The Quest for Illicit Weapons
The continued failure of American forces to find any "weapons of mass destruction" in Iraq must be worrying some officials, particularly at intelligence agencies that assured the White House that Baghdad had such weapons. If Saddam Hussein authorized his field commanders to use chemical weapons, as Secretary of State Colin Powell suggested to the United Nations in February, presumably some of the weapons should have been overrun by Army and Marine forces as they closed in on Baghdad. Yet so far every report of suspicious items has proved to be a false alarm. The very fact that pressure is mounting on the Bush administration to prove the presence of unconventional weapons makes it imperative that the White House bring in experienced inspectors from the United Nations and the International Atomic Energy Agency to help locate illicit materials and enhance the credibility of any findings. Current White House plans to bypass the U.N. are heading in the wrong direction.

There may be good reasons for coming up dry so far. The Iraqis were expert at hiding forbidden materials, and it could take some time to find secret storage and manufacturing sites in a nation that is the size of California. But with every passing day, American credibility is called into question, particularly by other nations that were not enthusiastic about military action to begin with. The chief justification for invading Iraq was to get rid of Baghdad's stores of chemical and biological agents and dismantle its effort to produce a nuclear bomb. These weapons were deemed a threat not only to Iraq's neighbors, but also to the United States, particularly if Mr. Hussein were to make them available to terrorists, as President Bush suggested in his State of the Union message.

The military units searching for unconventional arms in Iraq are not truly expert in finding hidden weapons. They need to be buttressed not only by American civilian experts but, even more important, by respected international inspectors as well. Such neutral experts need to ensure a strict chain of custody and oversee the accuracy of laboratory analyses. Otherwise there is a danger that any findings will be discounted by a skeptical world that is all too ready to believe that the evidence was planted or manipulated.…
http://www.nytimes.com/2003/04/18/opinion/18FRI1.html