What is a Material Breach?
Easy Cases and Hard Cases With so much riding on a finding of “material breach,” how should that term be understood? Even without a definition in Resolution 1441, common sense suggests the proper resolution of some obvious cases. For example, if U.N. weapons inspectors find nuclear warheads stashed underneath Saddam Hussein’s mattress, that fact–along with the Iraqi regime’s prior failure to disclose the existence of these warheads–would constitute an obvious material breach. Likewise, at the other extreme, if it turns out that some of the thousands of pages Iraq produced last month contain typographical errors (as they almost surely do), that would not constitute a “material breach.” (Indeed, it probably would not constitute a breach at all.) Of course, it is possible to imagine numerous scenarios in between these two extremes. Iraq may well have substantial stockpiles of weapons of mass destruction and an ongoing chemical and biological weapons research program, but U.N. inspectors
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