The Economist, 29 May 2003.
Where—if they existed—are Saddam Hussein's weapons of mass destruction?
GUNS normally smoke after they are fired. Had Saddam Hussein used his alleged weapons of mass destruction (WMD) during the American-led war that dislodged him, the doubts about his illegal arsenal would have evaporated. Yet despite all the talk of “red lines” around Baghdad, the sweaty protective suits in which American and British troops laboured were never put to the test. No Iraqi Scuds struck Israel or anywhere else.
These omissions at first seemed part of a larger mystery, namely why Iraq put up so shambolic a fight. But the ongoing elusiveness of the fabled “smoking gun” has led even those who supported the war to ask whether the WMD that in theory provoked it ever really existed—and whether the “proof” adduced by those who waged it was shoddy, or worse.
Down memory lane
Conspiracy theorists should remember that much of the evidence against Mr Hussein came not from the American and British governments or their spies, but from two unimpeachable sources. They were the United Nations weapons inspectors, and Mr Hussein himself.
Mr Hussein had what police call form. He made and used chemical weapons in the 1980s. Throughout the 1990s, he strove to hide his WMD programme from Unscom, the UN inspectorate then responsible for dismantling it. In this endeavour he enjoyed much success, though Iraqi defectors helped the inspectors to uncover, among other things, the extent of Iraq's biological weapons programme, and its manufacture of VX, a nerve gas. On the basis of Iraq's known imports and discrepancies in its record-keeping, Unscom and UNMOVIC (the latter-day inspection body, led by Hans Blix) made some frightening calculations about the chemical and biological agents and munitions potentially at Mr Hussein's disposal. On the eve of the war, UNMOVIC reported a “strong presumption” that around 10,000 litres of Iraqi anthrax might still exist.
Mr Hussein's form continued until the end. His regime failed to co-operate with Mr Blix's team in the way that UN resolution 1441, passed last November, demanded. Some Iraqi scientists refused to be interviewed privately, and the names of others were withheld, along with important documents. Though Iraq made some concessions, going so far as to destroy some proscribed missiles, its compliance with resolution 1441 remained lacklustre. This recalcitrance, as America and Britain now sophistically aver, was the legal pretext for the war.
Sophistically, because the resolution was premised on the notion that Mr Hussein's WMD constituted an imminent threat to his region and to the world. The inspectors' accumulated findings, and Mr Hussein's own behaviour, certainly suggested that he was a menace. But George Bush and Tony Blair went further than the speculative conclusions of Unscom and UNMOVIC, whose reports were always a little too recondite to sway the masses.
Mr Bush and Mr Blair argued that the threat was imminent, adding some specific and alarming allegations. Unusually, and to the discomfort of British spooks, Mr Blair published an intelligence dossier that claimed some of Iraq's WMD could be ready within 45 minutes of an order to use them. Mr Bush eschewed the subjunctives that punctuated the inspectors' reports: citing American intelligence, he stated that Mr Hussein retained hideous agents and various means of delivering them. In February, Colin Powell, Mr Bush's secretary of state, told the UN that biological warheads had been distributed across western Iraq.
Surprising, then, that despite the efforts of America's own inspection teams, no actual WMD have been unearthed: none. It is especially surprising that those weapons which, according to intelligence reports, had been deployed to southern Iraq for use against the invaders haven't been found. There are plausible explanations for why Mr Hussein did not use his WMD during the war: political considerations, the pace of the American advance, and so on. But it would be very odd if he hadn't at least made some of them ready, assuming he had any. Raymond Zilinskas, a former inspector, says Mr Blair's infamous 45-minute claim “now seems close to absurd”.
In fact, the only important finds thus far have been what the Americans say may be three mobile biological-weapons laboratories, two of which are said to correspond closely to the sort described by Mr Powell, on the basis of reports from defectors, in his seminal presentation to the UN. After a series of “false positives” in their search for WMD, which have circulated as swiftly as did some battlefield rumours before being embarrassingly scotched, the Americans have been understandably cautious in their claims about the mobile labs. Still, they are convinced that they could have had no other, innocent purpose. On the other hand, no actual biological agents have been detected in the suspect vehicles.
Scud in a haystack
What of the thousands of bombs and warheads and tons of deadly agents that Mr Hussein was allegedly hiding? There are various possible explanations for their invisibility. One is that the American-led teams that have been nosing around Iraq haven't done a very good job, perhaps because they lack the expertise of the specialists led by Mr Blix. The unit responsible for the initial snooping is now being superseded by a bigger outfit, on to which some former UN inspectors are being co-opted. Another excuse is that many of the documents that might have helped the Americans to refine their search have been destroyed by looters. Some are said to have been incinerated by Saddamite loyalists, anxious to conceal their guilt and discredit their conquerors.
The most frequently cited argument is that the job requires more time. As British and American leaders are fond of saying, Iraq is approximately the size of France or California. This, combined with the ousted regime's expertise in concealment and deception, makes chance discoveries unlikely. In time, the argument goes, Iraqis in the know about Mr Hussein's WMD will be persuaded to spill the beans.
