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WMD threats as political
football
By Martin Schwarz
(Republished with permission from Foreign
Policy In Focus)
US President George W
Bush's administration is using the issue of nuclear
weapons of mass destruction (WMD) as a political
football, fabricating non-existent threats while turning
a blind eye to real ones. That could have severe
negative consequences for the long-standing global
effort to promote non-proliferation of nuclear weapons.
Although the Bush administration is well aware
of the fact that Iraq never posed a nuclear threat to
the United States, Washington stands by its claim that
former Iraqi president Saddam Hussein's arsenal
justified the US-UK invasion of his country. What's
more, the administration is rewarding those who produce
phony evidence of nuclear threats and refusing to
support investigation of possible substantive WMD
proliferation. British Prime Minister Tony Blair's
administration and US media are playing along in this
dangerous game.
Former United Nations weapons
inspector David Kay's appointment a few weeks ago as an
adviser for Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) director
George Tenet on WMD issues is a shining example of how
the game is being played. Kay is now benefiting from his
successful efforts to help the Bush administration
justify the Iraq war. He was the one who told the
government that the International Atomic Energy Agency
(IAEA) in Vienna produced a report in 1991 that
indicated that Iraq was at the time just six months away
from having a bomb. Bush and Blair held a news
conference in Crawford, Texas, last September touting
Kay's claim, and the US media published it prominently.
The media did not verify the allegation by talking to
representatives of the IAEA, which would have been worth
the investment of a few minutes' time, since such a
report by the IAEA simply doesn't exist.
When
Blair visited Washington recently, he experienced the
so-called Gorbachev effect of being hated at home but
lauded abroad - in this case by the White House.
Referring to allegations that his government was the
source of faked documents concerning a deal for Iraq to
buy uranium from Niger, Blair said, "We're standing by
our claim." There are obviously no reasons to do so: the
documents that No 10 Downing Street provided to the IAEA
are all forged and so far the British government has
been reluctant to accept the IAEA's unofficial requests
for more documents.
It took only "a few hours of
Web research", according to IAEA sources, to find out
that all the documents on the Iraq-Niger deal delivered
by Britain were falsified. But US Secretary of Defense
Donald Rumsfeld stood by the claims, remarking that "no
one has said" the documents on that deal are "not
authentic". To that, one IAEA official responded: "He's
not telling the truth." Maybe Rumsfeld wants the public
to forget that IAEA chief Mohamed ElBaradei talked of
falsifications in his report to the UN Security Council
on March 7.
While insisting on these
nuclear-threat confabulations, the US government has at
the same time rendered the IAEA clueless as to the
disappearance of radioactive material that could
eventually be used in clandestine bomb-making. Last
month the IAEA inspected the looted al-Tuwaitha nuclear
facility in Iraq and has now presented its findings:
Twenty-two kilograms of low-grade uranium are lost, but
of more importance, the IAEA team was not allowed by the
US authorities to inspect other locations in
al-Tuwaitha, where highly radioactive cesium-137 and
cobalt-160 may have been looted.
Thus ignored
and restrained, the IAEA has the impression that the
current US administration is downplaying certain nuclear
threats and overestimating others for political reasons.
The benefits to the administration of overestimating are
clear. Building up the specter of a foreign enemy
focuses attention abroad, diminishing domestic rivalry.
Convincing foreign partners that they share a common
threat embroils their leadership in a never-ending war
on terrorism.
Since the September 11, 2001,
terror attacks on the World Trade Center and the
Pentagon, the Bush administration has spent US$2 billion
in new monies for research and policy advice on WMD
threats. Think-tanks all over the United States are
benefiting from that money and have learned their
lesson: no threat, no money. So they're producing
spectacular analyses and reports on nuclear threats.
"We're questioning the analysis of US think-tanks. These
people are interested in contract money," one IAEA
official said.
The non-proliferation experts at
the UN headquarters in Vienna have other good reasons
for doubting some of the charges made by Washington and
its think-tanks against representatives of the
much-maligned "axis of evil". Take, for example, the
administration's claim that nuclear-energy development
abroad is cause for alarm over bomb-making. As one
expert put it: "None of the nuclear powers we know got
their weapons by using their civilian nuclear program."
Meanwhile the administration fails to
acknowledge the importance of promoting
non-proliferation in new nuclear powers that will
probably emerge. "What has changed with that
administration is that if the good guys have the bomb,
it's okay," said one expert. For Washington, the good
guys include not only Japan, which the IAEA is closely
watching, since the threat from North Korea could lead
to the development of nuclear weapons by Tokyo; the good
guys also include India and Pakistan, because they are
deeply involved in the US-led alliance against
terrorism. While Tokyo will probably never again be an
enemy of the United States, US relations with India and
Pakistan are less stable, especially given the current
US government's dubious ability to form sustained
alliances. Regardless, India and Pakistan pose a nuclear
threat to each other.
The Bush administration has
turned the worldwide nuclear non-proliferation program
administered by the IAEA into nothing more than a
tactical tool for its own politically based calculations
of threat. Attaining non-proliferation is a business too
serious to be run with the object of getting a few
points in domestic popularity ranking. The Bush
administration is strongly urged not to play a dirty
game with such an issue.
Martin Schwarz
(martin_schwarz@stories-texte.tk)
is author of the forthcoming book (in German)
Saddams blutiges Erbe: Der wirkliche Krieg steht uns
noch bevor on the consequences of the Iraq war
(see http://irak.go.cc/) and the
editor of Das Info-Portal zu den Brennpunkten der
Welt. He is a regular contributor to Foreign
Policy In Focus.
(Copyright 2003 Foreign
Policy In Focus)
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