The U.N. Inspections in Iraq: Lessons for On-Site Verification

The author, a former government official and senior fellow at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, lays out clearly the lessons of the Iraq inspection effort. She covers a wide range of problems, from the mundane (the physical burdens of suiting up to visit contaminated sites) to the intangible (the psychology of self-censorship). The gist of the argument is simple: inspection is a much more difficult business than one would think, even when the subject is nominally cooperative. It is a great pity that the publishers have put such an absurd price on this book, because it deserves a wider distribution than libraries.