The Smoking Gun Did Not Go Up in Smoke
Raphael Israeli
Published as ACPR Policy Paper No. 164, 2006
Ever since Tony Blair’s speech before the two Houses of
Congress on July 17, 2003, where he conceded that “history would forgive him
and President Bush even if no weapons of mass destruction are found in Iraq”,
those who opposed the war, in the US and Britain in particular, and elsewhere
in general, have been “celebrating”, as if the war has been in vain or as if
there were no tyranny that was removed or terrorism that was battled. But this
celebration seems premature, to say the least, not only because the search
continues for WMD and vast possibilities still exist to find them, but also
because there is so much evidence of their existence, in the past if not in the
present, that there should be no doubt about the validity of the Allied claims,
or the veracity of a “smoking gun”. Evidence is indeed overwhelming and it should
be gleaned in the following domains:
-
Since the 1980s, Saddam
Hussein – personally – has boasted, in public, of the development by his
scientists of “binary” weapons of mass destruction, which presumably contain
both chemical and biological weapons. He has threatened to use them to “burn
half Israel”.
Others, such as the Egyptians in the 1960s, used WMD in their wars (in Yemen), but
denied the fact or at least tried to hide it. Saddam was one of the few tyrants
in history who threatened to use them, and backed his menace by actually
manufacturing the deadly substances;
-
Saddam used both
chemical and biological weapons against the Iranians in the First Gulf War
(1980-1988) and the Kurds in Halabja in 1988. This means that even if Saddam
had no weapons on the eve of the Third War (2003), there is no denying that he
had them in the past;
-
Saddam himself had
reported to the investigative team of the UN, under Hans Blix, that during the
months leading up to the war, he had certain quantities of biological and
chemical weapons which he destroyed; but he provided no evidence or
documentation of that destruction. In other words, while there is an Iraqi
admission of past existence of those weapons, there is no proof that they were
discarded;
-
Enough foreign
companies, notably German, were caught trading in chemical substances with Iraq, which
could provide the basis for the manufacture of WMD;
-
In the 1980s,
Saddam made tremendous efforts to develop missiles and a long-range “giant
cannon”, with the help of a Belgian scientist, which would be worthwhile
developing only if it had WMD payloads to deliver;
-
In June 1981, when Israel destroyed
Saddam's nuclear project at Osirak, it was widely known that the site was
geared to produce nuclear weapons. (This project was a joint program with the
French, in fact, at the time, people referred to the project as O-Chirac,
referring to Prime Minister Jacques Chirac, who under President Giscard
d'Estaing, initiated the deal with Saddam.) Further evidence to this transpired
over the years when Saddam’s agents attempted to smuggle parts that are
essential for the production of nuclear arms out of the US and western European
countries;
-
Prior to the Third
Gulf War, an impressive body of evidence had been gleaned by British, American
and Israeli intelligence, and most of it was presented by Secretary Powell to
the Security Council;
-
During the war, widespread
reporting was done in the American press, by independent investigative
reporters, who have accumulated a massive amount of evidence, circumstantial or
otherwise, regarding the manufacturing of WMD. It is unconceivable that so many
hiding places and secret sites, so many Iraqis who were banned from certain
areas and so many restrictions around certain military camps, should all be
part of some inconsequential game of no importance;
-
UN inspectors,
notably Mr. Butler the Australian Chief Inspector, who visited sites throughout
Iraq, have counseled us to learn from what the Iraqis tried to withhold from
them, and from the obstacles they put before UN investigators, more than from
the information they yielded under duress; there must have been something to
the fact that the UN inspectors were prevented by force, or under threat of
force, more than once, from accessing certain places that they suspected, and
only after certain delays during which the Iraqis cleaned up the incriminating
substances, were the inspections permitted to proceed; such rows with UN teams
would have been avoided if the Iraqis had nothing to hide;
-
Scientists tell us
that while nuclear weapons or facilities are difficult to hide, it is possible
to conceal biological and chemical weapons, and that even if under duress the
Iraqis destroyed the stocks they had of those deadly weapons, they certainly
preserved their capacity to manufacture new ones at will;
-
The US has set up special teams to search for WMD
throughout Iraq,
whose work might take many years; but in the meantime they have found many
barrels of chemical substances, suspiciously hidden or buried underground. Even
if these do not constitute the “smoking gun”, they are nevertheless a vital
step before it. The teams also found what seemed like mobile laboratories which
could manufacture WMD. No one has provided as yet any plausible alternative
explanation to their existence in the middle of nowhere, but that they were
hidden away to wipe out any indicting evidence;
-
The clear
possibility exists that during the months leading up to the war, Saddam had
ample opportunity to conclude cooperation deals with other Arab and Islamic
countries, headed by like-minded corrupt tyrants, like Syria, Iran, Pakistan or
Libya, who for a hefty bribe, in cash or smuggled petrol, would not shrink from
helping a fellow-dictator in trouble. One has to remember that since the end of
the 1990s, for example, Iraq and Syria so intimately rallied to each other as
to permit that huge smuggling of Iraqi oil abroad, even as Syria was made a
member of the Security Council of the UN which prohibited that illicit export;
-
No one is certain
that Pakistan
had developed an effective nuclear weapon until it tested it in the open, and
no one knew Saddam’s whereabouts until he was caught. But no one denied the
existence of either the bomb or Saddam. It is absurd to seek a negative proof
for anything in the fact that one does not know, does not understand or does
not find something. For the absence of evidence is not evidence of absence.
Rather, when no conclusive evidence in the form of a smoking gun exists for
now, overwhelming circumstantial evidence to its existence, especially when we
know that it was used in the past, should be sufficient to send shudders down
our backs and prompt us to act, the public conclusions of various investigative
committees notwithstanding.
In mid-December 2002, weapons experts in one facility
inspected by the UN were replaced by Iraqi intelligence agents who were to
deceive inspectors about the work that was being done there. On orders from
Saddam, the Iraqis issued a false death certificate for one scientist who was
sent into hiding, so that he could not be interrogated by the inspectors; in
mid January 2003, experts at one facility that was related to WMD, had been
ordered to stay at home away from work, to avoid the inspectors. Workers from
other facilities not engaged in unconventional weapons, were to replace the
absent workers; and a dozen Iraqi experts were placed under home arrest, not in
their homes, but as a group in one of Saddam’s guest houses. This is not the
expected behavior of someone who has nothing to hide. Had the Iraqis been
invited to the Security Council and allowed to be interrogated under oath, as
in a court of law, it is doubtful that any one of them could withstand the
interrogatory unscathed.
The examples cited by the Secretary of State at the Security
Council gave ample indication to the systematic effort made by the Iraqis to
keep key materials and people from the inspectors. This was not merely a lack
of cooperation, but a patent campaign to sabotage any meaningful inspection
work. This should not be surprising since Saddam had specialized in that sort
of misleading over the years of inspection (1991-1998), and it was precisely
due to those tactics that the entire operation came to a halt (1998-2003),
under the “arrangement” which the UN Secretary General had reached with Saddam
Hussein, which, in fact, relieved Saddam from inspection. Little wonder then,
that the UN Secretary was not the most vocal advocator of resuming inspections
until they were enforced by the US demand, nor was he in favor of exposing
Iraqi lies, which would have also exposed the hoax of his “understanding” with
Saddam.
