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The tangled WMD web
By
David Isenberg
To paraphrase William
Shakespeare, WMD or no WMD, that is the question.
Officially, nobody yet knows, as the Iraq Survey Group
(ISG), the official 1,200-person US group charged with
searching for evidence of actual Iraqi chemical and
biological weapons, or at the least evidence of a
nuclear-weapons research and development program, has
yet to make a report, interim or final.
And
lately the news reports about the ISG's progress have
made David Kay, the group's director, appear so
vacillating as to make Hamlet appear the very embodiment
of a decisive, take-charge executive.
Kay is
often wrongly described as a former director of UNSCOM,
the United Nations Special Commission that directed
inspections in Iraq from 1991 through 1998, though he
was for one year the chief inspector for the
International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA), which handled
the nuclear portion of those investigations for UNSCOM.
On June 11, Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) director
George Tenet announced Kay's appointment as special
adviser for strategy regarding Iraq's weapons of mass
destruction (WMD) programs.
Last month, Kay
privately reported successes that were to be revealed to
the public in mid-September. Kay told his superiors he
had found substantial evidence of biological weapons in
Iraq, plus considerable missile development.
Then early this month the Boston Globe reported
that Kay was expected to report that although US troops
and experts had been unable to find any hard evidence of
chemical, biological or nuclear weapons or long-range
missiles, they had uncovered a vast conspiracy to
deceive United Nations inspectors.
But, as Joe
Cirincione of the Carnegie Endowment for International
Peace in Washington, DC, pointed out, "If the newspaper
is correct, the Kay Report will mark the official
retreat of US and British prewar claims. However
unintentionally, it will be a direct refutation of
official assertions that we had to go to war to prevent
Saddam Hussein from using massive stockpiles of chemical
and biological weapons and possibly nuclear weapons.
Though weapons stocks may still be found, Kay will focus
on 'dual use' capabilities that could quickly be
reconfigured to manufacture weapons. Though such plans
would have been a violation of UN resolutions, this will
also be an indication that UN inspections were working.
As long as inspectors were in the country, Iraq
apparently did not expect to get away with active
weapons production."
But it is unlikely that the
ISG report will even be able to prove the experience of
a conspiracy that lasted up to shortly before the war
began.
Last week former UN chief weapons
inspector Hans Blix, in an interview with Australia's
ABC television from Sweden, said he now believes Iraq
destroyed its WMD 10 years ago and that intelligence
agencies were wrong in their weapons assessment that led
to war.
On the same program, another former UN
weapons inspector, David Albright, said of Kay: "He's
not finding the kinds of things the [US] administration
expected to find, large quantities of biological and
chemical weapons or evidence that they were destroyed
prior to the war."
To date, most of the evidence
offered in support of the existence of Iraqi
unconventional weapons has failed the smell test. This
year a joint US CIA-DIA (Defense Intelligence Agency)
report declared that they had confirmed the existence of
mobile trailers containing equipment that could only be
used for manufacturing biological weapons. But experts
quickly refuted that assertion, saying it was most
likely the trailers were used for producing hydrogen for
meteorological balloons.
In fact, in his
interview with NBC's Meet the Press on September
15, Vice President Dick Cheney said, "We believe he had
developed the capacity to go mobile with his BW
[biological weapons] production capability because,
again, in reaction to what we had done to him in '91. We
had intelligence reporting before the war that there
were at least seven of these mobile labs that he had
gone out and acquired. We have since the war found two
of them. They are in our possession today, mobile
biological facilities that can be used to produce
anthrax or smallpox or whatever else you wanted to use
during the course of developing the capacity for an
attack."
But as experts noted, the methodology
needed to produce smallpox differs from that needed to
produce anthrax in several important ways, both
quantitatively and qualitatively. The trailers are
incapable of producing anthrax, a much simpler task.
They certainly could not maintain the delicate control
of conditions required for maintaining tissue cultures.
