Newsday (New York, NY) March 21, 2003
If Backed Into Baghdad, Will Iraq Use Chemicals?
By Earl Lane. WASHINGTON BUREAU
Washington - American troops moving into Iraq face a range of possible threats, experts said yesterday, but the most dangerous may be as old as warfare itself: having to engage enemy forces on their own turf, particularly in the sprawling city of Baghdad.
"The one they worry about most is urban combat," said John Reppert, a retired Army brigadier general at Harvard University's Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs. "That would deprive us of many of the advantages of our superior technology."
Specialists also fear Baghdad might be the place where Iraqi President Saddam Hussein's special security forces, pushed to the wall, might use chemical weapons.
When American forces are on the outskirts of Baghdad and he knows his days are numbered, Hussein and his remaining loyalists may use every weapon at their disposal, said Ibrahim al-Marashi, a research associate at the Center for Nonproliferation Studies in Monterey, Calif.
The CIA has estimated that Iraq has 100 to 500 metric tons of chemical agents such as mustard gas and VX, a nerve gas. That is a small amount for battlefield purposes, some analysts said, particularly against U.S. forces equipped with warning devices and protective suits. But dispersal of such agents in or near Baghdad could cause civilian casualties, they said.
John Pike, director of GlobalSecurity.org, a research group specializing in military affairs, said it would be a mistake to assume that Iraq will wait until a siege of Baghdad to use its chemical weapons. "It is a big dog that has not barked," Pike said, "but it is perfectly capable of barking at any minute." Iraq has the ability to deliver chemical weapons in artillery shells, Pike said, which it did during the war with Iran in the 1980s. He said chemical and biological weapons are controlled by Hussein's Special Security Organization, a group many expect to follow orders to the end.
Others were skeptical about Iraq's ability to carry out a coordinated attack using chemical weapons. "I don't think they have the means to deliver them that they had in 1991," said James Phillips, an analyst at the Heritage Foundation, a Washington think tank. He said American forces, with air superiority, could quickly destroy massed artillery formations suspected of readying a chemical weapons attack.
Iraq began a biological weapons program in the mid-1980s and by 1990 it had stockpiled missile warheads and aerial bombs filled with anthrax, botullinum toxin or aflatoxin. It also investigated use of other toxins. While United Nations teams supervised destruction of Iraqi biological weapons after the 1991 Gulf War, experts say the status of an alleged covert biological program in Iraq is unclear. Administration officials have warned that Iraq has mobile laboratories, housed in nondescript vehicles, capable of producing germ weapons.
American forces have been immunized against anthrax, and some experts question whether Iraqis would be willing to use persistent biological agents, such as anthrax, on their own soil.
There is no evidence that Iraq has a nuclear weapon. Despite Bush administration claims that Hussein could be close to having the bomb, the recently suspended UN inspections found no convincing proof that Iraq had reconstituted its nuclear program or was engaging in any prohibited nuclear activities.
GRAPHIC: Pool Photo / Russell Boyce - British Royal Air Force personnel wait in a bunker with their full nuclear, chemical, biological kit on a base in Kuwait yesterday. Specialists fear that Iraqi special security forces in Baghdad might unleash chemical weapons.
Copyright © 2003, Newsday, Inc.