In the field of biological weapons, it had taken four years for
the UN inspectors to pry an admission by Iraq that it had this kind of
weapon. When they finally admitted having biological weapons in its arsenal in
1995, there were vast quantities, which meant that while denying their
existence, the Iraqis were hard at work producing and storing them. Iraq declared 8,500 liters of
anthrax, while UNSCOM estimated that three times this amount may have been
manufactured. A teaspoon of anthrax killed two postal workers in the US and forced
the US Senate to close down in the fall of 2001. Moreover, the Iraqis have
never accounted for all the biological weapons they admitted they did have, nor
for the 400 weapons they had filled with those substances. UN inspectors could not
determine what happened to those weapons, although American intelligence had
amassed information about the continued manufacture of those weapons in the
years since the inspectors were expelled by Saddam in 1998.
One of the most worrisome aspects of these weapons was the
existence of mobile facilities of production, either on wheels or on rail. The
trucks and train cars were designed to evade detection, once again not fitting
for a government who has nothing to hide. In any case, those mobile facilities
could have manufactured enough biological agents to surpass anything the Iraqis
had prior to 1990. In
2000, a
defecting Iraqi chemical engineer, who supervised one of those facilities, gave
evidence of the production of biological weapons and of an accident which
killed 12 technicians on the site. He testified that production of those agents
always started Thursdays at midnight, because the Iraqis thought the inspectors
would not work on the Muslim holy day of Friday. The production, which could
not be stopped in the middle, went on until Friday evening, when the inspectors
were likely to show up again. These descriptions were corroborated by other
independent Iraqi sources, to the point that they were known to American
intelligence in great technical detail. Those trucks, cars or trailers, could
be easily concealed because they did not look any different than ordinary
vehicles in those categories which could merge into the environment without
raising any suspicions. Indeed, during the Iraq war, even though many suspected
vehicles of that sort were detected by special teams, they were hard to differentiate
from others. In all, 18 mobile production units were available to the Iraqi
manufacturing of WMD, which could churn out enough biological agents in one
month (anthrax, ricin, aflatoxin and botulinum toxin) to kill many thousands of
people. By 1998, the UN Inspectors had concluded that the Iraqis had so
perfected the dry version of these agents, which is the most lethal, that it
was incorporated into the mobile units.
As to chemical weapons, UNSCOM had widely documented their
development and manufacture, and one needs no better proof of their existence
and of Saddam’s readiness to use them than the fact that he had employed them
in the war against Iran and against his own people in Halabja in 1988, causing
the horrendous deaths of thousands, which was of little concern to those who
then blocked the Security Council Resolution that Powell was striving to table.
Saddam has also never accounted for the thousands of shells and bombs filled
with mustard gas and other lethal chemical agents that were known to exist in
Saddam’s arsenal.
Only after the defection of Hussein Kamel, the late
son-in-law of Saddam, did Iraq acknowledge possession of four tons of VX nerve
gas, one drop of which on the skin is sufficient to kill in minutes. UNSCOM
collected forensic evidence that Iraq had not only produced VX but also
weaponized it by putting it in weapons of delivery. To escape scrutiny, Iraq had
embedded much of its illicit weapons industry into its other civilian chemical
plants, and this dual-use production can be turned back and forth from civilian
to military use in no time. These plants were built to undergo any inspection
and to appear innocent, even though they were not. This is one of the reasons
the UN inspectors who have visited some of those plants could not come up with
any indicting findings.
Satellite photos, made as late as May 2002, showed unusual
activity at the al-Musayyib complex where Iraq transshipped its chemical
products into weapons and then distributed them to their hiding places. Another
photo of the same site taken two months later, showed that the ground had been
bulldozed and graded, which indicated that the Iraqis had removed the crust of
the earth in order to conceal evidence of chemical weapons that would be extant
from years of chemical weapons’ activity.
Iraq ran an international network of clandestine procurement
to purchase vital parts and substances for its WMD program, which can serve
only that purpose, such as: filters which separate micro-organisms, toxins used
in biological weapons, equipment to concentrate the agent, growth media for
anthrax and botulinum toxin, sterilization equipment for laboratories,
glass-lines reactors and pumps that can handle corrosive chemical agents, large
amounts of thionyl chloride, a precursor for nerve and blister agents and other
substances. Even if Iraq were to explain that it needed all those substances
for its legitimate chemical production, it would have to explain why it hid
them from the Inspectors, and it took a tremendous intelligence effort, human
and electronic, including eavesdropping on senior Iraqi commanders who attested
to the existence of nerve gas, to dig them up. By American estimates, the
Iraqis had hundreds of tons of chemical agents, enough to fill thousands of
weapons to cause widespread death. Saddam had given his field commanders the
authorization to use those weapons under certain circumstances, in itself
evidence of their existence and of his intention to use them. Since the 1980s,
Saddam’s regime had been experimenting on humans to perfect his biological and
chemical weapons. 1,600 death-row prisoners were transferred in 1995 to a
special unit for such experiments. Eye witnesses saw those prisoners tied to
beds while those horrific tests were done on them, and then autopsies were
performed to evaluate the efficacy of the products.
Regarding Iraq’s nuclear capacity, which Saddam not only had
never abandoned but remained determined to advance, the US provided plenty of
proof. The Inspectors had looked since 1991 for elements of this nuclear
program but found nothing. In fact, Hussein had a massive clandestine nuclear
program. That it was not discovered by UN teams only goes to show his ability to
conceal it. It covered various techniques to enrich uranium (electromagnetic
isotope separation, gas centrifuge and gas diffusion), which must have cost him
billions of dollars while he was telling UN supervisory boards that he had no
nuclear ambitions. Iraq
already possessed two out of the three elements needed for nuclear weapons: a
cadre of expert scientists, and a bomb design. Since 1998 he had been centering
on the acquisition of the third element, which is fissile material, namely the
ability to enrich uranium. He acquired tubes from different countries, which
could be used for centrifuges for enriching uranium and were supposed to be
under control by their manufacturers. While American experts have identified
those tubes as rotors for the centrifuges, the Iraqis claimed that they were to
be used for the bodies of rockets, in multiple rocket-launchers, something
quite puzzling because their tolerance far exceeds what is the accepted
standard in the American weapon industry. The Iraqis were also making efforts
to acquire other parts of equipment that could be used to build gas
centrifuges, which in the aggregate amount to proving Iraq’s ambition
to manufacture fissile material which is the missing link for renewing its
nuclear program. The nuclear scientists’ cadre, whom the press openly called
the “nuclear mujahideen”, were regularly praised and exhorted for their
efforts, and they gained the personal attention of the tyrant.
In addition to the lethal weapons of mass destruction, Iraq also
developed means to deliver them, especially ballistic missiles and unmanned
aerial vehicles (UAVs). The means of delivery, which are too expensive to
deliver conventional payloads, are in themselves conclusive proof that the
Iraqis were developing unconventional weapons, even if we knew nothing about
nuclear, biological and chemical weapons. Before 1990, Iraq had developed many
such missiles, which struck its neighbors – Iran, Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, Israel,
and were being developed to attain farther ranges. The fact that they were all
loaded with conventional payloads only meant that the Iraqis were testing them
live in preparation for the day they acquired non-conventional capability; they
could certainly have loaded them at the very least with biological and chemical
weapons they possessed then, but they knew that a devastating counter-blow by
the Americans or the Israelis would leave them crippled for generations and put
an end to their program before it could mature. Despite the fact that the UN
inspectors destroyed most of Saddam’s missile capacity, he retained a few dozen
of them with the range of up to 1,000 kms. The Iraqis themselves admitted that
the two types of missiles they developed, “al-Sumud” and “al-Fatah”, violated
the 150 km.
limit established by the Security Council. Moreover, the Iraqis had illegally
imported 380 SA-2 rocket engines, for the development of the advanced rockets
it was not supposed to have. Ample graphic and photographic evidence was shown
by Secretary Powell to prove that the Iraqis were developing over 1,200 km.-range missiles
that are forbidden by the UN resolutions and patently put in jeopardy Iraq’s
neighbors, because of their capacity to deliver unconventional weapons to each
one of their major cities.
