Why did Saddam fail to comply with 12 separate U.N. resolutions to allow weapon inspectors in his country?

Question

I want to know if this is true, and if he had complied, what would of happened? Some people have told me, that we gave Saddam a chance to be peaceful, is this true and does that help justify our invasion?

Answer 1

If he had complied, it would have become public knowledge that he did not in fact have the advanced weapons sytems we had accused him of having. Would this have backed America off of his case? Doubtful. Might it have endangered the stability of his secular dictatorship , both from sectarian militants within Iraq as well as from neighboring (Islamist) countries? Quite possibly.


None of that justifies our invasion, though, because the UN Charter specifically prohibits member nations from unilaterally using military means to enforce Security Council Resolutions. In fact, America proposed a resolution in the Security Council to authorize force against Saddamn, but withdrew it before the vote because it was going to go down 13-2.

By the time we invaded, weapons inspectors had plenty of access, and were reporting that there was nothing to find. Bush tried to make it seem that the fact that they weren't finding anything proved that they weren't being given access, because he wanted to invade for reasons of his own.

It's Catch-22.

Answer 2

Saddam -did- comply with most of the resolutions. We know now in retrospect that he had destroyed his WMD. He never threw the inspectors out of the country, as GW Bush said (repeatedly) that he had.

Bush had already decided on an invasion when he issued the ultimatum to Saddam. There was nothing Saddam could have done to prevent it, and Saddam and Bush both knew that.

And how hypocritical was it for Bush to cite the UN resolutions when we simply ignore UN resolutions -we- don't like?

Answer 3

Some people seem to be under the impression that the invasion of Iraq was authorized by the UN. It was not. In fact when the final resolution regarding Iraq was passed in November of 2002, language authorizing military action was excised. This was language that the US wanted included. The Bush administration agreed to it's removal because they know the resolution wouldn't pass if it contained authorization of military force.

Bush's ultimatum to Saddam was a show. We were going in whether he left peacefully or not.

Answer 4

He didn't want the UN to know the truth, that he was a tiger whose teeth had been pulled.
A dictator who has no power, gets deposed, he wasn't about to go there. He had weapons inspectors in his country until the end, they said he had no weapons, this country choose to say that he did, Saddam was under constant fly-overs, at the end he got balky and did a few things to annoy the people he saw as diminishing his rule. He wasn't a happy camper that's for sure, but we had other ways of determining what he was doing and what he had, we didn't go in because of anything new Saddam did or had, we went in because Bush wanted to.

Answer 5

Saddam was a blowhard serial killer who learned how to obtain lots of money from governments, including ours, and other rich people with their own agendas who hate Israel, other Muslims or who knows who or what - he never had a 'respectable' army, had no capability to do anything but inflate himself at the expense of others and wasn't a serious threat even to Israel.

He served as a convenient excuse for Republicans to start a war that would empty the US Treasury and put us so far into debt that future 'most likely' Democratic administrations would have to raise taxes to get back to fiscal sanity - thereby giving Republicans more ammunition to use against the Democrats in future elections -- it all proving that Republicans are the most unpatriotic of all Americans.

Answer 6

Saddam had long been relying on his untrue claim that Iraq had WMD's as a way of deterring Iran, his arch enemy in the middle east. if the inspectors had returned and confirmed publicly to the world that Iraq in fact had no stores of WMD's (which they did not), Saddam feared that this would give Iran the intel and courage they needed to go to war with him. it was all a political sham.

Answer 7

Saddam was stubborn and foolish. Bad intel caused the invasion. I think our President pushed the launch button too quickly.

Answer 8

He didn't fail to allow the inspectors into his country. He allowed them to return and shortly after that President Bush told the inspectors to get out because he was going to invade anyways.

Its true, just look it up.

Answer 9

I don't believe it justifies our invasion at all. I think we should have left it alone. We should exercise patience and worked more on diplomacy. But for diplomacy to work, parties involved need to leave their baggage at the door so they can work on a solution that makes sense for parties involved. But usually it seems to be a bully thing where someone tries to take advantage of another. That is the American way after all.

Answer 10

THAT WA ALL BUSH HYPE

HERS IS WHAT THE U N INSPECTORS THAT WERE THERE SAY

The United Nations' top two weapons experts said Sunday that the invasion of Iraq a year ago was not justified by the evidence in hand at the time.

"I think it's clear that in March, when the invasion took place, the evidence that had been brought forward was rapidly falling apart," Hans Blix, who oversaw the agency's investigation into whether Iraq had chemical and biological weapons, said on CNN's "Late Edition with Wolf Blitzer."

Blix described the evidence Secretary of State Colin Powell presented to the U.N. Security Council in February 2003 as "shaky," and said he related his opinion to U.S. officials, including national security adviser Condoleezza Rice.

"I think they chose to ignore us," Blix said.

Mohamed ElBaradei, director general of the International Atomic Energy Agency, spoke to CNN from IAEA headquarters in Vienna, Austria.

ElBaradei said he had been "pretty convinced" that Iraq had not resumed its nuclear weapons program, which the IAEA dismantled in 1997.

Days before the fighting began, Vice President Dick Cheney weighed in with an opposing view.

"We believe [Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein] has, in fact, reconstituted nuclear weapons. I think Mr. ElBaradei, frankly, is wrong," Cheney said. "And I think if you look at the track record of the International Atomic Energy Agency in this kind of issue, especially where Iraq's concerned, they have consistently underestimated or missed what Saddam Hussein was doing."

Now, more than a year later, ElBaradei said, "I haven't seen anything on the ground at that time that supported Mr. Cheney's conclusion or statement, so -- and I thought to myself, well, history is going to be the judge."

No evidence of a nuclear weapons program has been found so far.

Blix, who recounts his search for weapons of mass destruction in his book "Disarming Iraq," said the Bush administration tended "to say that anything that was unaccounted for existed, whether it was sarin or mustard gas or anthrax."

Blix specifically faulted Powell, who told the U.N. Security Council about what he said was a site that held chemical weapons and decontamination trucks.

"Our inspectors had been there, and they had taken a lot of samples, and there was no trace of any chemicals or biological things," Blix said. "And the trucks that we had seen were water trucks."

The most spectacular intelligence failure concerned a report by ElBaradei, who revealed that an alleged contract by Iraq with Niger to import uranium oxide was a forgery, Blix said.

"The document had been sitting with the CIA and their U.K. counterparts for a long while, and they had not discovered it," Blix said. "And I think it took the IAEA a day to discover that it was a forgery."

Blix said that during a meeting before the war with the U.S. president, Bush told him that "the U.S. genuinely wanted peace," and that "he was no wild, gung-ho Texan, bent on dragging the U.S. into war."

Blix said Bush gave the inspectors support and information at first, but he said the help didn't last long enough.

"I think they lost their patience much too early," Blix said.

"I can see that they wanted to have a picture that was either black or white, and we presented a picture that had, you know, gray in it, as well," he said.

Iraq had been shown to have biological and chemical weapons before, "and there was no record of either destruction or production; there was this nagging question: Do they still have them?" ElBaradei said.

Blix said he had not been able to say definitively that Iraq had no such weapons, but added that he felt history has shown he was not wrong.

"At least we didn't fall into the trap that the U.S. and the U.K. did in asserting that they existed," he said.

ElBaradei faulted Iraq for "the opaque nature of that Saddam Hussein regime."

"We should not forget that," he said. "For a couple of months, their cooperation was not by any way transparent, for whatever reason."

ElBaradei said he hoped the past year's events have taught world leaders a valuable lesson.

"We learned from Iraq that an inspection takes time, that we should be patient, that an inspection can, in fact, work."