Boston Globe April 12, 2003
US no closer to finding banned arms
Adviser's surrender may help bolster case against Iraq
By Robert Schlesinger
WASHINGTON - More than three weeks after invading Iraq, American and coalition forces have had a little more luck in finding Iraq's alleged weapons of mass destruction than the United Nations weapons inspectors whose searches they preempted.
They have found tantalizing hints such as chemical protective gear and antidotes. They have discovered suspect items - munitions potentially loaded with chemicals, half-buried chemical drums, vials of powders - several of which have turned out to be harmless, though tests continue on the rest.
Hoping to accelerate the search, coalition forces are offering monetary rewards for information leading to the discovery of illicit weapons or fugitive regime members.
The surrender yesterday of Lieutenant General Amer al-Saadi, Saddam Hussein's top scientific adviser, , could prove a major break for US forces because he is believed to have first-hand knowledge about the illicit weapons programs.
But even as Saadi handed himself over, he declared once again that the charges were baseless.
Defense officials have said since the war's start that unearthing the Iraqi program would be a slow process. But with the fall of the regime, some observers say that time is running out for the administration to prove its allegations.
''The war was basically waged under the theory that [Iraq] had a dozen or two Scuds and that there were hundreds of tons of nerve gas and large stocks of anthrax and weaponized smallpox agent and that if the UN couldn't find them then V Corps would,'' said John Pike, director of GlobalSecurity.org, a defense think tank, referring to the Army V Corps, which is deployed in Iraq. ''The morality of this war is dependent on some reasonable facsimile of that turning out to be true.''
India's defense minister declared that the lack of proof thus far shows the war was unjustified. ''The United States started talking about weapons of mass destruction and finally went to regime change,'' George Fenandes said. ''It was determined to do what it has done in Iraq, and the rest was brought in as supporting reasons.''
US officials maintain that the weapons programs will come to light. They cite several reasons for having made little progress so far - chief among them that they are still fighting a war, and that until hostilities cease, the search will be secondary.
Much of the country has not been searched, they say. Suspected sites that have been found are being tested, a lengthy process for definitive results. Though the United States has dispatched specially trained teams to inspect suspected sites, Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld said that he doubts US officials will have any more luck in a straight search than UN inspectors did.
''Things were mobile, things were underground, things were in tunnels, things were hidden, things were dispersed,'' Rumsfeld said. ''Now, are we going to find that? No. It's a big country. What we're going to do is we're going to find the people who will tell us that, and we're going to find ways to encourage them to tell us that.''
Many Iraqis have already come forward with information about weapons caches and regime leaders, said US Army Brigadier General Vincent Brooks. But US forces are sweetening the deal financially in part to provide an incentive for people who might otherwise be tempted to sell weapons on the black market.
Some discoveries that appeared promising at first have proved false: Drums of chemicals uncovered at an agricultural facility near Karbala that originally tested positive for the nerve agents sarin and tabun and the blister agent lewisite now appear to have been filled with a pesticide. Thousands of bottles of white powder found at the Qa Qaa chemical complex turned out not to be chemical weapons components.
Other discoveries remain unresolved: CNN reported yesterday that a warhead found at a military base near Kirkuk had initially tested positive for trace amounts of a nerve agent. A bottle marked Tabum was discovered earlier this month at a base in the west.
Coalition special forces earlier this week searched several suspected sites at Qa'im, near the Syrian border. But military officials say they want to be careful about not making announcements they later have to retract.
Nevertheless, every day that passes without a substantial chemical or biological weapons discovery it becomes more of a problem for the Bush administration.
Material from Reuters was used in this report. Anne Barnard of the Globe Staff contributed to this report from Doha, Qatar. Robert Schlesinger can be reached at schlesinger@globe.com
Copyright © 2003, Globe Newspaper Company
