We saw them off at 11 p.m. from our headquarters in suburban Baghdad. The Americans rode in three Nissan four-wheel-drive vehicles, accompanied by two late-model Mercedes sedans for the Iraqi security men. Fatigue turned out to be a greater threat than bandits. According to my colleagues, one of the Mercedes drivers fell asleep and careered off the road into the desert. No one was injured; the only damage done was to the car and the driver’s pride. At dawn, the convoy crossed the border into Jordan. Despite the tense atmosphere, my colleagues said the Iraqis had treated them with respect and even cordiality.
We don’t know why the Iraqis decided to block the inspection effort now. UNSCOM has never received full cooperation from the Iraqi regime. On some inspection missions, we’ve had to wait several hours because the Iraqis supposedly couldn’t find the keys to certain sites we needed to enter. We have been denied access to facilities even as our air surveillance showed a stream of trucks going out the back entrance. And while they delayed us from entering some sites, we have seen Iraqi officials burning documents and throwing the embers into a river.
The morning after the Americans left, the rest of us–British, Brazilians, Germans and other nationalities–flew out of Iraq. We were exhausted by the time we got to Bahrain, and we looked a bit out of place. Bahrain is a posh resort for wealthy Saudis, and our inspectors sat around the marbled, mirrored lobby of the Holiday Inn dressed for work in blue jeans and polo shorts, with Leatherman tools and Mini Maglite flashlights holstered on their belts. We felt relieved to be out of a potentially dangerous situation. But our current mood is mainly one of frustration. We have a job to do in Iraq: the monitoring, verification and eradication of Saddam’s weapons of mass destruction. Now that we’re gone, the monitoring program is eroding day by day. Saddam is deliberately undermining the work we’ve done in the past six and a half years. Now that we’re out of there, who knows what can happen? That’s why we’re desperate to get back in.
Meanwhile, we feel as though we’re re-enacting the movie ““Groundhog Day,’’ in which Bill Murray wakes up each morning to find himself reliving the same day. For the last two weeks in Baghdad, our routine didn’t change: we’d go to inspection sites, get turned back because Americans were with us and start to prepare for the next morning. Now it’s Groundhog Day in Bahrain as we anxiously wait for instructions.