The UAVs have no other purpose than to carry and deliver
unconventional payloads. Spray devices have been developed to attain greater
efficiency in distributing the lethal substances over large enemy areas. These UAVs
have been fitted on Mig 21 Soviet aircraft, but Iraq had also been developing
smaller vehicles for that purpose, called L-29. While Iraq had declared this vehicle to have a range
of 80 km.,
US intelligence discovered
that in its test flights it covered a range of 500 kms., without refueling and
on autopilot, which renders it quite lethal to Iraq’s neighbors.1
Any independent judicial system in the world, who would
acquit a culprit due to the “insufficiency” of all the above massive evidence,
direct and circumstantial, would not be worthy of that attribute. But the
Security Council, with its conflicting interests and political considerations,
the hypocrisy and fallacy that drip from its deliberations, and the atmosphere
of vindictiveness and lack of concern for truth or fairness, certainly cannot
compete for the attributes of a court of law in a liberal democracy. If
tyrannical countries like Syria
and China, and until
recently the Soviet Union, can dominate its
debates, then what can one expect? Incidentally, the same kind of overwhelming
evidence was presented by Secretary Powell to the Security Council on the same
occasion, with regard to the links between Iraq and international terrorism in
general, and al Qa`idah in particular, but since it is neither graphic
or photographic but human by nature, where the US could be accused of
manipulation, it is perhaps preferable to cite other sources for it. Other
sources exist, however, in the domain of unconventional weapons too, of whom we
shall cite only the most telling, all of which largely corroborate Powell’s
accusations at the Security Council. Like him, we shall distinguish, for the
sake of the presentation, between nuclear, biological and chemical weapons, and
the means of delivery, which in themselves attest to the existence of WMD,
exactly as a Trident-carrying Submarine in the American Navy, which could
deliver inter-continental ballistic missiles (ICBM) to all corners of the
globe, was proof a) to the existence in the Navy of nuclear-powered subs, which
could deliver their payloads from under water and stay indefinitely at sea only
if they were nuclear-powered; b) they must have carried ICBMs, because only
that sort of missile justified the very onerous vehicle which carried them; c)
that the ICBMs would not be worth dispatching if they were not nuclear (or
biological or chemical), because to deliver one ton of regular explosives to
the target would not be worth the expensive missile and the onerous vehicle
that carried them; and d) to increase the cost effectiveness of the Trident, it
had to be multi-head, so that the same expensive missile, carried by the same
expensive submarine, could hit several targets in one shot. The very same logic
applies to Saddam’s arsenals, and therefore Powell’s analysis, not only as a
Secretary of State, known for his sobriety and integrity, but also as a former
trooper and Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, not particularly known for
his belligerency or unfairness, should be heeded by any open-minded observer.
Equipped with the knowledge that was laid out before the
Security Council (in which every bit represented the working assumptions of
Tommy Franks’ troops), as soon as the American forces crossed into Iraqi
territory they were on WMD alert, with specialized units of detection,
protection and de-contamination accompanying every fighting unit. There were
places and times where the troops in their entirety were on high alert, and
despite the crippling effect of the suffocating anti-WMD suits and masks, they
wore them. That was particularly the case in the approaches of
Baghdad, when the Americans were convinced
that in his last stand Saddam would deploy everything he had envisaged for his
doomsday confrontation with the Americans.2 But that did not happen, in
spite of the overwhelming evidence of the existence of those horrific means of
warfare in Iraqi hands and of the earlier indications that the Iraqis would use
them, at least as a last resort. Saddam’s authorization to his supreme
commanders to use these weapons, were picked up by Intelligence (not only the
Americans’). Various explanations are possible (not to their non-existence
because they certainly existed), but to their non-use, because they were
certainly not used in the Third Gulf War. The most common explanation is that
the American moves were so swift and overwhelming, and always several steps
ahead of the Iraqi field commanders, who never had the chance to evaluate the
right time and place to use them. Add to that the disarray and collapsing
systems of command and control under the American bombings, and you have a
plausible reason why the Iraqis should have abstained from that disastrous
move. But this explanation misses the long and elaborate preparations made by
the Iraqi military prior to the American attack that they knew was coming and
made tremendous efforts to avoid.
Another explanation is that Saddam’s decision not to use WMD
stemmed from his reluctance to lose face in front of the whole world, after he
had reiterated that he did not possess them. The US insisted that Saddam had WMD,
while he swore that he did not, and the UN assured the world that “there was no
decisive evidence” to sustain the American claim. Saddam was not reluctant to
be caught lying, a practice in which he had gained considerable expertise, but
he did not want to be seen losing his argument with the Americans, thereby
justifying their war against him. This argument also misses the whole rationale
for the stockpiling of such weapons for a rainy day or for an immediate and
tangible danger to the elimination of the regime. It is hard to imagine Iraq
once again coming so close to a doomsday scenario in the future as it did in
this war; and despite this, Iraq did not use these weapons.
Yet another explanation is that Saddam prepared those
weapons only for self-defense, not for offense, and knowing that if he should
use them against his enemies at war, Americans or others, his country and
people, not to speak about his regime, his cronies and his family, would suffer
such an untold devastation in retribution, that it would not be worthwhile to
take the risk. If so, why did he need those weapons when there was no one
remotely threatening him with such weapons? Except for Egypt, which used
chemical weapons in the Yemen in the 1960s, there is no record of the use of
chemical warfare since World War I, except by Saddam. Besides, if he needed
those weapons only in self-defense, why did he use them against the Kurds in
1988?
The only plausible explanation is a combination of all the
others: Saddam had plenty of WMD, which he built to use to attain his
megalomaniac ambitions, both against factions of his people and his neighbors.
Some of the latter also have them, but few would dare or have the guts, like
Saddam, to use them and defy the whole world which needs his oil. He,
nevertheless came to the conclusion in the months building up to the war, that
rather than vindicate the US and the Inspectors who would ultimately find
indicting proof of their existence, he would systematically eliminate any signs
of their presence on his soil. An elaborate program of concealment was undertaken,
matched only by the ongoing underground manufacturing of those substances.
Whatever could be buried under the ground in the vast Iraqi desert, together
with the large manufacturing facilities that existed there already since
inspection started, “disappeared” in that fashion; whatever could be
dissimulated as civilian-use substances, was metamorphosed to appear innocent;
what could be stored in neighboring friendly countries, such as Syria and
Jordan, and for a price even Iran and Saudi Arabia, was hauled there; what
could fit in neither, may have been shipped overseas to places like Sudan,
Libya, or some other mysterious ally, for a high price; and what could not find
its way to any of those destinations, was simply destroyed in place. The
destruction of missiles to satisfy UN inspectors in the weeks prior to the war,
was an example of that, another was the new top soil shown by Powell to the
members of the Security Council, which was to cover over the contaminated earth
in one of the bases of those WMDs. Another long trail of evidence in this
direction can be gleaned from the pieces of information that have been
published along the way since the war broke out.
