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WMD: Casus or
casuistry? Defending Bush
Economist
May 29th 2003
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.
The US Department of Defence, US Central Command and the
British government give news on the hunt for weapons of mass
destruction. The UN gives news on Iraq. Unmovic posts information
on its weapons-inspection activities in Iraq. See also the IAEA.
The International Insititute for Security Studies' post-war Iraq
section gives maps and a dossier of the sites of Iraq's WMD. The
Federation of American Scientists has resources on Iraq's weapons
of mass destruction.
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
Copyright © The Economist Newspaper Limited 2003. All
rights reserved.
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