America Targeted 14,000 Sites. So Where Are The Weapons Of Mass Destruction?
By Andrew Gumbel
Independent UK
Sunday 13 April 2003
They were the reason the United States and Britain were in such a hurry to go to war, the threat
the rank-and-file troops feared most.
And yet, after three weeks of war, after the capture of Baghdad and the collapse of the Iraqi
government, Saddam Hussein's weapons of mass destruction – those weapons that President
Bush, on the eve of hostilities, said were a direct threat to the people of the United States – have
still to be identified.
Many influential people – disarmament experts, present and former United Nations arms
inspectors, our own Robin Cook – have begun to wonder aloud if the weapons exist at all.
The public surrender of a senior Iraqi scientist could yet backfire against the US and Britain.
Lieutenant-General Amer Hammoudi al-Saadi, who handed himself over to US forces yesterday,
continued to proclaim that Iraq no longer holds any chemical or biological weapons. He should
know: the British-educated chemical expert headed the Iraqi delegation at weapons talks with the
United Nations.
The few "discoveries" trumpeted in the media – the odd barrel here, a few dozen shells there –
have not been on a scale that could reasonably justify the unprovoked military invasion of a
sovereign country, and in most cases have been proven to been no more than rumour, or
propaganda, or a mixture of the two.
It could still be that, as American forces advance on Tikrit, Saddam's home town, chemical or
biological weapons may be discovered, or even deployed by diehard Iraqi troops. But if the casus
belli pleaded by George Bush and Tony Blair turns out to be entirely hollow – and it should be
stressed that we can't yet know that – what does it say about their motivations for going to war in
the first place? How much deception was involved in talking up the Iraqi threat, and how much
self-deception?
As Susan Wright, a disarmament expert at the University of Michigan, said last week: "This
could be the first war in history that was justified largely by an illusion." Even The Wall Street
Journal, one of the administration's biggest cheerleaders, has warned of the "widespread
scepticism" the White House can expect if it does not make significant, and undisputed,
discoveries of forbidden weapons.
Before the war, American intelligence officials said that they had a list of 14,000 sites where,
they suspected, chemical or biological agents had been harboured, as well as the delivery
systems to deploy them. A substantial number of those sites have been inspected by the
invading troops. Evidence to date of a "grave and gathering" threat: precisely zero.
Much of what has been unearthed points to something we knew about all along: the weapons
programmes that Iraq ran before the 1991 Gulf War, before sanctions, before regular US and
British bombing raids in the no-fly zones and before the UN weapons inspection regime that ran
from 1991 to 1998.
US troops have discovered a few suspect barrels here, a sample bottle of nerve agent there,
stacks of chemical suits and some drugs typically used to counteract the effects of a chemical
attack, such as atropine and 2-pam chloride. According to many military experts, these finds
suggest the vestiges of a weapons programme that has been dismantled, not one that is up and
running. The US government argues that the weapons have been deliberately dispersed and
hidden – a claim that would have more merit if there were any evidence of where the materials
might have gone.
In his State of the Union address in early February, President Bush was quite specific about the
materials he believed Saddam was hiding: 25,000 litres of anthrax, 38,000 litres of botulinum
toxin and 500 tons of sarin, mustard and nerve gas. These days, he does not mention weapons
of mass destruction at all, focusing instead on the liberation of the Iraqi people – as if liberation,
not disarmament, had been the project all along.
The administration has shown its embarrassment in other ways. On day two of the war, Donald
Rumsfeld, the Secretary of Defence, said finding and destroying weapons of mass destruction
was the invading force's number two priority after toppling Saddam Hussein – itself a reversal of
the argument presented at the UN Security Council.
A week later, Victoria Clarke, the Pentagon spokeswoman, pushed the issue further down the
list, behind capturing and evicting "terrorists sheltered in Iraq" and collecting intelligence on
"terrorist networks". Now we are told that hunting for weapons is something we can expect once
the fighting is over, and that it might go on for months before yielding significant results. "It's hard
work," a plaintive Ms Clarke said last week.
Nonsense, say the disarmament experts. "It's clear there wasn't much," said Professor Wright,
"otherwise they would have run into something by now. After all, they've taken Baghdad." Hans
Blix, the chief UN weapons inspector who spent four months badgering the United States and
Britain in vain for reliable intelligence information about the whereabouts of lethal weapons, now
says he believes the war was planned on entirely different criteria, well before his inspection
teams went back into Iraq in December.
"I think the Americans started the war thinking there were some [weapons]. I think they now
believe less in that possibility," he told the Spanish daily El Pais. "You ask yourself a lot of
questions when you see the things they did to try to show that the Iraqis had nuclear weapons,
like the fake contract with Niger."
Anxious to find a "smoking gun", a team of US disarmament experts has been set up to question
Iraqis involved in weapons programmes, while others comb sites and analyse samples in the field
using mobile labs.
The move has alarmed the weapons inspectors at the UN, where Kofi Annan, the UN secretary
general, pointedly said last week: "I think they are the ones with the mandate to disarm Iraq, and
when the situation permits they should go back to resume their work."
The US team has attempted to lure some of the inspectors, who are recognised as the sole
legitimate international authority on Iraq's weapons programmes.
The latest theory being touted in Washington by the usual unnamed government sources is that
the Iraqis have moved their weapons out of the country, very possibly into Syria. This claim
appears to have originated with Israeli intelligence – which has every motivation for stirring up
trouble for its hostile Arab neighbours – and has been bolstered by reports of fighting between
Iraqi Special Republican Guard units and US special forces near the Syrian border.
Disarmament experts do not give the claim much credence. After all, any suspicious convoy or
mobile laboratory would almost certainly be spotted by US planes or spy satellites and bombed
long before it reached Syria.
But the notion does provide the hawks in Washington with a compelling plot device not unlike the
McGuffin factor in Alfred Hitchcock's films – a catalyst that may or may not have significance in
itself but that gets the suspense going and keeps the story rolling.
If the Bush administration should ever seek to turn its military wrath on Damascus, the weapons
of mass destruction it is failing to find in Iraq might just provide the excuse once again.
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