Global Policy Forum

By Ed Vulliamy and Peter Beaumont

In their rooms at the Flamingo Hotel in Cyprus the first team of UN weapons inspectors are making preparations for their flight to Baghdad tomorrow.

As they receive their final briefings and pack their bags they will know two things.

First, that they will be embarking on the most important mission ever undertaken by UN weapons inspectors, a mission which will determine whether the world faces a devastating war against Iraq or an imperfect and difficult peace.

Second, they will be aware that there are many senior officials in the US administration desperate for them to fail so they can start their war to depose Saddam Hussein.

The teams are made up of 270 staff, including 27 Americans, working in a rota of three shifts with 100 on mission at any time.

The initial team will comprise 30 logistical and technical experts. Some dozen weapons inspectors are due to follow on 27 November, to begin spot inspections.

Between 85 and 100 will be on the ground by the end of December - unless the US has found an excuse for a military strike before then. This could be provoked by firing on allied aircraft, proscribed under UN resolution 1441.

Life on the teams - say those who were on the last UN inspections missions - is a combination of the mundane and the exhausting. One of the inspectors' first jobs will be to clear the pigeon droppings from their abandoned compound.

After 12-15 hour shifts, the experts will be confined to their guarded compounds, playing cards or chess, when they are not actually working.

This time the inspectors will have no Iraqi minders to hinder their work, and will be concentrating, in the first instance, on surprise visits to the senior scientists in Iraq's weapons programmes, whom they will be able to spirit out of the country with their families should they feel that the interviews would be better done abroad.

The inspection team has charted a road map of more than 1,000 sites with 100 on a priority list, focused on the town of al-Fallujah, near Baghdad.

The inspectors have at their disposal a new generation of technology. A ledger compiled by the New York Times includes commercial spy satellites, miniature and portable radiation detectors and air sensors, powerful radar systems that can penetrate underground - and germ detectors able to check for anthrax, smallpox and such agents.

However, Hans Blix, the former Swedish Foreign Minister who now heads the body that will look for Iraq's chemical and biological programmes (Unmovic), said while briefing inspectors that 'human knowledge and experience' will be paramount.

Interviews will be crucial to the work of the inspectors, and among the first candidates will be the British-educated scientist Rihab Taha, aka 'Dr. Germ', still working in Iraq.

The International Atomic Energy Agency says that most of Iraq's indigenous nuclear programme was neutralised in its work up to 1998 - and was in any case seriously flawed. Instead, inspectors will be looking for evidence that Iraq has bought fissile material off the shelf to build a nuclear bomb in kit form. Instead of looking for large-scale enrichment facilities, they will have to find small, well-screened sites, that leave only the tiniest radiation footprint for sensors to detect.

Former inspectors involved in looking for evidence of Iraq's biological programmes under the Unscom regime believe that the biological facilities could be equally easily hidden, amounting to the kind of small fermentation facilities you would find in a brew-on-the premises pub.

Finding them, and hidden programmes that might trigger a war, will likely come down to the intelligence provided by individual nations - and interviews with key scientists in Iraqi programmes.

And at the back of all the inspectors' minds is the knowledge that the nation with the world's most powerful military - which is already pouring troops and equipment into the region - is just waiting for them to fail.

Hawks surrounding Bush have made it clear that they would not be disappointed if Blix, and Mohamed al- Baradei, the head of the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA), which will look for Iraq's nuclear weapons, fail in their mission.

Indeed, they would be happiest of all if the full inspection teams never made it to Iraq. An 'untruthful' Iraqi declaration on 8 December of what weapons it holds could, if challenged by the US, based on its own intelligence of what it believes Iraq possesses, trigger an invasion.

And the inspectors in the Flamingo Hotel will know that the resistance to 74-year-old Blix in particular - and UN inspections in general - comes from the highest circles in Washington, and is said to be advanced by Defence Secretary Donald Rumsfeld himself.

It was a position summed up by a senior Pentagon official last week: 'The inspections cannot work. Period. Military power works. Period. All this is a sideshow which, the longer it drags on, the greater the need to break the cycle becomes and the need to get involved militarily.'

It is a viewpoint that has not gone unnoticed by those sending in the inspectors.

'We are aware of the criticism that is being levelled at us and at Mr Blix,' says Melissa Fleming, a spokeswoman for the IAEA. 'But our job is not to go in as an occupying army and overrun a place the size of France. Our job is to be detectives ... to look for clues and to prove and disprove what we are being told.'

It is the word disprove that is likely to cause the greatest friction. For what they will be disproving is not just Iraqi denials, but likely too the claims of President Bush and Tony Blair of what Iraq holds.

Fleming believes that the UN mandate has been 'generous' with the timetable it has set out for the inspection teams, but says the teams should be given time to do their work properly regardless of the pressure on them.

It is a view shared by the Russians and the French on the Security Council. But it is not shared by the US.

Last week State Department officials reaffirmed the comments of the hawkish US ambassador to the UN, John Negroponte, that 'any member state' on the Security Council could complain of a violation at any point.

By this logic, the decision to launch a military attack can be made at any time after Iraq makes its declaration of its weapons programmes if that state believes Iraq has fallen short of the truth.

And behind this is the belief held by US officials that there is 'no chance' of Saddam complying with UN resolution 1441. Washington's interpretation is that the unilateral use of force has already been sanctioned by the resolution.

That in turn hides a more deeply embedded US agenda: that if the UN inspectors succeed in disarming Iraq, the Bush administration will find it hard to justify its aim of removing Saddam. And for Bush to fight the 2004 presidential election with Saddam still in office would constitute a political disaster.

It is this that explains why US patience with Blix is running out even before he has begun his work. Washington will have its radar looking for any sign of a 'material breach' justifying war, even if the same Iraqi act does not trigger Blix into registering a complaint.

And Blix is the last man the US wants in the job. 'Blix doesn't want to be blamed for going to war,' says David Albright, a former IAEA inspector and now president of the Institute for Science and International Security in Washington. 'Blix comes from an environment where the nation-state is supreme, but this is a criminal state.'

Blix says: 'Inspectors may be more likely to encounter smoke rather than smoking guns. However, smoke might be enough to trigger government concern or action'. Sources say that Blix will accept US intelligence as a valid pointer on where to go, but will not consider the material to be conclusive.

The US has said it will not provide Blix or El Baradei with all the intelligence it holds - suggesting that it will reach its own conclusions, match them against the inspectors' findings and use that as the test of whether to go to war alone.

Now the inspectors in the Flamingo Hotel know that they may be the tripwire for an American-led war.

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