Indeed, together with intelligence reports that Saddam was
ready to use gas against the Americans once they completed their conquest of
the Shi`ite south, there were press reports that the Americans had inspected a
suspected chemical plant near Najaf, which may have undergone the civilian
metamorphosis, but found nothing. However, noting that Iraqi soldiers in the
battlefield or in POW camps were carrying masks with them, and knowing that the
US would certainly not use that horrific form of warfare, reporters came to the
conclusion that the Iraqis themselves must have prepared for their own forces
to use gas or other chemical or biological means in the field. American fears
of such an eventuality were so concrete that American and Australian Special
Forces were flown into Iraq to seize control of Iraqi command and control
posts. Such “Chemical Ali”s (named after one of Saddam’s relatives, called Ali,
nicknamed “Chemical Ali” because he was in change of all WMD projects in Iraq)
in southern Iraq, that were connected to what they thought were chemical
weapons sites. On a previous occasion, President Bush had elaborated on his
description of the Halabja horror, in which an estimated 8,000 Kurds, mostly
women and children perished, 15 years earlier, in his weekly radio talk. He
must have known, or feared some warning that was not revealed in public.3
On March 26, barely at the end of the first week of
fighting, the Americans ran across that huge three square mile compound, near
Najaf, some 100 miles
south of the Capital. Of particular interest was the information provided by an
Iraqi General, 30 officers, and another 300 POWs who surrendered to the
Americans. Some of these prisoners were whisked away for interrogation before
the troops of the 3rd Infantry (who occupied the grounds), had a
chance to question them about the stunning findings on the ground. The General
himself claimed that he had nothing to do with unconventional weapons, but
admitted that there were special bunkers and underground tunnels in the
compound that neither he nor other senior officers could enter. What was there
to hide from senior officers; dollars or gold that Saddam stacked there? But
then, that was hardly a suitable place, in the heart of the desert, if Saddam
needed the weapons close to his palaces in the Capital, both for access and for
escape. Were these secret harems of Saddam? But then, the same problems apply.
What could be there that senior officers in the middle of nowhere could not
access? Surely something Saddam needed to hide. And that amount of personnel
and senior officers? Was it a base manned by sinecures, or just a blunt case of
mismanagement? Since the site was probably emptied by Saddam just prior to the
arrival of the Americans, in the course of some dark night when the convoys of
evacuation could not be spotted from satellite, one must look for bits and pieces,
for scraps of evidence that may have been left behind by negligent evacuees,
and like a detective, piece them together, analyze them, and provide a
plausible plot. When a team of the 75th Exploitation Task Force
(XTF), made out of technicians of various disciplines and Special Forces,
arrived to that site, they found a biological hazard sign on a wooden pallet
with a crate in bunker No 36, and markings on other crates in bunker No. 37
indicating CN-1, which is sometimes used for riot control agents. Since there
was no one in sight to control and riots are unlikely to happen in a secret
military camp, we remain with the possibility that either that substance was
implanted to make the place look innocent, or that it was of a dual purpose
like other agents in Saddam’s chemical industry.4
Signs of that sort are not usually found in beauty parlors
or in kindergartens, though with Saddam one never knows. The team also found
artillery shells coated with wax, which is sometimes used on shells and bombs
containing unconventional weapons. They also stumbled across 40 advanced
Soviet-style masks with extra filters, which attest that the personnel there
dealt with WMD, or at the very least were expecting an American gas attack.
Hydraulic triple-locked doors barred the entrance to some of the more than 100
bunkers on the site, protected by electric fences and trenches. Certainly, no
weapons of mass destruction were found there, but one has to explain what hid
behind those doors conducting to tunnels in the middle of the desert and
surrounded by top security defensive devices. Stores of toys and candies? A
secret school for nurses? A hidden HQ for Mother Teresa? That site was
initially on the list of suspected locations for manufacturing and storing WMD,
and it was due to be visited by Pentagon experts, but until a conclusive
analysis of the findings there and elsewhere was put together, no smoking gun
could be said to have been found.5 Another team headed by a
captain, the Mobile Exploitation Team Bravo (MET-Bravo) rummaged through a vast
Iraqi air-base at Talil in the south which looked abandoned, and its runways
littered with war debris, pieces of planes and vehicles, as if someone made an
effort to present it as an innocent site, where mammoth quantities of weapons
and ammunition, some from World War II, had been amassed haphazardly and left
behind, without the slightest attempt to tamper with the ammunition so as not
to let it fall in enemy hands. That base had been heavily bombed by the
Americans during the previous Gulf War, and was on the list of suspected sites
too, but according to the captain, “there was not any apparent rhyme or reason
to the storage. Shells were mixed in with casings, fuses and mortar, piled high
from floor to ceiling. It was all a jumble.”6 Isn’t it plausible to
advance the hypothesis that it was not an ammunition depot that the Americans
found, but a carefully staged one to make believe that Iraq was clean of WMD,
and that once the war is over, and the Americans forced to leave, under the
criticism or world opinion and the unrelenting attacks of his own guerillas
that he withdrew from Baghdad, Mosul and Kirkuk, almost without a fight, Saddam
would be able to stage a comeback and repatriate or unearth all the hidden
goodies?
As the Americans failed to find any unconventional weapons
along the way, they continued to be convinced that Baghdad would have to use
them, as their last opportunity. Had the Iraqis learned the lessons of the
weapons dumps that had been cleaned up and deserted prior to the arrival of the
Americans, they may have known that Saddam had adopted a novel tactic of
preserving what he could of his army and unconventional arsenals. For this
purpose, Saddam would avoid combat and begin harassing the occupying troops
only after the war was over and no WMDs were found. The Americans estimated,
instead, that the withdrawing Iraqis would now use the weapons defensively,
namely that they would use chemical agents to contaminate land, in order to
create a no-man’s land between them and the attacking troops. But that did not
happen, for Saddam would have had to betray his vow not to vindicate the
Americans and let the world believe that the attack was in vain and had no
justification in the first place. The American assumption was based on the experience
of the First Gulf War (1980-8), where the Iraqis laid down mustard gas behind
the Iranian forces, then bombarded the front lines with the short-lived but
highly toxic sarin gas. The goal was to drive the retreating sarin-exposed
Iranians into the mustard trap, and the Americans were afraid that the same
tactic might be repeated against them to create killing zones around them as
they approached Baghdad.
Iraq is not a signatory of
the Chemical weapons Convention of 1993, that was signed by 150 countries,
including the US,
and that increased the suspicions of the Americans who were kept guessing by
Saddam from day one of the war.7
Two weeks into the war, the Americans had explored a dozen
of the several hundred suspected sites, but still no smoking gun, the official
explanation being that most of the suspected locations were still under Iraqi
control, in the Baghdad and Tikrit areas, and
that after America
took over the entire territory the search would be pushed forward in earnest.
Meanwhile, at an industrial plant in Latifiya south of Baghdad, the troops
found thousands of boxes of white powder, suspected to be a chemical agent, but
it was identified as regular explosives. The 75th XTF, much to the
frustration of its members, found itself training in northern Iraq rather than
making headway in the investigations they had come for, while the American
Administration, instead of providing plausible explanations to the so-far
evasive WMD, were losing faith in their pre-war determination that finding and destroying
those weapons were top priority, second only to removing Saddam, and were now
talking about restoring civil rights to Iraq, building a democracy and
destroying the infrastructure of terrorism in the country. But they still
maintained their faith, at least when asked in public, that when the got to Baghdad those sites would
be uncovered one by one. The media, on their part, far from investing some
investigative reporting to answer the quandary, started reporting that the fact
that only masks and protection suits were uncovered in the Iraqi sites meant
that the Iraqis had no offensive unconventional weapons, and all they did in
the chemical and biological domain was to provide protection for their troops.
