It was stupid and wasteful but not "illegal." Saddam Hussein had broken "treaty" agreements.
The most important text of Resolution 1441 was to require that Iraq "shall provide UNMOVIC and the IAEA immediate, unimpeded, unconditional, and unrestricted access to any and all, including underground, areas, facilities, buildings, equipment, records, and means of transport which they wish to inspect".
[22] However, on January 27, 2003,
Hans Blix, the lead member of the UNMOVIC, said that, "Iraq appears not to have come to a genuine acceptance, not even today, of the disarmament that was demanded of it". Blix noted that Iraq had failed cooperation in a number of areas, including the failure to provide safety to
U-2spy planes that inspectors hoped to used for
aerial surveillance, refusal to let UN inspectors into several chemical, biological, and missile sites on the belief that they were engaging in
espionage rather than disarmament, submitting 12,000-page arms declaration that it handed over in December 2002 which contained little more than old material previously submitted to inspectors, and failure to produce convincing evidence to the UN inspectors that it had unilaterally destroyed its anthrax stockpiles as required by resolution 687 a decade before 1441 was passed in 2002.
[23] On March 7, 2003, Blix said that Iraq had made significant progress toward resolving open issues of disarmament but the cooperation was still not "immediate" and "unconditional" as called for by UN Security Council Resolution 1441. He concluded that it would take “but months” to resolve the key remaining disarmament tasks.
[24] The US government observed this as a breach of resolution 1441 because Iraq did not meet the requirement of an "immediate" and "unconditional" compliance.
[25]
