OTOTOT
Saddam's Economy of War
Saddam is still the artillery buff he always was. German prosecutors produced evidence last week against two businessmen for shipping milling machines to Iraq that would enable the regime to make guns of a "caliber capable of carrying weapons of mass destruction."
The news brings to mind Gerald Bull, the Canadian artillery designer who was assassinated mysteriously in 1990 while building Saddam a supergun capable of lofting projectiles into orbit. It's amazing how little has changed despite the resounding defeat of Saddam's army 11 years ago. Thus the question at the heart of the U.S. policy debate: Does his continued pursuit of such weapons, in violation of the 1991 Gulf War cease-fire, mean he intends to launch another war?
There is no doubt that Saddam, with his oil billions, has single-handedly called into being a world-wide industry devoted to brokering illegal weapons technologies. It begins with Syria, which agreed to reopen a long-dormant pipeline and channel $3 billion a year in illegal Iraqi oil exports whose proceeds the regime can use for any purpose it wants, free of U.N. constraints. As to suppliers, the German case was discovered by accident -- a routine inspection -- so the suspicion has to be that more Western business people, knowingly or not, are aiding in Saddam's rearmament.
Debate over his links to al Qaeda is less conclusive, but attention ought to be paid to a taped message from Ayman al Zawahri, Osama bin Laden's master strategist, ordering terrorist attacks in anticipation of U.S. moves against Iraq. But even were there no evidence of a connection, only a fool would stop looking for one. The Islamic and Arab radical underground may be strange to us but it is not strange to Saddam's intelligence services. If there were reason to cooperate, opportunity would be found.
His ambitions in the past have been expansionary -- witness his invasions of Iran and Kuwait. His penchant for miscalculation is huge -- look at the outcomes of Kuwaiti and Iranian aggressions. And then we have his apparent faith in "decisive" weapons that can deliver victory despite Iraq's general weakness. His investment in bioweapons is especially significant: Many of these are slow-acting and suited not for battlefield use but for sowing terror in civilian populations. Records found in Iraq attest to 3,117 gallons of botulinum toxin, 2,265 gallons of anthrax, 1,400 gallons of gangrene and 500 gallons of Brucella, not to mention unknown quantities of smallpox, aflatoxin and nerve gases.
Saddam's whole official life has been devoted to the pursuit of exotic weapons of every kind. This must mean something.
What's more, there are reasons at least to evaluate the possibility that something did change after Sept. 11: that the risk posed by Saddam actually increased. He saw what we have been keen not to dwell on: The Sept. 11 plot was largely a failure but contained the seeds of a much more devastating blow against the U.S., had the hijackers succeeded in decapitating the political system by taking out the White House and Congress.
The value of Dick Cheney's August speech was that it ventured an unvarnished answer to the puzzle of why Iraq would be willing to forgo an end to U.N. sanctions, which would have put billions of dollars in the regime's pockets, in order to accumulate unconventional munitions: "These are not weapons for the purpose of defending Iraq; these are offensive weapons for the purpose of inflicting death on a massive scale, developed so that Saddam can hold the threat over the head of anyone he chooses, in his own region or beyond."
Too much is made of the ideological difference between Muslim radicals and the Iraqi regime. Both are engaged in a pursuit of political power and aren't squeamish about allies. It is profoundly a mistake to imagine that terrorism is a cry of indignation against U.S policies around the world and will go away if we change our policies. Saturday's bombing in Indonesia may have been helped by al Qaeda, but the local purpose of Jemaah Islamiyah, the group strongly suspected of carrying it out, was to destabilize Indonesian society and pave the way for Islamic radicals to seize power there.
Ultimately the Muslim world must decide for itself whether it wants to live under Islamic totalitarianism, but we are part of this fight whether we like it or not. To the extent that terrorism is allowed to win, we will face more terrorism everywhere. And Saddam, believer in magic weapons, has long been known to be fascinated by terror as an aid to his ambitions.
Now we're stuck guessing about his state of mind, especially his oft-pronounced belief that we would wilt at the sight of our own blood and run away, leaving the Mideast to him. He can see, by watching CNN, that Mr. Bush's support in Congress is far from unanimous. He might easily mistake obsessive media coverage of events like the suburban D.C. sniper or last year's suspiciously experimental-looking anthrax attacks as evidence that the country is prone to dissolve in panic. (Indeed, the possibility that we were being sized up for a larger anthrax assault is one Washington has preferred to ignore in pursuit of the rogue-scientist theory).
Various peacemongers have called for sending inspectors back to a country that has spent 10 years learning how to hide its weapons labs and stockpiles from inspectors. It's no longer possible to treat this as anything but a fig leaf for surrender. The worm finally turned last week, when the CIA chief sent a letter to Capitol Hill implying to some that we dare not move against Iraq lest Saddam strike back with a catastrophic terrorist attack.
We can blame ourselves for letting it get to this point. Deterrence is finally beginning to work -- for Saddam. Happenstance and Sept. 11 have given us one last opportunity to regain the initiative over whether and how he will end up using his terror weapons. That opportunity, though, will vanish fast.
Updated October 16, 2002 |