All the other questions, like who manufactured and used gas against Iranians
and Kurds, became taboo in their eyes and no one wanted to talk about them
anymore, least of all the Administration, which was embarrassed by the
questions of reporters and never again volunteered to make statements on this
issue unless asked.8 The vanishing of the American forceful accusation
against Baghdad on the use of WMD, which
incidentally did not affect Tony Blair in the least, generated a perverse
accusation in reverse against the Americans for having authorized the use of
tear gas against rioters in Iraq,
precisely in order to avert the use of live fire to quell disturbances. The new
accusations voiced in the press and by all kinds of experts and intellectuals,
said that America, who is a signatory to the Convention against chemical
weapons, would be violating its signature; tear gas being included among the
prohibited substances against armed forces. However, there exists in the
American legal system, an executive order from 1975, which has since become
American national policy, as adopted by the Senate of the US, which has allowed
tear gas for certain defensive purposes. The Chemical Weapons Convention had
banned tear gas against armed forces for fear that it might escalate to the use
of other chemical agents, but that was clearly not the case here. At any rate,
opponents of the war saw this as an opportunity not only to clear Iraq of any blame,
despite the fact that it did not join the Convention, but to unfairly and carelessly
reverse the blame against the US, in spite of the fact that the US had joined
the convention. Moreover, one of those experts claimed, that if the Americans
used tear gas in the war, the Iraqis would be entitled to retaliate with
chemical weapons of their own, in self-defense.9 Absurdity had made a full
circle.
In the Karbalah area, while the Americans were searching an
empty (once again!) military camp, where Palestinians and other foreign
volunteers were supposedly trained, they found several drums which they thought
may contain deadly nerve agents and mustard gas. They duly warned that many
industrial chemicals can cause false alarms; therefore they reserved their
final judgment until the 75th XTF could test the findings. The
American troops discovered on the site, once again, an unusually large amount
of chemical protection gear, but instead of the weapons they were searching for
they found those canisters of chemicals. Some soldiers became ill, probably due
to auto-suggestion, and they put on their chemical protection suits. The
chemical unit that tested the substance identified it as CN, a riot control gas
that caused vomiting and blisters, and when they later tested a 20-gallon drum
they identified it as sarin and tabun, two nerve agents. Another 55-gallon drum
was said to have tested positive for mustard gas. But those suspected materials
were not packaged into warheads or artillery shells, something which should
have raised suspicions as to their lethal effect.10
However, based on previous experiences where all those alarms proved false, this
time reporters were extremely prudent, qualifying their writing with “possible”
and “may”. One reporter even warned that tests in the field can be inexact, and
they appealed for patience before final conclusions were drawn, because the
kits for preliminary testing were designed to err on the caution side, while
the large and precise instruments – the gas chromatograph and the mass
spectrometer, which break up the chemicals into their components and then
compare them to libraries of known substances, are too large and too complex to
be placed in the field. The immediate analysis with the field kits can confuse
nerve agents with other chemicals such as insecticides, for in fact tabun and
sarin had been originally developed as insecticides in Nazi Germany and then
used against humans. The site was suspect at first sight because the Iraqis
were known to have developed in the 1980s large quantities of mustard, tabun
and sarin, and although these substances evaporate when exposed to the air, the
first tests showed that residues of them might still have lingered in the camp.11
These were precisely the ambiguities that the Iraqi deception program was based
upon, whereby any lethal material can be shown to be innocent, and any residue
of chemical substance from weapons of mass destruction that were transferred to
a hiding place can be dismissed as a fertilizer. It did not occur to the
testing units that the spot in question, like the others in Talil and Najaf,
had been used to manufacture and/or store WMD, then evacuated and its contents
transshipped for hiding or eliminated, while the remnants, including the
chemical raw materials that were left behind, could be said to be just
“fertilizers of insecticides”. One ought to ask, nevertheless, what business do
insecticides and fertilizers have to do in military camps in the heart of the
desert, where there was no apparent agriculture in sight to protect?
When questions relating to circumstantial evidence are not
asked, and testing in military units is limited to matter-of-fact and
unimaginative atmospheric and mechanical gauging, then of course the testing
units would repeat their refrain of “no-conclusive evidence”, and of
“frustration” at their inability to dig up the findings that were their very raison
d’être. By their repeated expression of “disappointment” that they
did not find the incriminating material, while it was laying right there all
around them, they betrayed their expectation and hope that they should have.
When a literally “smoking gun” is not found in a homicide case, because it had
been thrown into the river, the spent-cartridges, the corpses of the victims,
the blood trail, the stains, the hair and fingerprints of the assassin are
enough of an incriminating proof in themselves. If the situation were not so
tragic, it would be almost comic, when sensors invariably detected chemical
materials in every suspected Iraqi camp, that was left empty by the retreating
troops, but then the chemical liquid found was dubbed as “probably part of
organo-phosphates used in pesticides”. When such a finding was announced by the
Mobile Exploitation Team Alpha in Muhawish, a town in the valley of the
Euphrates, eminently suited for agriculture, one could understand the
inconclusiveness of the findings, although one could guess that a spot of this
sort, where the ambiguities of the chemicals’ dual use could be best played
out, would fit ideally for Saddam’s ruses and hiding tactics. But in most other
cases where there was no agriculture around, the testing teams could also have well
transcended their technical routine, tempered in caution by the nature of their
job, and ventured into some hypothesis that provided some explanations. They
would have thereby contributed to the resolution of the quandary. In Muhawish,
American soldiers reported nauseating and noticed welts on their hands, a
sophisticated detector showed the presence of a gas agent, but the verdict read
organophosphates once again, and the whole affair was dropped. No questions
were asked as to why the Iraqis went to great lengths to hide eleven 20-gallon
and three 55-gallon drums of thin clear liquid. If it was innocent, and no
investigative reporting was done on the question, why did the soldier, who
yielded this piece of information, ask not to be identified?12 Palm branches had been cut to hide the
barrels in a deep trench lined with sandbags. Who has heard of such elaborate
defense afforded to fertilizer or insecticide?
The day before
Baghdad
fell, Mobile Exploitation Team Alpha, of the 75th XTF, was
dispatched for a “three hour mission” to explore the Tabook State Company in a
small town near Karbalah, to check on some “underground barrels of mysterious
origin were stored”. But two days later the team was still there, opening large
storage containers that they found buried in the ground. They also found new
equipment of foreign make, but “it was not clear that it was used in any
weapons program”.13 What else did they need to clarify, and
what would it take to convince them? Would Saddam deliberately not drop
a chemical or biological bomb on American troops simply in order not to give
“satisfaction” to his enemies? Why not ask, instead, why did all those barrels,
which could be used also for chemical weapons, need to be buried?
