I sent a letter to the NYRB about this piece by Charlie Savage.

I don’t think that they will publish it, so here’s the letter:

In his recent review of Steve Coll’s The Achilles Trap: Saddam Hussein, the CIA, and the Origins of America’s Invasion of Iraq, Charlie Savage ably explains how the Saddam Hussein government’s refusal to comply with UN-mandated weapons inspections during the early 1990s – particularly the regime’s secret destruction of Iraqi weapons of mass destruction (WMD) – fueled inaccurate U.S. assessments that Iraq possessed WMD and related programs. This background is obviously important, but Savage omits the significant role of the inspectors, whose work the world should acknowledge.

For example, Savage does not mention that UN inspectors, who returned to Iraq in 2002 under a new UN Security Council mandate, provided a mechanism for verifying U.S. prewar Iraq WMD assessments. Indeed, less than two weeks before the March 2003 U.S.-led invasion of Iraq, Hans Blix, Executive Chairman of the UN Monitoring, Verification and Inspection Commission,(UNMOVIC), reported to the Council that inspectors had found no WMD in Iraq. Blix added that UNMOVIC would only need “months” to resolve UN-mandated “remaining disarmament tasks.” It is also worth noting that, following completion of these tasks, Iraq would have been subjected to a UN-mandated long-term monitoring regime designed to prevent Iraqi reconstitution of its WMD programs.