U.S. Readies a Different Army
To Search for Weapons in Iraq
By JOHN J. FIALKA 4/17/03
Staff Reporter of THE WALL STREET JOURNAL
WASHINGTON -- The Bush administration, intensifying its so far fruitless search for weapons of mass destruction in Iraq, is preparing to send 1,000 scientists, technicians, intelligence analysts and other experts to Baghdad, a Defense Department official said.
Called the Iraq Survey Group, the largely civilian team will be led by a general and will be equipped with mobile laboratories that can do tests in Iraq. It also is developing procedures for testing in laboratories in the U.S. and the United Kingdom.
"It's going to be a much more muscular organization," said the official, who added that lead elements of the group are already working in Iraq. The Army's 75th Exploitation Group, which has searched several sites in Iraq, will come under the command of the larger Survey Group and provide its transportation and logistics, he said.
Meanwhile, the head of the United Nation's inspection team, Hans Blix, will brief the U.N. Security Council next week on his preparedness to send an inspection team to Baghdad.
"Clearly he [Dr. Blix] does think there is an ongoing job to be done and that we have the mandate for it under the existing council resolutions," said Ewen Buchanan, a spokesman for the U.N. Monitoring, Verification and Inspection Commission, which is called Unmovic.
The moves raise the possibility of a collision of unrelated inspection teams. A U.S. official said, "We see no immediate role for Unmovic. We have other issues to deal with before we start bringing Blix back in. Nor are we convinced that Blix is the right person to lead any effort in Iraq."
The tension comes as U.S. searches of homes, weapons sites and former terrorist training camps in Iraq have, so far, turned up no hard evidence of a substantial Iraqi chemical, biological or nuclear weapons program. This poses a difficult political issue for the Bush administration, which justified its attack on Iraq by asserting that Saddam Hussein had a robust program to develop weapons of mass destruction.
Syria, meanwhile -- which has been accused by the U.S. of experimenting with chemical weapons and charged by Israel with hiding Iraqi chemical or biological weapons -- said it would propose to the U.N. that the Middle East be declared a zone free of weapons of mass destruction. The move was pointedly aimed at Israel, which is widely believed to have nuclear weapons.
At the same time, Syria's government Wednesday suggested relations with the U.S. were calmer than they have appeared amid harsh rhetoric in recent days. "Things are not so bad," said Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Bouthayna Shaaban. "I really take all these statements with a positive tinge to them. The objective is to engage and talk about issues, rather than to threaten."
Wednesday, the Army's Fourth Infantry Division found huge caches of conventional weapons at the Al Taji Army Airfield about 15 miles from Baghdad. Troops began searching the base's large bunker complex for signs of Scud missiles and biological and chemical weapons that were once stored there.
Also Wednesday, an American military team raided the Baghdad residence of Rihab Taha, a British-educated microbiologist who is suspected of running Iraq's biological-weapons program, and took three Iraqi men into custody and seized boxes of documents. Ms. Taha appears to have fled the country.
The disappearance of many Iraqi scientists, military leaders and other officials said to be involved with weapons programs is disturbing, according to Jonathan B. Tucker, a senior fellow at the U.S. Institute of Peace, a federally funded research group.
"We know there were roughly 3,000 Iraqi scientists that worked at one time or another in these weapons programs. At least a hundred had broad knowledge of these programs. Their expertise would be of great interest to the other proliferators in the [Middle East] region."
Mr. Tucker, author of a book on biological weapons, urged the U.S. and its allies to set up a science and technology center in Baghdad for some of these scientists to work on nonmilitary science projects, similar to centers set up in Moscow and Kiev after the Cold War.
Raymond Zilinskas, a former U.N. inspector, suggested that one reason the U.S. hasn't turned up more evidence of weapons of mass destruction is that Iraq's weapons program "may not be on the scale that the Bush administration posited before the war."
Because U.N. inspectors were working in Iraq up to a few hours before the war started, he said, they "would have created a real logistics hassle" for Iraq's military. The military would have had to retrieve hidden caches of materials, put them in weapons and deploy them as bombs were falling over Baghdad. "For all these reasons, I don't think they had any [weapons of mass destruction] ready to go," said Mr. Zilinskas, who currently directs the chemical and biological nonproliferation program for the Monterey Institute of International Studies in Monterey, Calif.
On the outskirts of Baghdad, meanwhile, a Marine unit found a terrorist training camp where, it said, conventional bomb-making apparently was taught.
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