Similarly, late last month the Associated Press
reported that US weapons experts working in Iraq had
concluded that Iraqi unmanned aerial vehicles (UAV) were
not designed for conducting biological- or
chemical-weapons attacks, contrary to claims made by the
administration of President George W Bush prior to the
war.
More important, reports state that prior to
the war, US Air Force intelligence analysts and analysts
from the Missile Defense Agency said they believed the
UAVs did not pose a threat to either Iraq's neighbors or
the United States. There was also little evidence that
the UAV program was connected with Iraq's suspected
biological-weapons program, said Air Force Intelligence
Analysis Agency director Bob Boyd. The Iraqi drones were
also believed to be too small to carry weapons, he said.
This month in a confidential report obtained by
AP, IAEA chief Mohamed ElBaradei said UN inspectors
found Iraq's nuclear program in disarray and unlikely to
be able to support an active effort to build weapons.
"In the areas of uranium acquisition,
concentration and centrifuge enrichment, extensive field
investigation and document analysis revealed no evidence
that Iraq had resumed such activities," ElBaradei said
in the report, made available to the AP by a diplomat.
When Kay was back in Washington last week,
officials told ABC News the draft report provides no
solid evidence that Iraq had weapons of mass destruction
when the United States launched its attack in March.
One example of the Bush administration's attempt
to downgrade the previously asserted Iraqi weapons
threat was the fact that when Defense Secretary Donald
Rumsfeld recently visited Iraq he didn't even ask Kay
for a status report.
And, as Joseph Wilson, who
was deputy chief of mission at the US Embassy in Baghdad
from 1988-91 and who in July called into question the
Bush administration's assertions about Iraq seeking
uranium from Africa, recently wrote, "The State
Department's under secretary for arms control, John
Bolton, recently said that whether Saddam's government
actually possessed weapons of mass destruction isn't
really the issue. The issue, I think, has been the
capability that Iraq sought to have ... WMD programs."
In a briefing last Wednesday, Rumsfeld
downplayed the possibility of even an interim report.
Q: Is there any indication in those
spotty reports that you've received of whether or not
WMD has been found?
Rumsfeld: My instinct
is to let that team of hundreds of people, who are well
organized and working hard on this problem, proceed in a
manner that's appropriate to them, and they are
interrogating a large number of people. And they are,
from time to time, investigating various suspect sites.
How they will pull that together into a report at some
point is something I think I'll leave to them.
Currently Kay is not expected to produce hard
evidence of Iraq's proscribed weapons, but is expected
to build a more circumstantial case that Saddam
dismantled and dispersed his weapons programs to elude
inspectors. But such conclusions will likely revive
criticism of the administration's prewar intelligence,
which is being investigated by the US Congress. And, of
course, a deception program is hardly the imminent
threat that Iraq was portrayed as representing prior to
the war.
Ironically, what seems to have been
forgotten is that the task of effective accounting for
Saddam's weapons was exactly the task the UN Security
Council first assigned to the IAEA and to UNSCOM
immediately after the 1991 Gulf War. That same mandate,
with updated details, was given to UNMOVIC (the United
Nations Monitoring, Verification and Inspection
Commission) eight years later when the Security Council
created it under Resolution 1284.
But because of
US insistence that UN inspectors were ineffective, the
United States went ahead and invaded Iraq.
And
speaking of accounting, AP reported on September 7 that
ex-inspectors now say the "unaccountables" may have been
no more than paperwork glitches left behind when Iraq
destroyed banned chemical and biological weapons years
ago. Some may represent miscounts, they say, and some
may stem from Iraqi underlings' efforts to satisfy the
boss by exaggerating reports on arms.
On
September 14 the London-based Sunday Times reported that
the United States and the United Kingdom have decided to
delay indefinitely the publication of a full report on
Iraq's weapons of mass destruction. The newspaper
reported that British defense-intelligence sources had
confirmed that the group's final report that is to be
submitted to Tenet had been delayed and may not
necessarily even be published.
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