An Early Test for Iraq

Seldom has an agreement to defuse a crisis been regarded with so little expectation of success as last weekend’s back-down by Iraq, which came just minutes before U.S. cruise missiles were to be launched in punitive strikes against Saddam Hussein’s regime. American officials who spoke almost immediately after President Clinton accepted Iraq’s promise of full cooperation with U.N. weapons inspectors were unanimous in assuming that Hussein, a serial liar, has no intention of honoring the commitments he first made more than seven years ago and has worked so hard to evade ever since. The United States has rightly promised swift, no-warning airstrikes at the first indication that Iraq is reneging on its latest promise. The test of that could come very soon.

Richard Butler, the Australian diplomat who heads the U.N. arms inspection program, has asked Iraq to hand over two key documents dealing with its chemical and biological warfare efforts. The documents are known to exist; last summer Iraqi security officials literally snatched one from the hands of U.N. inspectors. They are believed to record what materials Iraq acquired to make chemical and germ weapons. Large quantities of these materials, especially those used to make biological weapons, are still unaccounted for, meaning almost certainly that Iraq retains an intact capability to produce terror weapons on a large scale.

The U.N. resolutions that called on Iraq to give up those and other weapons required Baghdad to cooperate fully with the weapons inspection teams. Instead Iraq has put constant roadblocks in the path of the inspectors, impeding and diverting their efforts while it frantically moved prohibited weapons and materials from one hiding place to another. Iraq has thus been able to hold on to its weapons of mass destruction, but at the cost of assuring that the sanctions that have so diminished the lives of the Iraqi people would stay in place.

U.S. officials say that Iraq has about a month to demonstrate it is at last ready to give the arms inspectors the information they must have to work effectively. But there’s no reason why it should take four weeks to hand over the documents that will show what Iraq is hiding and where. That can be done at once, and at once is exactly what should be demanded.

U.S. officials have said often since last Sunday that they are prepared to strike at the first sign of Iraqi intransigence. American credibility, no less than Iraq’s, is now on the line.