Do not expect a smoking gun when chief weapons inspector Hans Blix delivers his report to the United Nations tomorrow.

On the basis of past history, the last thing we will get from Blix is blinding clarity.

In fact all his report will reveal is that what the weapons inspectors have been doing is absurd.

Blix is dealing with Saddam as if he were a normal, sane person. But Saddam isn't someone you can treat like that. Blix doesn't have a clue that he's talking to a bloodthirsty thug as if he were in a Bloomsbury salon. In fact the whole approach of the weapons inspectors has been wrong.

The impression is being created that they are trying hard to find weapons of mass destruction-and because they can't find them, maybe they do not exist.

Hiding But they will never find anything because there are millions of hiding places and just 100 inspectors.

All Blix has done is go back to locations he inspected before 1998.

They are the last places Saddam is going to hide something. Blix is a complete fool if he thinks otherwise. The only reason he has been going to these places is because he doesn't know where else to go.

The inspections were never intended to find things that have been hidden. They were intended to verify the destruction of things Saddam claims he no longer has.

This is not well understood. Think of the auditors of a public company. If they examine the books and find large quantities of money missing, their job is not to find the money, it is to document the fact that it is missing. They are not supposed to go to the chairman's house and look under his mattress to see if that is where the money went.

The remit here is solely to audit the books, and on that basis Saddam delivered the smoking gun when he provided a manifestly false weapons declaration on December 7.

No doubt the French will call for the inspectors to have more time. But that is a purely cynical move.

They know more time will not bring about the disarmament of Iraq. But Jacques Chirac is quite happy for Saddam to stay in power. He thinks it serves French purposes. I suspect there is even a personal relationship there.

The French have developed a uniquely friendly relationship with Saddam, and I think this is in pursuit of their commercial interests.

Hijack At the same time the French and Germans are trying to hijack the EU for their own purposes and France is out to destroy Nato. The French are cynically exploiting a naive anti-war feeling. They know the movement is wrong.

This is not about oil.

If it were, the United States would simply lift trade sanctions and allow Saddam to produce all the oil he liked.

This is about liberating the people of Iraq.

Once Saddam falls, France and all the anti-war protesters will be extremely embarrassed, because what will emerge is testimony from millions of Iraqis of what life has been like under one of the most brutal dictatorships the world has known.

What will the protesters say then?

Richard Perle is a resident fellow at AEI.