with its air fields, missile bases and air defense batteries, was assigned for the first three weeks of December to US special forces.

And in contrast, gallingly:

The story going around the Gulf, according to DEBKAfile’s sources, is that in the week since the UN inspection team started work, it has been well penetrated by Iraqi agents.The most disturbing aspect of this - and the reason for the sharp responses coming from the White House - is that the spies have managed to fit "electronic jackets" on the UN measuring instruments, which throw them off and make them emit false data. The technical assistants, some from Arab countries, are also thoroughly infiltrated by Iraqi intelligence.

But it's okay, because we knew that would happen all along.

It's looking to me as though there are these special teams of multinational operatives who know what job needs to be done and do it, implicitly trusting each other as partners in a "special relationship" between nations... while the top-level, internationally visible US bickering in the UN and the press has simply been a set of opinion probes to see who's willing to be an ally when crunch time comes, and who would rather stand in the way. None of it affects the evidence-gathering or the war effort, but it will affect how friendly and open and cooperative we're going to be with certain other nations in the future.

As CapLion puts it:

Looks like this is shaping up to happen rather quickly, and it also looks like we'll have bombs for Christmas, but the troops will be back for New Years.

Once again, Dubya has been underestimated and will probably pull another of his trademark I'm a lot smarter than that, stupid moments soon. I love when that happens.

This is another one of those things that, when flung into the winds of the blogosphere, will catch and gain runaway attention in no time. Spread the word, eh?

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© Brian Tiemann