UN weapons inspectors in Iraq - 15 January 1993

Daddy, asked the young daughter of an old Hollywood screenwriter, "what's a documentary?" "It's a film he said with no plot and no stars." It certainly is a forbidding word and the inimitable Scot who coined it, John Greerson, has much to answer for, but no other word has come along to define this type of movie, which can range between the deadly dull and the unforgettable.

I saw the other evening a brilliant film, which performed a service all documentaries ought to perform, to penetrate your shallow understanding of something and show you depths that you never guessed at or so to expand, in this case alarmingly, your knowledge of a topic that most of us I think would claim to be able to sum up in a minute or two. So the film, an hour long, was made jointly by the United Nations television service and the Boston headquarters of the American Public Television network. I ought to say this film was made before, long before Saddam's latest provocation and the allied strike in response.

The theme was the search-and-destroy mission of the United Nations inspection team that started two years ago to track down first Saddam's suspected arsenal of nuclear facilities. I noticed at the time, as yet another sad proof of our human inability to be objective, where wishing is concerned that in this country, anyway, the senators and congressmen who were against fighting Saddam and in favour of relying on sanctions alone, they tended to believe that Saddam was many comfortable years away from making the bomb. Well, the first thing about this television film, it was called by the way, The Hunt for Saddam's Secret Weapons, was the conclusion by the nuclear and weapons experts on the UN team that Saddam was 18 months at most, probably a year or less, away from having the bomb.

I think we all assumed when the inspectors started scanning the Iraqi landscape that they were looking just for nuclear components but their mission was also to ferret out weapons of mass destruction, which meant also chemical and biological weapons. To me, the first shock was the far-flung piles of weapons of these three sorts, once the teams started to probe – they already knew some nuclear sites from old intelligence that were effectively bombed to rubbish during the desert war – but once they started following up new leads.

And, needless to say, the Iraqis were no help; the wide spread of sites, facilities, storage areas, underground hiding places were staggering and very difficult to track down. Why? For the simple reason that Iraq is larger than California (which is 850 miles long), 167,000 square miles or more than three times the size of England, and so much of it a desert that aerial scanning for weeks on end was sometimes about as rewarding as spotting the odd hairpin on a sandy beach. No wonder it's taken them two years and the end is nowhere in site. Now the team is plainly expert in all phases of nuclear and weapons engineering, but they mention the other day that it will take two years to perform the extremely delicate operation of destroying the known caches of chemical weapons.

And imagine, after more than a year of searching and examining every sort of pipe and wrench and tank, pot and storage bin and underground cave and tunnel … imagine one day flying off over hundreds of miles and coming on a whole valley of what looked like a plain stacked with torpedoes. It was, in fact, 40,000 canisters of nerve gas, so day after day, month after month the team rode and flew and trudged through villages, factories, old battlefields, new suburbs and found the Iraqis in the main hospitable and guileless, until you started to get warm. Then they brought in one of their atomic scientists who made a big to-do of protesting on some arcane principle that would stall the search and they did this long enough to cajole or organise the onlooking people to march in protest. By the time 10,000 people were on the streets of Baghdad throwing things at 20 UN inspectors, the UN Team wisely decided, for the time being, to retreat.

There was no sense incidentally from this report that Saddam's power is waning or that he has lost any of his hypnotic or tyrannical grip. All this is going on while Iraq still endures the United Nations sanctions, which some people remember believed two years ago would bring Saddam to heel without the nastiness of a UN war with such optimists still exist, I hope they'll see this stunning film and come to believe what the UN Security Council – especially Britain, the US, France and Russia – concluded two years ago, that we could risk a manageable war with Saddam then or face him as a rogue nuclear power in a devastating war a year or two down the road.

Well, you'll gather that here as elsewhere in the past week, Saddam has raised his ugly head above the little crowd of horrors that increasingly hammer on the doors of the Western nations. It's a wholly unexpected irony of the arrival of Mr Clinton on the scene that while he won partly because he accused Mr Bush of being obsessed with foreign affairs to the neglect to the poor, the drug ridden, the uneducated, the homeless on his own doorstep. Yet in the moment of his inauguration, President Clinton will besieged by more and more menacing foreign troubles than any President we can remember. The hideous plight of the women of Bosnia, the Marines' commitment for how long to Somalia, the threatened prospect of military force against the Serbs, Angola again, but now less noticed but drifting in over the Western horizon a thundercloud from the Pacific comes an extensive survey of the range and pace of rearmament among nations we have long learned not to fear. China, which was never really feared chiefly because of its second-class military technology is now buying billions of dollars worth of first-class Russian equipment.

The Russian foreign office, hungry as all the other Russians for currency, forgivably explains we sell to all-comers. This renovation and strengthening of China's huge armies has naturally alarmed Japan, which for most of 47 years was forbidden by its constitution to acquire all but the barest means of self-defence. Well, Japan is aroused and while buying prodigiously from the United States is as you'd guess well along in developing its own military, naval, aerial technology and the strategic boys say is today mounting the third largest defence force, what we used to call "war machine" on earth. The United States is also selling armaments briskly to China's chronic enemy, the defiant exile Taiwan.

It is inconceivable to be, said a rather sober Asian historian, that we can avoid in the next 10 years a really big war in the Far East. Well Mr Clinton will wake up the morning of the 21st, when the party's over to ponder all these things and instead of bemoaning them, enjoy the new sensation of being required to act on them in the name of the United States.

In the meantime, the United States Supreme Court, all nine of the justices, are – Christmas over – back in their gowns and up on the bench and have just pondered without success a very profound question indeed, as is their wont. The question is, "what is a person?" The Constitution in several places uses the word, but there has been down the centuries no commonly accepted definition of a person. This time, the problem turned on a California case, a bunch of inmates in a California state prison brought suit against the authorities to get free tobacco under a provision, which allows it to a pauper. These men sued as an association of plaintiffs, the Supreme Court voted five to four against them. No combination or association said one judge can be a pauper, a pauper is a natural person. Another said, poverty is the human condition of a person. A dissenting judge said, "nonsense", quoting two federal statutes that talk about poor countries.

Since all great human affairs are decided in America in the end by those nine judges or rather more often than not these days by one judge, the fifth vote in nine, since that's how the vote came out, those poor persons in jail will not get their tobacco, which is perhaps just as well if they did pretty soon they'd be suing the state for giving them emphysema or lung cancer.

Oh what do you know, who should pop up this week like Mr Punch bopping up at a seaside ventriloquist – do they still exist? – but Ross Perot. He's going to revive his campaign outfit United We Stand America, he wants millions of Americans to join him in forming a watchdog group keeping an eye on President Clinton and seeing how well or badly he does with the promised cures, the economy, ethics in government, healthcare and crime. Considering that Mr Perot got 19% of the vote, more millions than any third party candidate in history, his resurrection is not to be sneezed at. He's going to be a gadfly, he says, to the administration, probably not a bad thing except for poor Mr Clinton who is about to embark on what we always call the new president's honeymoon. And who needs a gadfly on his honeymoon?

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