THE GREATEST THREAT: Iraq, Weapons of Mass Destruction, and the Crisis of Global Security.

• Author: Strauss, Mark
• Position: Review

THE GREATEST THREAT: Iraq, Weapons of Mass Destruction, and the Crisis of Global Security by Richard Butler Public Affairs, $26.00

THERE HAVE BEEN NO WEAPONS inspectors in Iraq since December 1998. If that statement doesn't scare the crap out of you, it should. Although most of Saddam Hussein's arsenal of mass destruction has been accounted for and destroyed, he's had 18 months to rebuild it. The full extent of his biological weapons program remains a mystery, and there is evidence that the Iraqi dictator is hoarding supplies of the nerve gas VX--a substance so toxic that a single warhead of it could kill up to one million people. The United States and its Gulf War allies spent $61 billion to drive Saddam from Kuwait and box him in with UN Security Council Resolutions. Maybe it's time to ask for a refund.

Whenever a monumental foreign policy screw-up occurs, there's an inevitable rush to "investigate the truth," assign blame, and offer up a sacrificial lamb. In the case of Iraq, one lamb-of-choice has been Richard Buffer, the Australian diplomat who in 1997 took over from Rolf Ekeus as head of the now-defunct United Nations Special Commission (UNSCOM) tasked with disarming Iraq. In his book Endgame, Scott Ritter--the chief inspector of UNSCOM who resigned in August 1998--portrays his former boss as a Clinton administration puppet, declaring that "Butler appeared to have forgotten that he was a servant of the Security Council, not the United States." With the smell of Butler's blood in the water, UN Secretary-General Kofi Annan joined the feeding frenzy. Although Annan did not personally criticize his former colleague, the Secretary-General's inner circle of advisers anonymously leaked unflattering stories to the press that characterized Butler as a vulgar roughneck who had allowed UNSCOM to get out of control.

It was only a matter of time before Butler weighed in with his side of the story. His book, The Greatest Threat, chronicles the decline and fall of UNSCOM during his tenure as executive chairman. Readers expecting an angry, tell-all memoir will be disappointed. This book is not "Richard Butler Responds to His Critics." Instead, he prefers to let the facts (as he saw them) speak for themselves and offers a dispassionate analysis of how the United Nations undermined the efforts of its own weapons inspectors.

Butler devotes fewer than 10 pages to addressing the most serious charges leveled against him. Among the most prominent of those...