What Secretary of State Madeleine Albright seems to have said, sotto voce, to the United Nations is that the United States wants U.N. inspectors in Iraq not to conduct the most aggressive and important inspections of facilities pertaining to weapons of mass destruction. He resigned rather than continue to lend his considerable credibility to the charade the inspection process has been reduced to. This reduction is a result of the secret U.S. policy of discouraging surprise inspections that might provoke a crisis.
Realists understand arms control usually is impossible until it is unimportant.
That is, arms control controls almost nothing, and is itself a process of competition, until adversaries stop competing. Regarding Iraq, arms control must mean regime removal, or it will mean nothing. If Saddam Hussein cannot be toppled, we should shut up rather than continue to squander U.S. credibility and contribute to the cynicism of the American public. However, even if such a scenario is plausible, a prerequisite for implementing a muscular policy is a serious president, one who can convince the country because he has beliefs and is believable. Obviously such a policy is currently impossible.