Next it was Kirkuk, where American paratroopers discovered
“suspicious warheads and rocket components” just outside the Iraqi government
offices in town, again characterized as “tantalizing but inconclusive find”,
because the officers could not determine whether they were of a design
prohibited by UN resolutions, or they were built to hold chemical or biological
munitions. They were found in the rear lot of the civilian governor’s complex,
painted with a wide red strip, a very unlikely place of storage for that
seemingly sophisticated kind of heavy munitions, unless staged to be there, to
deflect the attention from something else. Five of those 5-feet long warheads
were found packed in green wooden crates, with cables and missile guidance
systems lying around them.14 Back in
Washington, it was learned that the Americans were now setting their sights on
3 dozen sites in search for illegal weapons, selected from among the list of
1,000 laboratories, plants, military installations or storage facilities that
were initially suspected of manufacturing WMD, or storing parts of them. In the
preceding week the Americans had retrieved file cabinets of laboratory manuals
and technical papers at some of the sites where they had looked for banned
weapons. A Doc-Ex project, collecting documentation about the prohibited
weapons and war crimes committed by the Saddam regime, often in conjunction with
foreign parties, was underway in the Pentagon. But due to the ambivalence of
the findings thus far, the best hopes of the Administration were now pinned on
human intelligence to be extracted from arrested or surrendering senior Iraqi
officers who would know where the materials had been hidden, or what had happened
to them. Progress in the investigation of Iraq’s al-Qa`idah ties, which
had so far also been “inconclusive”, might throw some light on the
manufacturing of ricin and other dangerous gases and chemicals by the defeated Ansar-al-Islam
in northern Iraq. The American Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, General
Myers, said that he believed the ricin gas found in an apartment in London in
January 2003, had originated from the Ansar camp in northern Iraq.15
At the site of Karbalah, already mentioned above, a search
team found radioactive material in a maintenance building, and “dual use”
biological equipment that could be switched to either civilian or military use,
which of course also led to “inconclusive” conclusions. But what of the fact
that it was buried in metal containers under huge mounds of gravel and soil? A
nuclear detection team removed seven canisters containing a radioactive isotope
of cesium from the maintenance warehouse. Cesium is used to calibrate machinery
in the many buildings and production facilities that were under construction on
the site. After a week-long survey at this location, American experts concluded
that the specific purpose of parts of that giant installation “remained a
mystery”, something that could hardly be said of an innocent plant for the
manufacturing of toys or candy. Maybe the experts in
Washington would pour over the details maps,
diagrams and the 1,000 documents which were lifted from the plant and find an
answer some time in the future, if they are also willing to look for
circumstantial evidence. That plant was one of Iraq’s leading ammunition
manufacturing locations and it was under a mammoth expansion project when the
war broke out. It is hard to imagine that anything produced there which was not
connected to the Iraqi death-machine. The UN inspector teams visited the plant
in February 2003, but nothing incriminating was found there. Had there been
something incriminating to be found, Saddam would not have let them in. The
inspector teams were allowed in only after Saddam cleared the plant of any evidence.
This explains why the Americans found only “suspicious” materials, which, if
compounded with the rest of the findings, were conclusive enough for any
sophisticated detective. But the famous smoking gun, required by detectives who
only work by the book and by the rules, was nowhere to be seen. The site had
been visited twice before by American troops and then by a specialized team,
but they missed the buried containers. It was not until American troops came in
for a second time, (already the third time in all), that they came across the
biggest find of all – 11 sealed and buried containers. Some of them were opened
and a small chemical platoon was left behind to secure them, but the massive
looting of the site by thousands of impoverished Iraqis from the surrounding
villages, left the containers clean of any findings when finally a specialized
team arrived to take stock of what was there.16
That was a measure of the chaotic coordination between the
combat units, who had to move forward, and the specialized teams who had to
arrive to the spot immediately and begin their tests, provided they were
protected by the advancing troops, which was not always the case. For example,
the late-coming experts found manuals of two drying ovens imported from
Germany, equipment that is used to culture bacteria and viruses for biological
weapons. In the first instance, the experts concluded that the containers
included expensive, highly sophisticated equipment imported from Germany,
Italy, Britain, China and other countries, that could be used for either
military or civilian purposes. Then the experts examined a 50-foot long and
five-foot high mound of packed soil and gravel. The ground-penetrating
detectors revealed objects buried inside the mound. Because they had no
earth-moving equipment, they hired laborers from an adjoining village who, after
an entire day of vain effort, found nothing. The experts were not given the
requisite equipment to test sites and move on to seek others, nor the requisite
vehicles to facilitate their task, apparently due to the shift decided in the
Pentagon, from searching the evasive WMD, to collecting data about Iraq’s war
crimes.17 Civilians recruited by the
Pentagon to help in the search for prohibited weapons, confirmed the state of
confusion which existed in the field in this regard. About 50 experts, American
and foreign, some of whom had worked for the UN inspection teams previously,
criticized the American military search efforts as “superficial” and
“misguided”, probably for their inability to piece together the evidence they
found into an incriminating whole. It was felt that the whole operation might
be counterproductive if left in their inexperienced hands. The Administration,
which finally awoke to the ineptitude of the troops on the ground to spot the
dangerous materials, and even the XTF units which followed them, was now
considering to dispatch the much more trained and capable teams of recruited
civilians, even though Paul Wolfowitz, the Deputy Secretary of Defense,
visiting Iraq in mid-July 2003, admitted that the search for WMD had taken
second spot in his priorities to the more urgent task of bringing order back to
the country. Their task would be, as a military official termed it, “to tell
the difference between Saddam’s strategic talcum-reserves and anthrax”.18 At long last, someone understood that the
old technical method would not work any more.
The infighting and competition between the two Pentagon
agencies – the Defense Intelligence Agency, which was supposed to coordinate
the civilian effort, and the Defense Threat Reduction Agency, in charge of
destroying any unconventional weapons that are discovered, seemed to step on
each other’s toes. The civilian group assigned the Iraq Survey Group to recruit
the civilian experts from among a pool of 300 previously-trained UN inspectors
from various UN agencies who had field experience in Iraq in the past. According to the
Pentagon, the idea of recruiting the specialized civilians had originated from
the early stages of the war-planning, and was not the result of the
incompetence of the built-in military teams. Be it as it may, the failure of
the detection team thus far to come up with anything beyond the “no conclusive”
formula, has certainly accelerated the process of recruiting the requisite 50
or so expert civilians. They received refresher training in
Fort Benning,
and were to join the 1,000-man effort to search for WMD, of which they will be
the core of experts.19
In the meantime, however, the skeptics’ hands were strengthened
by the fact that no weapons had been found, months into the post-war period. They
claimed that the arms hunt was fruitless because Saddam had none in the eve of
the war, though he may have had some previously, which by they had been either
destroyed or had evaporated. Moreover, in another perverse reversal, one of
them suggested that even if they were found thereafter, the US would be
suspected of having planted them, for it would be difficult to convince people
of the justification for the war, unless some independent body like the UN
confirmed the findings.20
The skeptics offered no
explanation, however, to all the mysteries, quandaries, questions and
hide-and-seek game that Saddam played for years with the UN inspection teams.
After the war, the picture began to emerge of what had happened
with the WMD programs in Iraq.
An Iraqi scientist who claimed to have worked in Iraq’s chemical weapons
industry for more than a decade, told an American military team that Iraq had
destroyed chemical and biological weapons and equipment only days before the
war began. He led the Americans to a supply of material that proved to be the
building blocs of illegal weapons, which he claimed to have buried so as to
wipe out the evidence of his country’s illicit weapons program. He also said
that his country had sent secret unconventional weapons and technology to
Syria, starting in the mid-1990s, and that more recently his authorities were
cooperating with al-Qa`idah. He reiterated that Saddam had destroyed as
early as the 1990s some stockpiles of deadly agents, shipped others to Syria,
and focused research instead on programs impervious to detection by outside
inspectors. Mobile Exploitation Team Alpha considered him credible especially
after they verified on the ground some of the details he gave them, but for his
own safety could not disclose his identity. These findings, which only
corroborate the tentative conclusions that were independently reached above,
also lend credence to the assurances of the Administration on the eve of the war
that it was out to destroy those weapons, and its later contention that it would
use human intelligence, provided by Iraqi defectors or turncoats, to reach
evidence of the hidden chemical and biological programs.
