A report released this week by a special UN disarmament panel makes the case for the UN Security Council to adopt less intrusive weapons inspections in Iraq – but insists that disarmament work continue.

There have been no disarmament inspections in Iraq since Dec 14, when US and British forces launched four days of missile attacks on Iraq in response to a report by the UN Special Commission (UNSCOM) criticising Iraq’s failure to cooperate with weapons inspectors.

Baghdad responded to the strikes by stating that the UNSCOM inspectors, who left shortly before the strikes, would not be permitted back. In recent days, Iraqi officials have insisted that the United Nations has no more disarmament work to do in Iraq, since Baghdad has destroyed all banned weapons.

According to a report approved Monday by a 20-member UN panel on disarmament, which included UNSCOM Deputy Chairman Charles Duelfer and UN Under-Secretary-General Jayantha Dhanapala, UNSCOM has in fact completed a substantial chunk of its mission.

“Although important elements still have to be resolved, the bulk of Iraq’s proscribed weapons has been eliminated,” the panel report, drawn up after meetings chaired last week by Ambassador Celso Amorim of Brazil, says.

The panel notes progress in destroying Iraq’s nuclear weapons programme, most of its long-range missiles and many weapons-ready chemical agents. But some banned weapons – notably biological toxins and the chemical agent VX – remain unaccounted for, and must be part of any future inspection activity, the panel says.

Enough progress has been achieved, the panel contends, that UN inspectors can essentially wrap up disarmanent activities – those based on the assumption that prohibited weapons must be found and destroyed – and move to “ongoing monitoring and verification”, which simply intends to prevent any future proscribed activities.

Ongoing monitoring and verification activities could be carried out at the same time as any search for “outstanding elements from proscribed weapons programmes,” the report says.

The major change in moving to the monitoring phase, it adds, would be a difference in “the intensity, frequency, intrusiveness and methods” adopted by the inspectors.

Ironically, those words would have been music to Baghdad’s ears mere months ago, when the Iraqi government argued that it had destroyed its arsenal of banned weapons and pushed for the start of ongoing monitoring.

Since December, however, continued attacks on Iraqi installations by US and British jets and a spy scandal involving US members of UNSCOM have hardened Iraq’s stance.

Baghdad now is opposed to all UN disarmament activity in Iraq, and is calling for the lifting of the UN embargo that has been in effect since 1990. Iraq has some support for its position in the 15-nation Security Council, which is set to review its relations with Iraq next month.

Russia, France and China – three of the five permanent Council members – have called for the sanctions to be lifted, although two other veto-wielding permanent members, the United States and Britain, insist on maintaining the embargo.

Yet the disarmament panel’s recommendations present a strong case for the resumption of at least some inspection activity in Iraq as soon as possible.

“The panel notes that the longer inspection and monitoring activities remain suspended, the more difficult the comprehensive implementation of Security Council resolutions becomes, increasing the risks that Iraq might reconstitute its proscribed weapons programmes or retain proscribed items,” the report says.

With the standoff over inspections continuing, there are powerful incentives for all sides to strike a deal on limited, non-intrusive inspections.

Baghdad needs to allow UNSCOM or some similar body into Iraq, because it cannot win the lifting of sanctions until its scrapping of its weapons of mass destruction is verified.

At the same time, the United States and Britain cannot push for a return to the pre-December status quo, given that reports of US spying within UNSCOM have battered the inspectors’ credibility.

US officials acknowledged in recent months that US intelligence agents working within UNSCOM planted sophisticated listening devices in Iraq, which gathered information that UN sources said was unrelated to the agency’s disarmament work.

The problem for all sides is establishing a new disarmament regime that can be credible, effective and acceptable to Iraq.

One of the panel’s ideas is to reconfigure the Special Commission to include technical experts, Security Council representatives, Dhanapala and other UN officials and members of other disarmament groups, like the Organisation for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons.

Such a Commission could review the work of the weapons inspectors every three months, the report suggests.

The move to ongoing monitoring, meanwhile, might encourage some of Iraq’s supporters – including France and Russia – to renew their calls for at least the partial lifting of sanctions.

Yet other Council members are still pushing a hard-line stance, including British Ambassador Jeremy Greenstock, who called Tuesday for the United Nations to monitor medicine shipments which are allowed to Iraq under a humanitarian exemption to the sanctions.

Greenstock also urged that the world body monitor and regulate the currently covert commerce in oil and smuggled goods – prohibited under the sanctions regime – that is carried out between Iraq and Turkey.