UNITED NATIONS -- The U.S. and Russia have agreed to dismantle the U.N. agency that searched Iraq for weapons of mass destruction and affirm that Saddam Hussein's government had no such arms at the time of the American invasion in March 2003.
The Security Council will adopt a resolution the last week in June to close the U.N. Monitoring, Inspection and Verification Commission, created in 1999 to search Iraq for biological and chemical weapons, Belgian and British diplomats said. The measure will also end the U.N. nuclear watchdog agency's mandate to look for nuclear arms in Iraq.
U.N. inspectors found no banned weapons before or since the invasion.
Feisal al-Istrabadi, Iraq's deputy ambassador to the U.N., said his country is "still dealing with the residue of having been a pariah state" and called the resolution a "huge symbolic step that will show we are taking steps forward to be reintegrated in the community of nations."
He said adopting the U.S.-drafted resolution would be a prelude to lifting all U.N. sanctions imposed on Iraq during Saddam's reign.
So, despite the fact that the US illegally invaded Iraq and has had control of it for years now while democratically-held elections took place, the country is still under sanctions? Sanctions, by the way, have a habit of causing humanitarian nightmares.
And not only that:
Iraq has complained about paying $50 million since the invasion to maintain the agency, known as UNMOVIC. The agency, which withdrew the inspectors before the war, employs 34 people and prepares quarterly reports to the Security Council.
The Iraqi people have been ripped off in so many ways by the Bush administration's lies, with the biggest theft (besides the hundreds of thousands of lives lost) coming down the pike via the proposed oil law, that the entire disaster is practically beyond comprehension. Then again, I'm not an imperialistic warmonger raking in the profits so maybe that's why I'm having such a hard time seeing this as anything but one huge war crime.
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