Pynchon Mention

[David Morris]

http://www.talkingpointsmemo.com/

(June 01, 2007 -- 10:16 PM EST // link)
When bureaucracy meets bamboozlement, or Where're Pynchon and DeLillo
When We Need Them.

According to the Post, despite the fact that even the most confirmed
yahoo now concedes that late Saddan-era Iraq had no WMDs, the UN has
not and apparently cannot get around to shutting down the office
charged with monitoring Saddam's weapons and disarming the
now-disheaded Saddam Hussein.

Writes Colum Lynch: "Every weekday, at a secure commercial office
building on Manhattan's East Side, a team of 20 U.N. experts on
chemical and biological weapons pores over satellite images of former
Iraqi weapons sites. They scour the international news media for
stories on Hussein's deadly arsenal. They consult foreign intelligence
agencies on the status of Iraqi weapons. And they maintain a cadre of
about 300 weapons experts from 50 countries and prepare them for
inspections in Iraq -- inspections they will almost certainly never
conduct, in search of weapons that few believe exist."

The reality of the situation is even more comic and bizarre then the
headline. Even I wasn't completely sure I understood it after reading
Lynch's article in the Post. But the essence of it seems to be this:
the US and the Brits want to shut the thing down, but the Russians say
the word has to come from the inspectors themselves. The inspectors,
in turn, say they can't definitively say that Saddam/Iraq has been
disarmed because they haven't been given access to the records of the
Coalition-led Iraq Study Group.

Meanwhile, the current head of the inspectors, a Greek weapons expert
named Dimitri Perricos doesn't really seem to want to give up the gig.
Indeed, Perricos warns that the Iraqi inspectorate should be kept
going because insurgents, terrorists or some new Iraqi government
could well reconstitute the weapons at some point in the future. (Hey,
where was this guy when Bush and Cheney and Hanity really needed him,
right?) Presumably, Martians might also reconstitute the weapons. But
he seems not yet to have played this card.

We quote form the Post quoting Perricos ...

"Look, Iraq is not Denmark," he said. "They've made botulin, anthrax,
VX, sarin; they've made the whole spectrum of horrifying items, and
they've used them. We don't know how things are going to develop in
the region, and we want to be sure there are some controls."
Last month, Perricos showed the U.N. commission's board satellite
imagery of plundered Iraqi chemical factories that produce chlorine,
which has been used by Iraqi insurgents in chlorine-bomb suicide
attacks. He warned that insurgents may obtain more deadly chemical
weapons on the black market, according to U.N. officials.



You get the sense the Russians are getting a bit of a kick out of this.

-- Josh Marshall
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