Unfortunately, not much spilling seems to have been going on so far. “Mrs Anthrax”, “Dr Germ”, and several of the other scientific and military henchmen on the Americans' list of most-wanted Baathists are in their custody. But they seem to be sticking to their pre-war story that Iraq was innocent and misunderstood. The line now emanating from Washington and London is that the “most wanted”, being anxious about prosecutions and reprisals, are not quite so wanted after all. Clues about the WMD are now expected to come from lower-ranking scientists, many of whom, it is said, are still too fearful of a possible Baathist resurgence to come forward, despite the rewards and incentives being proffered to them. Terence Taylor, another former inspector, agrees that middle-ranking scientists can be more revealing than their bosses.
But the idea that large stocks of, say, chemical shells can't be located without further tip-offs doesn't quite wash. Gary Samore, of London's International Institute for Strategic Studies—which produced an influential assessment of Iraq's WMD shortly before the British government issued its own—concedes that if Iraq had retained large stocks of chemical munitions, they probably would have been found by now. And the chances of finding such caches could well deteriorate rather than improve with time. Ongoing looting will erase more paper trails. Information from captives and defectors is notoriously unreliable, given their tendency to tell interrogators what they want to hear; their claims will have to be laboriously cross-checked. If the leads they are said to be generating continue to disappoint, there will be nothing for it but to “look under every rock, go to every crossroad, peer into every cave for evidence” (Mr Powell's description of what UNMOVIC wasn't supposed to do).
Meanwhile, in an inversion of their rhetoric before the war, the governments that waged it have been massaging down expectations. MI6, Britain's foreign intelligence service, remains confident that the central tenets of Mr Blair's dossier will eventually be vindicated. But the politicians are hedging.
They are talking about piecing together evidence about a WMD programme from scientists and documents, rather than uncovering the weapons themselves. Some have speculated that the programme may have been dispersed to hide it from the inspectors (though this suggests that inspection was containing the threat). Some have hypothesised a “just-in-time” system of production to explain why no stocks have been discovered. Another idea, advanced by (among others) Donald Rumsfeld, America's defence secretary, is that Mr Hussein destroyed his WMD before the war—a baffling move for a hitherto unscrupulous regime facing an existential threat.
The most obvious explanation is of course that, leaving aside the mobile labs, there are no massively destructive weapons or facilities in Iraq to find. This Occamite theory in turn raises two main questions. The first concerns Mr Hussein's own obstreperous behaviour. Why, if he had nothing to hide, did he subject his country to the crippling economic sanctions, periodic bombings and eventual invasion that his non-compliance with UN resolutions and inspections incurred?
There are several more or less plausible answers. The least subtle is that Mr Hussein didn't give a hoot about ordinary Iraqis and wouldn't countenance the loss of face that fully submitting to the UN would have meant. The most sophisticated is that he thought Iraq's strategic interest lay in cultivating a sense of ambiguity over its WMD efforts: intimidating his enemies, while denying them the evidence to prove his guilt conclusively. More likely, he had indeed maintained some sort of WMD programme, perhaps less advanced than Messrs Bush and Blair said, but sufficient to explain the shenanigans that plagued the inspectors. Whatever Mr Hussein's strategy, it backfired catastrophically when he underestimated Mr Bush's resolve to get rid of him.
Doctored
The second question, which should be easier to answer regardless of whether or not the gun eventually smokes, is: how and why did Britain and America come to make what now looks like an exaggerated case for war? Parts of the case were always dubious. Another dossier released by Mr Blair's office, purporting to detail Iraq's intelligence infrastructure and praised by Mr Powell at the UN, turned out to have been partly plagiarised from a graduate student and stitched together by spin-doctors. Efforts to connect Mr Hussein with al-Qaeda always looked thin. Now the intelligence used to elevate the threat of Iraq's WMD from long-term and tolerable to imminent and actionable also looks ropy.
Among the specific questions that require answers are how, as seems to have been the case, forged documents came to be used as proof that Iraq had tried to buy uranium for its alleged nuclear programme from Niger. (British sources, by the way, insist that other, non-forged documents prove that Iraq tried to do just that in the past few years.) How influential and reliable was a special office created in the Pentagon to revisit Iraqi intelligence? Was information from defectors properly vetted? Did the CIA adequately counteract the wilder claims emerging from other intelligence agencies? Ken Pollack of the Brookings Institution, who was a leading advocate of deposing Mr Hussein, thinks that some officials may knowingly have used weak evidence to build their case. A review of Iraq-related intelligence and how it corresponds with reality, which Mr Rumsfeld has asked the CIA to conduct, must resolve these pressing issues.
Still, given all the evidence available, it remains likeliest that Mr Hussein did indeed have some sort of WMD programme, if not the serried ranks of illegal munitions portrayed by Mr Blair and Mr Bush. So another, equally pressing question requires an urgent answer: where is it?
After repeated, ignored warnings to the Americans, a team from the IAEA, the nuclear inspectorate, is imminently to revisit Iraq to assess the possible loss and looting of radiological material from its main nuclear centre. But chemical and biological kit and agents may also have gone astray. So, just as importantly, may some of the scientists who designed them. Some material and boffins may have left the country—perhaps to Syria, as intelligence reports have suggested. Some may still be in the hands of die-hard Baathists. As the CIA once warned might happen if Iraq were attacked, some may even have fallen into the hands of terrorists. The bungled hunt for Iraq's WMD could yet turn out to be worse than an embarrassment.
Citation: "Weapons of mass destruction: Casus or casuistry?," The Economist, 29 May 2003.
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