Homeland Security

DATE=12-12-02

TYPE=INTERVIEW

NUMBER=3-459

TITLE=STIMSON-IRAQ

BYLINE=KENT KLEIN

DATELINE=WASHINGTON

CONTENT=

HOST: The Washington Post Newspaper says U-S officials have received a report that Islamic extremists linked to al-Qaida recently acquired a chemical weapon in Iraq. Amy Smithson is the Director of the Chemical and Biological Weapons Nonproliferation Project at the Henry-L-Stimson Center in Washington. She told V-O-A News Now's Kent Klein the report is not surprising, but it is troubling....

MS. SMITHSON: There have always been concerns that governments that have weapons of mass destruction might choose to share technology, actual weapons, or know-how with terrorist groups. The conventional wisdom holds that a government would not choose to do that because once that cow is out of the barn, so to speak, they really lose control over it. They don't know exactly what the terrorists will do. And, in other words, that weapon, knowledge, or knowledge could come back to actually bite them.

However, in the case of Iraq, I think there are reasons to be more than just a little bit concerned. Because with war perhaps in the offing here, the decision calculus for Saddam Hussein, particularly if the U.S. Government has been talking about regime change, may actually be different from what he faced in the Gulf War, which was a United Nations mandate to eject Iraqi troops from occupied Kuwait. In this case the circumstances are different and he might choose to fight asymmetrically in a future war.

MR. KLEIN: Within the past week, when Iraq released its 12,000-page statement about its alleged weapons program, did that make the job easier or more difficult for the U.N. weapons inspectors?

MS. SMITHSON: Well, first of all, they have to wade through a tremendous amount of material. My instincts tell me that they will find much in there that they've seen before or that their predecessors saw in earlier Iraqi declarations. It may be packaged differently, phrased differently, but I suspect there will be a lot of familiar information there. And I also suspect that the Iraqis, as they have said, will completely deny having a current weapons capability. I do not believe that that position is credible.

MR. KLEIN: Well, so far, the inspectors haven't said that they have found any weapons of mass destruction. Does this mean that Iraq doesn't have any or that the inspectors haven't been able to find them, or that they're just not saying?

MS. SMITHSON: There are some misimpressions about inspections. Everybody kind of thinks that the inspectors go out there and actually hunt for weapons themselves, which is, on the one hand, true. But, on the other hand, they are also hunting for all the trappings that go along with a weapons program, that indicate that a weapons program is still operational.

Some of the most important things that the inspectors are looking for are the equipment that can be used to make these weapons, and trying to determine what use has that equipment been put to in the years since inspectors were last there. What about the personnel that were known to have been associated with that weapons program, what have they been up to for the last several years? What about the facilities that were known to have been involved in these weapons programs? Ditto.

So, there are a number of things that can lead the inspectors to have a better understanding of whether or not Iraq has indeed shut down some of these weapons activities -- which I sincerely doubt given their track record, given their repeated obfuscation, their denial of things just as basic as having a biological weapons program. For several years they simply said, we didn't do it, and then finally, with all of the evidence garnered by inspections, they confessed to that in 1995. So, there are a lot of things that the inspectors could be looking for.

HOST: Amy Smithson is the Director of the Chemical and Biological Weapons Nonproliferation Project at the Henry-L-Stimson Center in Washington.