Significantly, the captured Iraqi revealed that four days
before Bush gave Saddam 48 hours to leave Baghdad or face war, Iraqi officials
set fire to a warehouse where biological weapons research and development were
conducted, and that months before the war he had watched Iraqi officials bury
chemical precursors and other sensitive material, to conceal and preserve them
for future use. He showed the Americans documents, samples and other evidence of
the program that he claimed to have stolen to prove that the program existed, if
proof was needed.21
But since the “smoking gun” the opponents of the “Anglo-Saxon”
war wanted to see was yet to appear, in the post-war period attacks by both
European pundits and the opposition press in the US and Britain, centered upon
the “cooked evidence” that Bush and Blair were accused of having staged to lure
their countries into war. The Daily Telegraph observed that “Tony Blair
stands charged in effect of committing British troops on the basis of a lie”,22 and Le Monde flatly charged that “what we are
witnessing is probably one of the biggest state lies in years. The US was in fact bluffing
when it published its documentary proof... The weapons of mass destruction were
just a pretext...”23 This heated public debate
further escalated with the eruption of the David Kelly-BBC scandal in Britain
and the George Tenet admission that he was the origin of the erroneous note
introduced into Bush’s State of the Union speech in January 2003, accusing Iraq
of having purchased uranium from Niger. For the American Administration,
however, as voiced by Condoleezza Rice, the National Security Adviser, it was
essential for the disarming nation, in this case Iraq, to show its goodwill and
intention by giving the international community unrestricted access to its
installations, exactly as South Africa and the Ukraine had done with regard to
their nuclear programs. Otherwise, the rogue regime of Saddam who continued to
play hide-and-seek games with the international inspectors, was not worthy of
any credibility even if, ironically, it had begun the process of eliminating
its stockpiles of WMD.24 Other writers, who have also
concluded that Saddam indeed had stockpiles of prohibited weapons, were founded
on Saddam’s refusal to give himself a clean bill of health by answering the
simple question of what he had done with the thousands of liters of anthrax and
the thousands of tons of VX that he had admitted having in the 1990s. Therefore,
the only remaining question was how far he progressed since 1998, when the
inspectors were expelled. And when they resumed their searches in the Fall of
2002, following the Security Council Resolution, the thousands of pages his
experts wrote in response to the demand of the UN, took up the old stuff of
pre-1998 and added nothing to clarify the new situation. Moreover, in a
February 1998 speech, President Clinton described the frightening proportions
of the chemical and biological arsenal of Saddam, and urged the world to
address that threat. No voluntary disarmament is known to have been done by
Saddam since, hence the hesitation of many to believe that on the eve of the Iraq war all
those agents had evaporated.25
In an interview with Polish Television, President Bush,
questioned by the concerned Poles, America’s new allies, who are to participate
in maintaining order in post-war Iraq, he was remarkably keen to assure his
audience that some banned weapons had been found by the search teams in Iraq. Not
only the mobile laboratories, used to make the weapons, received wide coverage
by the media. General Keith Dayton, who headed that effort in Iraq, has said
that his team would shift the focus from suspicious sites to areas where
documents, interviews with Iraqis and other clues suggest where biological or
chemical weapons may be hidden.26
One would think that both speakers were referring to the considerable progress
made by the Americans after they interrogated some of the defectors and
renegades who fell into their hands, amidst the rising demands by public
opinion and members of Congress to be told “where is the meat?”. The critics in
America were not interested in being told that only manufacturing machines or
labs were found, they wanted to see the weaponized substances themselves, which
had led America to war. In Britain, the frenzy to criticize Blair was so
feverish, that no amount of proof of the cruelty of Saddam’s defunct regime was
enough, The mass-grave of 200 children who had been burned alive, which was
discovered near Kirkuk, itself sending shock waves, no less than WMD, was not
satisfactory to some Britons to justify the removal of Saddam in a war that was
already won, not lost; and they continued to clamor for evidence and a
smoking gun. A reporter, who visited Western Iraq,
was startled by the vast amount of closed military compounds in the heart of
the uninhabited desert, with hundreds of buildings, laboratories, hangars,
bunkers and silos stretching to the horizon, for which Iraqi officials never
provided a plausible explanation of their use. Therefore, for that author, it
was not the question of whether or not Iraq had those weapons that was relevant
and nagging, but its capacity of manufacturing them in those vast compounds
that only now are beginning to be studied and dug up.27
The reports about the discovery of Saddam’s plans to revive his
nuclear program, served as ammunition to American authors who could not comprehend
the self-flagellation of some of their countrymen regarding the war in Iraq,
after all the revelations of the mass graves, massive tortures, severe
oppression, arrests and executions, corruption, siphoning public funds to the
cronies of the tyrant, or to developing megalomaniac projects to please
Saddam’s dreams to hold weapons of mass destruction and intimidate his enemies,
and cultivating a regime of fear and persecution that the Ba`ath machinery
imposed, by all accounts worse than Stalin’s and not far from Hitler’s. Those
authors reminded their audiences that during the previous Gulf War, Iraq had stored
biological ammunition in pits dug in the desert or in abandoned railroad
tunnels. Now that an Iraqi scientist has led the Americans to the site where
the uranium enrichment equipment was buried, people should realize how
difficult it is to extract the information and should be satisfied with
discovering the implements that make nuclear weapons, even if the bomb itself
has not been found or is not manufactured yet.28 On
June 21, 2003, US forces broke into an abandoned community hall in
Baghdad and seized piles
of intelligence equipment and top secret documents. Some documents refer to Iraq’s nuclear
programs, and they were seized on the sixth day of a nationwide operation to
seize weapons and insurgents dubbed “Desert Scorpion”. Ninety raids were
conducted in all, yielding 540 suspects, 22 of them by troops of the 1st
Armored Division who had relieved parts of the Marines and the 3rd
Infantry after they had fought the battle of Baghdad. Another 3 raids were done by the 4th
Infantry in the area of Kirkuk
in the north. In some of the seized documents, there were manifests for the
delivery of communications equipment to the Iraqi nuclear agency. One letter,
dated February 7, 1998, from the National Security Council of Iraq, was
addressed to the Iraqi Nuclear Agency, with a carbon copy to the Mukhabarat (
the Secret Police), attesting that not only was there a nuclear program but it
was secret.29 These bits and pieces are
apparently the tip of the iceberg, because the US has been sitting on much more
information, discovered after the reform and reinforcement of the search teams,
than meets the eye, or than it is ready to admit as long as that effort has
been going on and its early disclosure might jeopardize its continuation.
According to preliminary information leaked, many countries, like France and Germany,
would find themselves in an embarrassing situation, since many of the Iraqi WMD
scientists traveled to Syria
with French passports.30
Finally, pending the many scandals that are bound to rise when
more information becomes available, it is worth concluding this essay with some
citations from Rolf Ekeus, the first Chief of the UN Inspectors in Iraq, who
had accumulated more Iraq-hours right after the Second Gulf War of 1991 than
anyone else:
...Chemical weapons were used by Iraq
in its war against Iran
(1980-1988). Arguably that use had a decisive effect on the outcome: it saved Iraq from being
overwhelmed by a much larger Iranian army. Furthermore, Iraq made use of chemical bombs in air raids
against the Kurdish civilian population in Northern Iraq.
Nerve gases such as sarin, and mustard gas immediately and painfully killed
many thousands of civilians. More than 100,000 later died or were crippled by
the after-effects... That meant that chemical weapons were used by Iraq both
for strategic reasons against its enemies and for domestic suppression...
Regarding biological weapons, the UN Inspection Team managed
after four years of investigation to confirm the existence in Iraq of a major
secret biological weapons program...During debriefings in Iraq after the
defection [of Hussein Kamal, Saddam’s son-in-law, who was in charge of Iraq’s
WMD program], Iraq’s biological weapons scientists, able to speak slightly more
openly than normally, explained that their secret work mainly was on
assignments to find means of warfare against the Iranians...
As to the nuclear weapon programs, the Iraqi authorities
defended their systematic violations of Iraq’s obligations under the
non-Proliferation Treaty with the proposition that Iran, likewise a party to
the treaty, was active in developing its own nuclear weapons. Iraq’s obsession with Iran was illustrated by its air
attack in 1983 on the Iranian nuclear reactors at Busher... Even the remarkable
missile development in Iraq
was related to Iran.
