Posted on: Wednesday, April 23, 2003

EDITORIAL
U.N. inspectors should complete Iraq mission

The Bush administration wants the United Nations to lift sanctions against Iraq quickly so its oil revenues can be used to finance reconstruction.

The sanctions were imposed after Iraq's 1990 invasion of Kuwait and cannot be lifted until U.N. inspectors certify that Iraq's nuclear, chemical and biological weapons have been destroyed.

Hans Blix, chief U.N. weapons inspector, says his team is ready to go back to complete that job. That's not a development the Bush administration welcomes, according to White House spokesman Ari Fleischer.

He misses the point. The Bush administration justified its war with Iraq in terms of its possession of weapons of mass destruction. It insisted the threat from these weapons was a fact, not a theory.

Now, after 30 days of looking, the "smoking gun" has yet to be found. Americans have been fairly patient with this search, but to say the rest of the world is skeptical is an understatement.

"Because the longer it takes" to find WMD, Sen. Dan Inouye told state lawmakers this week, "we'll have a lot of explaining to do." What Inouye didn't say is that the longer the search takes, the more people will conclude evidence, when it is found, was planted.

For the sake of its credibility, the White House is better off securing suspected sites, but otherwise letting U.N. inspectors conduct the search.

It appears the French and the Russians are prepared to meet Washington halfway on this issue, suggesting that sanctions be ended for humanitarian reasons now. The White House should respond by letting U.N. inspectors back into Iraq immediately.