The Cupboard Was Bare

PURCHASE, N.Y. — Chief weapons inspector David Kay, after six months of leading a postwar search by the Iraq Survey Group, resigned last week and announced his conclusion -- the same one that United Nations inspectors had reached just before the war began: Iraq had no significant weapons of mass destruction nor any effective programs to develop them in the months leading up to the invasion. Iraqi WMD programs were largely eliminated after the 1991 Persian Gulf War, under pressure from U.N. inspections.

The real message of Kay's statement is this: U.N. weapons inspections, coupled with sanctions, work. As Hans Blix, who headed the pre-war inspections told reporters in Stockholm last week: "We were not wrong. Most others were wrong. We were looking at the matter with a critical mind."

U.N. inspectors had the advantage of long familiarity with scientific and technical activities in Iraq between 1991 and 1998. When they returned in November 2002, a small band with an annual budget of $80 million, they quickly perceived that Iraq's capabilities had markedly deteriorated and that Iraq did not have the resources to pursue WMD.

In on-site inspections of potential weapons sites, the U.N. found Iraqi declarations accurate. They also found much of the equipment essential to an ongoing WMD program in disrepair, unusable even for legitimate purposes. There was strong evidence that earlier research programs had been cut back or abandoned. Nothing was found at suspected sites, including those identified by U.S. and other intelligence sources. No significant illegal activities, with the exception of a marginal missile program the Iraqis claimed they thought was within permissible limits, were uncovered in the three months before U.N. inspectors were prematurely withdrawn from Iraq last year.

Kay's Iraq Survey Group -- with a staff of 1,400, high-tech equipment and a monthly budget of $100 million -- had the disadvantage of arriving in Iraq after war and looting had ravaged much of the infrastructure that might have been capable of weapons production. By now, though, the ISG surely knows where all the chemical plants, biological fermenters and weapons scientists were located. They must know whether there were missiles, bombs, rockets or other systems capable of delivering WMD. The inspectors had free access not only to sites but to confidential documents. And they could conduct candid interviews that could be checked against each other for consistency.