Iraq succeeded in modifying
and re-engineering many hundreds of the more than 800 Scud missiles bought from
the Soviet Union, increasing their range from
300 kms. to 600, sufficient to reach Teheran...
The Iraqi policy after the previous Gulf War was to halt all
production of warfare agents with the purpose of activating production and
shipping of warfare agents and munitions directly to the battlefield in the
event of war. Many hundreds of chemical engineers and production and process
engineers worked to develop nerve agents, especially VX, with the primary task
being to stabilize the warfare agents in order to optimize a lasting lethal
property. Such work could be blended into ordinary civilian production and
activities, such as agricultural purposes, where batches of nerve agents could
be produced during short interruptions of the production of ordinary
chemicals....This combination of engineers, researchers, know-how, precursors,
batch production techniques and testing is what constituted Iraq’s chemical threat- its
chemical weapon... The rather bizarre political focus on the search for rusting
drums and piece of munitions containing low-quality chemicals, has tended to
distort the important question on WMD in Iraq, and exposed the American and
British Administrations to unjustified criticism...
The real chemical warfare threat from Iraq has two
components: one has been the capability to bring potent chemical agents to the
battlefield to be used against a poorly equipped and poorly trained enemy. The
other is the chance that Iraqi chemical weapons specialists would sign up with
terrorist networks such as al-Qa`idah, with which they are likely to have
more affinity than do the unemployed Russian scientists the US worries about... The remnants of
Iraq’s
biological weapons program, and specifically its now unemployed specialists,
constitute a potential threat of much the same magnitude. While biological
weapons are not easily adaptable for battlefield use, they are potentially the
more devastating as a means for massive terrorist onslaught on civilian
targets...
It is possible that Iraq, in spite of its denials, has
retained some anthrax in storage. But it could be more problematic and
dangerous if Iraq
secretly maintained a research and development capability, run by the
biologists involved in its earlier programs... Such a program would constitute
a more important biological weapon than stored agents of doubtful quality...
It is difficult to understand the extent to which the terror of
the Saddam years has penetrated his unhappy nation... As long as Hussein and
his sons are not apprehended or proven dead, few of any of those involved in
the weapons programs will provide information of their activities... The
chemical and biological structures in Iraq constitute formidable
international threats through potential links with terrorism... These were
major threats against Iran,
the Kurdish and Shi`ite populations of Iraq,
and Israel...
The Iraqi nuclear programs lacked access to fissile material but were advanced
with regard to weapon design, with competition with Iran as a major driving factor...
The fall of Saddam should give it an opportunity to rethink its own nuclear
weapons program...
This is enough to justify the international military
intervention undertaken by the US
and Britain.
To accept the alternative- letting Hussein remain in power with his chemical
and biological weapons capacity would have been to continue to tolerate a
continuing destabilizing arms race in the Gulf, including future nuclearization
of the area... and the continued terrorization of the Iraqi people...31 It is then time that the Americans and the British
stop torturing themselves about the “missing” “smoking gun”, piece together all
the circumstantial evidence listed above, and bless their respective
governments for the courage they had to remove the tyrant and force him to
dispose of his WMD, and to deter other potential tyrants who might have
followed in his footsteps.
Endnotes
1 |
New York Times,
February 6, 2003, pp. A1 and A 10-20. |
2 |
David Sanger, “US
Officials Fear Iraqis Plan to Use Gas on GIs”, The New York Times,
March 25, 2003, p. B11. |
3 |
Ibid. |
4 |
Judith Miller, “US
Hunts for Bio-Agents and Gas at an Iraq Depot”, The New York Times,
March 27, 2003, p. B4. |
5 |
Ibid. |
6 |
.Judith Miller,
“Smoking Gun Still Proves to be Elusive for Searchers”, The New York
Times, April 2, 2003, p. B7. |
7 |
William Broad,
“Iraq May Try Defensive Use of Chemicals, Experts Warn”, The New York
Times, April 4, 2003, p. B4. |
8 |
Judith Miller and
Douglas Jehl, “US Forces Have Searched Few Iraqi Weapons Sites”, The
New York Times, April 5, 2003, pp. B1, B13. |
9 |
Nicholas Wade and
Eric Schmitt, “US Use of Tear Gas Could Violate Treaty, Critics Say”,
The New York Times, April 5, 2003, p. B13. |
10 |
Bernard Weinraub,
“American Soldiers Find Drums Possibly Storing Chemical Agents”, The
New York Times, April 8, 2003, pp. B1, B4. |
11 |
William Broad,
“On-Site Identification Inexact”, The New York Times, ibid., p. B4. |
12 |
Judith Miller,
“Hunt Finds Hint of How Iraqis Fill Power Void”, The New York Times,
April 10, 2003, p. B6. |
13 |
Judith Miller,
“Hunting Weapons, A Plucky Crew Makes Do”, Ibid., April 12, 2003, p. B2. |
14 |
C. Chivers,
“Paratroopers Find Suspicious Warheads and Rocket Parts in Kirkuk”, The
New York Times, April 13, 2003, pp. B1, B5. |
15 |
Don Van Natta and
David Johnston, “US Search for Illegal Arms Narrowed to about 36 Sites”,
The New York Times, April 14, 2003, p. B4. |
16 |
Judith Miller, “US
Inspectors Find No Forbidden Weapons at Iraqi Arms Plant”, The New York
Times, April 16, 2003, pp. B1-2. |
17 |
Ibid. |
18 |
William Brod, “US
Civilian Experts Say Bureaucracy and Infighting Jeopardize Search for
Weapons”, The New York Times, April 16, 2002, p. B2. |
19 |
Ibid. |
20 |
William Brod,
“Some Skeptics Say Arms Hunt is Fruitless”, The New York Times,
April 18, 2003, p. B8. |
21 |
Judith Miller,
“‘Illicit Arms Kept Till Eve of War’, Iraqi Scientist is Said to Assert”,
The New York Times, April 21, 2003, cited by IMRA, April 21, 2003. |
22 |
The Daily
Telegraph, London, June 2, 2003. |
23 |
Le Monde,
Paris, May 30, 2003. |
24 |
David Rivkin and
Lee Casey, “Saddam, Nikita and Virtual Weapons of Mass Destruction: A
Question of Threat Perception and Intelligence Assessment”, The
National Interest, June 11, 2003, cited by Updates from AIJAC,
Melbourne, June 16, 2003, pp. 2-6. |
25 |
Robert Kagan,
The Washington Post, June 8, 2003, B07, cited by Updates from AIJAC,
ibid., pp. 6-9. |
26 |
The Associated
Press (AP), June 1, 2003, cited by Haaretz, Tel Aviv, of the same
day. |
27 |
Mark Steyn, “What
is Going on in Those Sofa Factories”, The Jerusalem Post, June 9,
2003, cited by Isranet Daily Briefing, Montreal, June 17, 2003, pp.
2-4; see also Mona Charen, “The Nazis Again?”, The Washington Times,
June 13, 2003, cited ibid., pp. 4-5.[ |
28 |
Richard Spertzel,
“The Politics of Mass Destruction”, The Wall Street Journal, June
27, 2003. |
29 |
AP, June 22, 2003,
cited by Haaretz, June 22, 2003. |
30 |
Erik Schechter,
“Bush May be Sitting on Iraqi WMD Evidence, FOX Analyst Says”, The
Jerusalem Post, July 11, 2003, A4. |
31 |
Rolf Ekeus,
“Iraq’s Real Weapons’ Threat”, Washington Post, June 29, 2003, p.
B07. |
|