A Plot to Deceive?
By Robert Kagan
Washington Post
Sunday, June 8, 2003; Page B07
There is something surreal about the charges flying that President Bush lied when he said that Saddam Hussein was in possession of weapons of mass destruction. In Europe, and especially in Britain, where Tony Blair is also under fire, the idea has actually taken hold that the charge against Iraq was a complete fabrication.
The absurdity of these accusations is mind-boggling. Start with this: The Iraqi government in the 1990s admitted to U.N. weapons inspectors that it had produced 8,500 liters of anthrax, as well as a few tons of the nerve agent VX. Where are they? U.N. weapons inspectors have been trying to answer that question for a decade. Because Hussein's regime refused to answer, the logical presumption was that they had to be somewhere still in Iraq.
That, at least, has been the presumption of Hans Blix. Go back and take a look at the report Blix delivered to the U.N. Security Council on Jan. 27. On the question of Iraq's stocks of anthrax, Blix reported there existed "no convincing evidence" they had ever been destroyed. On the contrary, he said, there was "strong evidence" that Iraq had produced even more anthrax than it had declared "and that at least some of this was retained." Blix also reported that Iraq possessed 650 kilograms of "bacterial growth media," enough "to produce . . . 5,000 litres of concentrated anthrax."
On the question of VX, Blix reported that his inspection team had "information that conflicts" with Iraqi accounts. The Iraqi government claimed that it had produced VX only as part of a pilot program but that the quality was poor and therefore the agent was never "weaponized." But according to Blix, the inspection team discovered that the Iraqi government had lied. The Iraqi government's own documents showed that the quality and purity of the VX were better than declared and, according to the inspection team, there were "indications that the agent" had indeed been "weaponized."
Blix reported as well that 6,500 "chemical bombs" that Iraq admitted producing still remained unaccounted for. Blix's team calculated the amount of chemical agent in those bombs at 1,000 tons. As Blix reported to the U.N. Security Council, "in the absence of evidence to the contrary, we must assume that these quantities are now unaccounted for."
Today they are unaccounted for. But the answer to the continuing conundrum is not that Bush and Blair are lying. The weapons were there. Someday we'll find them, or we'll find out what happened to them.
Unless, of course, you like your conspiracies to be as broad and all-pervasive as possible.
So maybe Bush and Blair are lying, but if so they're not alone. There must be a vast conspiratorial network of liars. Blix and the U.N. weapons inspectors must be lying, too, of course. But the conspiracy doesn't stop there.
Maybe former CIA director John Deutch was lying when he testified before the Senate Intelligence Committee on Sept. 19, 1996, that "we believe that [Hussein] retains an undetermined quantity of chemical and biological agents that he would certainly have the ability to deliver against adversaries by aircraft or artillery or by Scud missile systems."
And so was former secretary of defense William Cohen this past April when he declared, "I am absolutely convinced that there are weapons. . . . I saw evidence back in 1998 when we would see the inspectors being barred from gaining entry into a warehouse for three hours with trucks rolling up and then moving those trucks out."
One would have to assume as well that the German intelligence service was lying when it reported in 2001 that Hussein was three years away from being able to build three nuclear weapons and that by 2005 Iraq would have a missile with sufficient range to reach Europe.
Maybe French President Jacques Chirac was lying when he declared this past February that there were probably weapons of mass destruction in Iraq and that "we have to find and destroy them."
And then there's Al Gore, who declared last September, presumably based on what he had learned as vice president, that Hussein had "stored secret supplies of biological and chemical weapons throughout his country."
Finally, we get to Bill Clinton. In a speech delivered at the Pentagon in February 1998, Clinton described what he called Iraq's "offensive biological warfare capability, notably 5,000 gallons of botulinum, which causes botulism; 2,000 gallons of anthrax; 25 biological-filled Scud warheads; and 157 aerial bombs." Clinton accurately reported the view of U.N. weapons inspectors at the time "that Iraq still has stockpiles of chemical and biological munitions, a small force of Scud-type missiles, and the capacity to restart quickly its production program and build many, many more weapons." It was essential, Clinton declared, in words that now seem especially poignant, that the world address "the very kind of threat Iraq poses . . . a rogue state with weapons of mass destruction, ready to use them or provide them to terrorists . . . who travel the world among us unnoticed."
If you like a good conspiracy, this one's a doozy. The best thing about it is that, if all these people are lying, there's only one person who ever told the truth: Saddam Hussein. And now we can't find him either.
The writer, a senior associate at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, writes a monthly column for The Post.
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