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Iraq's WMD
revisited
By David Isenberg
Remember the Iraqi weapons of mass destruction
(WMD), that is, chemical and biological weapons?
Supposedly they were the reason the United States and
Great Britain had to invade Iraq right away, without
giving United Nations inspectors more time to continue
their task.
For a brief shining moment they were
on the tip of everyone's tongue. Even the most
brain-dead pundit or rabid talk-radio host would talk
knowingly about the need to destroy anthrax, sarin,
cyclosarin, VX and Tabun nerve agents, mustard gas,
ricin and botulinuum toxin. Even the liberal Natural
Resources Defense Council released an analysis based on
computer modeling stating that a fairly small release of
Iraqi anthrax over Kuwait City or Baghdad could infect
hundreds of thousands of people under certain
conditions. In a potential worst-case scenario, an Iraqi
attack against Kuwait City spraying 30 kilograms of
anthrax from an aerial drone under certain wind
conditions could infect 800,000 people.
But like
an aging Hollywood starlet, one rarely hears about WMD
anymore.
Why? Because so far nobody has found
any of them. The search, of course, is ongoing and,
doubtless, at some point something will be turned up,
but thus far the search is like the quest for the Holy
Grail. It resembles, as William Shakespeare wrote, "A
tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury,
signifying nothing."
Like a dancer at a strip
club showing some decolletage, the media keep reporting
that military forces are finding "signs" and
"indications", usually turning out to be unspecified
documents and equipment of possible chemical and
biological weapons, but nothing is ever actually
produced.
Early reports that US forces captured
a possible chemical-weapons plant in the town of Najaf
turned out to be false. And the Christian Science
Monitor reported that US Special Forces and Kurdish
militiamen had captured a base in northern Iraq
belonging to the Islamic militant group Ansar al-Islam,
where they found evidence that the group attempted to
develop biological and chemical weapons.
Consider what has happened so far. Ten days
before the invasion began, the New York Times reported
that UN weapons inspectors in Iraq had discovered a new
variety of rocket seemingly configured to strew bomblets
filled with chemical or biological agents over large
areas.
The weapon was discovered after the UN
inspectors returned to Iraq in November. At first, Iraq
told the inspectors that it was designed as a
conventional cluster bomb, which would scatter explosive
submunitions over its target, and not as a chemical
weapon. A few days later, the Iraqis conceded that some
of the weapons might have been configured as chemical
weapons.
But it remains unclear, according to a
report that the United Nations Monitoring, Verification
and Inspection Commission (UNMOVIC) posted on its
website, whether the Iraqi cluster warhead is a newly
developed one, devised during the absence of inspectors
over the past four years, or whether its existence was
kept secret before 1998, when the inspectors left.
And still, despite receiving an updated report
from Baghdad just before the war in Iraq began, UN
inspectors continued to doubt that Iraq had destroyed
all of its anthrax stores. Shortly before the war began,
UNMOVIC received a report from Iraq intended to account
for the destruction of 3,400 liters of anthrax agent at
a site called al-Hakam. A translation of the report from
Arabic was completed recently and UNMOVIC experts have
since reviewed the report.
Citing data collected
from soil samples, Iraq claims it used a sufficient
quantity of potassium manganate to neutralize all the
anthrax at its al-Hakam facility. UNMOVIC spokesman Ewen
Buchanan said commission experts were skeptical that the
Iraqi report completely documented anthrax destruction
activities.
Even if the document were true, he
said, Iraq had still not fully accounted for the
remainder of the 8,445 liters of anthrax agent it had
declared that it produced at two facilities and
destroyed. Iraq previously had declared that some of the
material had been loaded into aerial bombs and missile
warheads.
Three days before the war started, the
Washington Post reported that despite the George W Bush
administration's claims about Iraq's weapons of mass
destruction, US intelligence agencies had been unable to
give Congress or the Pentagon specific information about
the amounts of banned weapons or where they were hidden.
The day the war started, the New York Times
reported that the Bush administration had deployed
several new tactical units called mobile exploitation
teams, or METs, to locate and survey at least 130 and as
many as 1,400 possible weapons sites.
Ironically, considering the Bush
administration's previous impatience with UN inspectors,
the article reported that military officials were also
reaching out to former international weapons inspectors,
as part of the top-secret effort to find quickly and
destroy Iraqi WMD. This is especially embarrassing
considering that before the war's start the White House
decided to assign no role in the disarmament effort to
UNMOVIC or the International Atomic Energy Agency
(IAEA).
The day after the war started, the
Washington Post reported that the UN agencies would not
likely be invited to participate until the US was ready
to turn over dual-use biological or chemical sites for
long-term monitoring. Meanwhile, UN sources said that
the IAEA believed it had ongoing legal authority over
former Iraqi nuclear facilities, regardless of a change
in government.
Reportedly, military planners see
four stages in the search-and-disarm effort. The first
is to take control of and assess any known site that
might present an immediate threat to US forces. The
second is to disable the threat and any ongoing
production. The third will be the responsibility of
"exploitation teams" with linguists, tools to extract
information from hidden or encrypted computer files, and
field laboratories that include detectors for radiation
and sophisticated tests for biological and chemical
toxins. Full destruction, the fourth stage, will come
much later.
The search draws on nuclear experts
from the Lawrence Livermore, Los Alamos and Sandia
national laboratories, civilian scientists from the
Energy Department's nuclear emergency response team,
linguists from the Central Intelligence Agency and the
Defense Intelligence Agency, and computer and records
specialists from the Justice Department. The military is
supplying specialists in missiles and biological and
chemical weapons, drawn from Defense Threat Reduction
Agency, the Cooperative Threat Reduction Agency, the US
Army's technical escort unit and the Marine Corps's
chemical biological incident response force.
The
Pentagon's Defense Threat Reduction Agency, which is
conducting the weapons search, has printed some 9,000
booklets to help troops identify suspected weapons
facilities and dangerous materials, conjuring up visions
of American GIs struggling to ask for directions in
Arabic to the nearest anthrax bioreactor.
Even
if coalition forces find evidence, they will face a
credibility problem. An article in the Washington Post
quoted Jay Davis, who led the Defense Threat Reduction
Agency until 2001. "A very important political component
is if you find these things, how do you establish the
proof of that to the satisfaction of 35 foreign
ministries and those of you in the media? A large number
of conspiracy theorists all over the world will say the
US government has planted all that stuff."
(©2003 Asia Times Online Co, Ltd. All rights
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