The Boston Globe August 29, 2002
AN IRAQI ARSENAL: MANY INDICATIONS BUT NO FIRM PROOF
By Robert Schlesinger
WASHINGTON - The three chemical plants outside the Iraqi town of Fallujah were bombed by US planes during the Gulf War because they were part of the country's chemical weapons program. United Nations inspectors monitored the sites from 1994 until they left the country in 1998.
Like many similar facilities in Iraq, the Fallujah plants are operating once again. The Iraqi government publicly swears it no longer produces chemical weapons and yesterday took reporters on a tour of one of the Fallujah sites, which a plant manager described as "producing domestic insecticides and agricultural pesticides." But Saddam Hussein's government still refuses to let inspectors back into the country to verify those claims. "There's significant enough activity at the Fallujah facilities alone to create a presumption that they have an active chemical weapons program," said John Pike, director of GlobalSecurity.org, a research group based in Alexandria, Va. "The Fallujahs would have to be considered guilty until proven innocent."
Iraq's pursuit of chemical, biological, and nuclear weapons - and its alleged possession of them - is at the heart of the public case the Bush administration has made for forcing Hussein from power.
"The Iraqi regime has in fact been very busy enhancing its capabilities in the field of chemical and biological agents, and they continue to pursue the nuclear program," Vice President Dick Cheney said in a speech Monday. "These are offensive weapons for the purpose of inflicting death on a massive scale, developed so that Saddam can hold the threat over anyone he chooses."
The Fallujah plants illustrate a broader dilemma for US officials: Although they can show that Iraq has the means, motivation, and opportunity to pursue such programs, no one has yet been able to produce irrefutable evidence that the Iraqis have an arsenal of such weapons.
"There are question marks in most of the weapons areas," said Ewen Buchanan, spokesman for the UN organization that would look for the weapons if Iraq allowed inspectors to return.
Although the United Nations Monitoring, Verification, and Inspection Commission remains publicly undecided on the question of whether Iraq currently has weapons of mass destruction, many defense specialists say that the circumstantial evidence is overwhelming.
"My sense is that he would have biological weapons and chemical weapons, probably a small number of longer-range missiles [and is] certainly working on nuclear [weapons]," said Charles Duelfer, the former executive deputy chairman of the United Nations Special Commission on Iraq, which initially handled the inspections.
Iraq has a long history with weapons of mass destruction. Hussein's government used chemical weapons during the Iran-Iraq war in the 1980s and again in 1988 to put down a Kurdish uprising. Iraqi stores ranged from basic mustard gas to lethal VX nerve gas. The Iraqi government was also pursuing a nuclear capacity at the time and could have had a nuclear weapon within six months at the time of the Gulf War, according to the International Atomic Energy Agency - a conclusion that stunned Western intelligence officials.
They were equally surprised to learn in 1995 about the extent of the Iraqi biological weapons program. Four years of United Nations inspections turned up nothing to substantiate a biological program until Hussein Kamal, Hussein's son-in-law and then chief of Iraq's bioweapons program, defected. Iraq then acknowledged its work making weapons out of anthrax, botulinum toxin, and aflatoxin, which causes cancer after a few years.
The inspectors were withdrawn in 1998 shortly before the United States bombed Iraq in Operation Desert Fox, and Hussein's government has not allowed them to return. The monitoring equipment they set up at key sites around the country has been dismantled. Judging Iraqi progress on amassing weapons of mass destruction since the inspectors departed is largely a combination of analysis, deduction, and inference from sources as diverse as spy satellite photos, Iraqi defector testimony, and other intelligence. Hussein's motivations are another consideration.
A few skeptics doubt whether Iraq has made any progress in re stocking its deadly supplies. Scott Ritter, who led UN inspection efforts on the ground between 1991 and 1998, vocally questions whether any weapons of mass destruction are left in Iraq. UN teams eliminated the bulk of them, Ritter argues, and the rest have expired. "It's just insane to talk about an Iraqi capability unless you can substantiate that they have reacquired a manufacturing capability, and no one's done that yet," Ritter said. "Short of hard fact, we don't have a national security threat here."
This much is fact: Iraq has rebuilt much of its industrial chemical capacity since the Gulf War. Hussein's regime has also imported numerous "dual-use" items - materials that have both civilian and weapons-oriented applications. Perhaps more importantly, virtually all the scientists and technicians who produced Iraq's original chemical, biological, and nuclear weapons programs are still in place. "Iraq retains intellectual capital in all these areas, including nuclear," Duelfer said. "We did not lobotomize all these scientists and technicians."
Trying to paint an accurate picture beyond these facts enters varying levels of speculation. Take the plant toured yesterday, for example. Reporters were shown a plant floor littered with barrels and sacks marked as containing agricultural pesticides, according to the Associated Press. "[But] with all due respect, I don't think journalists would be the people to make a snap judgment as to whether a facility is designed and equipped for chemical and biological weapons," Jean Pascal Zanders, a chemical and biological weapons specialist at the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute, told the AP.
Biological weapons are even more problematic, requiring even smaller, more easily hidden facilities.
Western intelligence officials must also determine the credibility of Iraqis who have defected in the years since the Gulf War. Dr. Khidhir Hamzi, who ran the Iraqi nuclear weapons program before defecting in 1995, testified before Congress that Iraq is continuing its drive for nuclear weapons. A more recent defector, who also appears to be taken seriously by US intelligence officials, Adnan Ihsan Saeed al-Haideri, a civil engineer, talked about helping to build or maintain secret laboratories under wells and hospitals.
A German intelligence report made public last year stated that Iraq has restarted its chemical weapons production and possibly its biological weapons program as well. More alarmingly, the report predicted that Iraq's progress in nuclear technology would allow the country to develop three nuclear weapons by 2005.
As recently as September of 2000, Hussein publicly exhorted his "Nuclear Mujahideen" to "defeat the enemy." But the most compelling argument for concluding that Iraq has continued its weapons of mass destruction programs, specialists say, is Hussein's history. He actively sought to acquire and develop these weapons before, and there is no reason to believe his intentions have changed. "No one would be talking about invading if he had a nuclear weapon, [because] Tel Aviv would be incinerated. This wouldn't even be on the table right now. So why wouldn't he want one?" said Duelfer. "All of a sudden he stopped? Why? To me it doesn't even pass the laugh test."
© Copyright 2002 Globe Newspaper Company
