Since you won't comment on what it would be like to invade Baghdad, a city of 5.5 million people, and capture its government and have it not be like Stalingrad, perhaps you'd like to consider the following, while still--I hope--pondering Baghdad:
War with Iraq could put a big dent in world's chemical weapons
By DAVID WESTPHAL
McClatchy Newspapers
Feb 24, 2003, 06:06
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If President Bush achieves his aim of disarming Iraq, he will have struck at one of the world's most potent stores of biological and chemical weapons, according to U.S. intelligence reports.
Notwithstanding the inability of United Nations inspectors to locate the suspected toxins, government experts believe Iraq has thousands of tons of chemicals capable of producing weapons like VX and sarin gas, and has one of the most active biological programs anywhere.
But destroying whatever poisons Iraq harbors would barely dent the world's supply of these weapons, scholars say, and scarcely diminish nations' ability to produce more.
At least 15 other countries, from China to Iran to Syria, have active chemical weapons programs, according to U.S. assessments, while a dozen are believed to be working on biological weapons. And that doesn't count the thousands of tons of toxic agents still held by the United States, Russia and other nations believed to have discontinued their chemical and biological programs.
Scientific advances, particularly in the area of biotechnology, are complicating efforts to contain their spread.
"The acceleration of scientific discovery, the ease of access to new technology and the availability of nuclear, biological and chemical materials means it now takes fewer and fewer people to cause greater and greater devastation," said former Sen. Sam Nunn, who now heads an ambitious effort to curb weapons of mass destruction.
The upshot, some say, is that an invasion of Iraq would be only a first step in an exceedingly difficult quest to reduce the threat from so-called weapons of mass destruction.
Bush says disarming Iraq would have a huge impact because the country's leader, Saddam Hussein, demonstrated in a 1988 chemical attack against Iraqi Kurds that he's willing to deploy these weapons. Beyond that, Bush says, toppling Saddam would send a powerful message that manufacturing biological, chemical and nuclear weapons can be a hazard to governments around the world.
"By defeating this threat, we will show other dictators that the path of aggression will lead to their own ruin," Bush said in Georgia last week.
Even so, many experts who track weapons of mass destruction say the United States faces a tall order in preventing the manufacture of poisons and their transfer to terrorist groups.
The emergence in the last decade of a biological and chemical weapons threat capable of producing mass casualties has come as something of a surprise because many arms control specialists thought they were making progress in ridding the world of these toxins.
Between 1945 and 1970, hundreds of thousands of tons of chemicals produced by Germany, Russia, Great Britain, France and the United States were dumped into oceans around the world. Subsequently, non-proliferation treaties covering these materials have resulted in the disposal of thousands of tons more.
The United States today continues a long program of destroying its own chemical weapons, working toward a completion date of 2007.
But a sarin gas attack on the Tokyo subway in 1995 and the 2001 anthrax deaths in the United States have signaled a dramatic turn. Small nations, along with terrorist groups, are now seeing biological weapons in particular as a viable strategy for countering the overwhelming military superiority of the United States.
"The danger that biological weapons may be used by rogue states or terrorist groups is increasingly recognized as presenting the greatest danger of all weapons of mass destruction," said Graham Pearson, a former British security official. "They are the easiest to acquire ... and yet their effects can be comparable to those of nuclear weapons."
In targeting Iraq, Bush has singled out the country many experts believe to be the top threat - both in its capacity for producing toxins and its propensity to use them. According to its own report to U.N. inspectors in the 1990s, it had produced 3,859 tons of chemical agents, including abun, sarin, VX and the blister agent mustard.
Yet Iraq is hardly alone.
North Korea ranks second only to Iraq in bio-weapons capability, according to U.S. officials, and is believed to have shopped chemical weapons to developing countries. Iran has an advanced chemical weapons store, according to an analysis by the Henry L. Stimson Center in Washington, and may have stockpiled small quantities of biological agents.
China, Libya, Taiwan and Syria are among other countries believed to have capability in both biological and chemical weapons. Officials are also concerned that the vast bio-weapons program operated by the former Soviet Union may have substantial remnants.
What particularly worries administration officials is that some of these materials - or the capability to produce them - will be sold to non-state groups bent on threatening the United States with terror.
CIA Director George Tenet told Congress earlier this month that associates of Osama bin Laden have received training from Iraq on "poisons and gasses."
Looking ahead, Tenet said, terrorist groups may be able to develop chemical and biological weapons capability on their own. Bin Laden's al-Qaeda group acquired the know-how and equipment needed to grow biological agents in Afghanistan, he said.
"Bio-weapons programs have become more technically sophisticated as a result of rapid growth in the field of biotechnology and the wide dissemination of knowledge," he told Congress. "Almost anyone with limited skills can create bio-weapons agents."
Gert Harigel, a senior physicist at the European Organization for Nuclear Research in Geneva, Switzerland, says the threats posed by chemical or biological weapons attacks are vastly overstated.
Despite their huge production, chemical weapons proved to be almost useless on the 20th century battlefield, he said, while biological weapons have caused even fewer casualties.
Compared with other causes of mortality, he said, the "impact of biological and chemical agents' terrorism in the past is absolutely negligible and will probably remain, hopefully, small."
© Copyright 2003 by Capitol Hill Blue
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