U.N. Team Still Looking for Iraq's Arsenal

But Russia has resisted U.S. pressure. A senior Russian official who tracks the group's work said the U.N. inspectors -- not the U.S.-led coalition in Iraq -- must have the final say on whether Iraq has been disarmed. And the inspectors say they cannot confirm Iraq's disarmament without access to the classified reports of the Iraq Survey Group and a final visit to Iraq to verify U.S. assertions. The United States has refused U.N. requests for such information, Perricos said.

Hans Blix, the retired Swedish diplomat who led the U.N. commission before the U.S.-led invasion, said keeping weapons experts in the U.N. system could help train a new generation of inspectors who may be called on to investigate weapons programs anywhere in the world.

"The main part of the job is done," Blix said. "But there is a valuable asset that has stood the test and could be of great use in other areas," he added, noting that no international body conducts missile or biological weapons inspections.

That asset, however, may be losing some value. Many top inspectors left the agency after the fall of Hussein, returning to government posts or taking jobs elsewhere in the United Nations. Some who remain have begun searching for other positions. "There are limited opportunities within the U.N. system" for people steeped in the arcana of Iraqi weapons, observed commission spokesman Ewen Buchanan, who is also looking for a new job.

Meanwhile, the commission's budget reserves -- financed by Iraqi oil revenue and valued at more than $300 million when the last U.N. inspectors left Iraq in March 2003 -- are shrinking. More than $200 million has been returned to Iraq, and the Iraqi government made a formal request to the Security Council in April to terminate the commission and return its remaining $63 million to Iraq.

"This is really absurd. We're approaching five years now of this exercise in futility," said Feisal Amin al-Istrabadi, Iraq's deputy permanent representative to the United Nations.

Carne Ross, a former British diplomat who helped draft the 1999 resolution creating the U.N. commission, agrees. "The reason for them disappeared the day Baghdad fell," he said.

But even Ross regards UNMOVIC with nostalgia. He came up with the name one night by tossing cards with the words "commission," "verification," "observation," "inspection" and "monitoring" on a table and rearranging them until he found the least clumsy acronym.

"It doesn't exactly trip off the tongue," Ross said, "but it's my piece of history, and I'm clinging to it."