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Iraq in the Crosshairs: Expert Says It’s Time for War
January 28, 2003
CBN.com – After Hans Blix told the UN yesterday that Saddam Hussein is not serious about disarming, Secretary of State Colin Powell responded by repeating the White House warning that Iraq is running out of time. War appears to be looming on the horizon as U.S. military might is steadily building in the region. Pat Robertson spoke with former UNSCOM weapons inspector Bill Tierney about why inspections are doomed to failure, and why war will produce the best long-term solution.
PAT ROBERTSON: Thanks, Lee. Well with us now by satellite from Tampa, Florida, is a former UN weapons inspector, Bill Tierney. Mr. Tierney took part in nine UN inspections in Iraq. He’s also served as an Iraqi intelligence analyst with the U.S. military. He’s fluent in Arabic and we welcome him to The 700 Club. Bill, do you agree with David Kay that these inspections have put the Bush administration in a box?
BILL TIERNEY: It’s possible that they can put the administration in a box if we play to the Iraqis’ tune. Now the problem has been, in the last decade, we gave the Iraqis the bow and the violin, and we’ve said, "You play the tune and we’ll dance to it." It’s time to just completely change the terms of the debate.
And right now, we could take the declaration that they gave, point out that it was insufficient, and that’s enough. We can just stop the inspections and say, "It’s time to move on to the next stage." If we continue to grant the UNMOVIC [United Nations Monitoring, Verification and Inspection Commission] the legitimacy that it wants, as David Kay is pointing out, we could end up going on for years.
ROBERTSON: Well, can these inspections ever succeed? You were there. You were looking at things. What game does Iraq play?
TIERNEY: Pat, we did succeed in verifying that Iraq has no intention of complying. That was one of the fundamental purposes of UNSCOM [United Nations Special Commission], and it was successful. By the time 1998 came around, we had shown numerous occasions where the Iraqis had locked us out when we had solid evidence that they had weapons of mass destruction. We approached a site from various directions to keep them from slipping out the back door, and we succeeded in showing that they’re not going to cooperate.
Now Tariq Aziz [Iraq’s Deputy Prime Minister], I have to give him credit, he pulled a fast one. What he did in all these television interviews is he pointed to the weapons of mass destruction and said, "The inspectors don’t have them. They don’t have a smoking gun." If you want to really take apart the metaphor, he was really referring to the bullet, but he was using the smoking gun. Now that’s become a standard operative term, when, in fact, all these indications that the Iraqis have these weapons — for instance, a computer simulation of a Scud missile flight that I found as part of a computer forensics team at Mamoun State Establishment. It took off from the desert in Iraq and flew west. They shouldn’t have had that on their computer. Now is that a missile? No. Is that an indicator? Is that a smoking gun that a bullet’s been fired? Sure. There’s a laundry list as long as my arm or longer of all these things, and it’s time to just say, "Enough. Enough. Time to move on to the next phase."
ROBERTSON: I understand in one cache of documents there was a document that indicated a particular Iraqi official had sent a message down to a site, "Clear out fast. The inspectors are on the way," and nobody knew that they were coming except two or three people, which indicated that the UN was being infiltrated. Tell us about that.
TIERNEY: Well, we operated on the assumption that the UN was infiltrated. The Bahrain field office was infiltrated. And the moment we stepped off the plane in Baghdad, we were being monitored. So I came up to the UN for a planning session, and if we wanted to have a secure conversation, we went down to the cafeteria. The glass windows in the cafeteria made listening in on us extremely difficult. When we were in Baghdad, when we were in Iraq, any kind of sensitive discussions took place on paper.
Another security measure we adopted was, we took it for granted that there was an Iraqi with headphones listening in to us and we called him "Izzat" after Izzat Ibrahim Aldouri, the Vice-President. So anytime in a conversation someone might not be considering what they’re saying or started to go into a particular direction, one of us would say, "Hey, I wonder what Izzat would think about that? Oh yeah, we better write a note and send it off to him," and that would control us.
We had very, very strict operational security measures. There was one inspection I was on, I didn’t know what it was about until we were at the site, about to go into the room where the suspected target was. I didn’t need to know, so I wasn’t told.
ROBERTSON: What about the French? You have definite information the French tipped the Iraqis about where the inspectors were going.
TIERNEY: Yes. The French are playing both sides against the middle.
ROBERTSON: Why?
TIERNEY: Because they have oil companies that have "day after" contracts. "Day after" meaning the day after sanctions are lifted, they’re in there. So in order to win favor with the Iraqis, they would give them a forewarning of inspection sites. So the counter-measure to that was to create a bogus list and accidentally allow the French to see it. Now this worked a number of times and then the French caught on that the first one they’re going to get their hands on was the bogus list. So by August of 1998, we had three. The first was a throwaway list, then a second one to make the French think that’s the real list which they would then pass on to the Iraqis, and then the true list.
ROBERTSON: I know we’re supposed to be diplomatic and the French are supposed to be our buddies, but isn’t it time to call Chirac on this charade?
TIERNEY: It’s time to call them on their duplicity.
ROBERTSON: Yeah.
TIERNEY: Now let me put it this way: If the French put an office in Washington, D.C., between the Capitol and the White House, raised the French flag and demanded that any major foreign policy initiative go through this office where it could be approved if it served the national interest of France, would we stand for it? I don’t think so.
Well, that’s exactly what’s going on at the UN. They are using the cover of these high-minded ideals of world peace to try and make them players. The French aren’t players.
ROBERTSON: Let me ask you something too. Obviously, the President is losing in the polls. His poll ratings are falling precipitously. Of course, he’s still in pretty good shape, but, nevertheless, they’ve come down dramatically since 9/11. People are saying, "If you’ve got proof, put it on the line," and I know the other answer is, "Well, you don’t reveal your intelligence-gathering data." Can he put something out for the American people like Kennedy did during the Cuban Missile Crisis?
TIERNEY: I’m not going to make-believe I know exactly what the President’s plans are. I do know from the time when I was an intelligence analyst that there is very clear proof that the Iraqis still have weapons of mass destruction. If I were the President, I would time the release of this for shortly before I was fully prepared to go to war. That may be a reason. I don’t really know; I’m just on the outside looking in here.
ROBERTSON: Well, he’s having a tough time with the public relations and with the allies because everything’s kind of going against him right now except for Tony Blair, and he’s losing ground in Britain, so it’s a major thing. One last question… Does Saddam definitely, does he have nukes, do you think? And does he have delivery mechanism for nuclear bombs?
TIERNEY: I believe he has nuclear weapons. I’m working on a particular piece on that to explain it more fully, so I’d like to just put that to the side for the moment. That Scud missile flight simulation I just referred to, the warhead for that was 50 kilograms, which for HE, for high explosive, that’s not enough to make it worthwhile to even fly it. So that only leaves biological weapons or a nuclear device. Now whether they have gotten a nuclear device small enough to fit on a warhead, I don’t know. I really do not know.
ROBERTSON: If you were sitting in the Oval Office, would you push the trigger and say, "Let’s go to war?"
TIERNEY: Yes. And there’s a reason that has not been discussed, and it’s very important that it be brought out. Everyone says that the terrorism is over here and Iraq is over there. That’s not true. They’re all intertwined, and if we go in strong, and we deal decisively with Iraq, we’ll take the fight out of the jihadist movement. If we allow ourselves to get talked out of this, there are a million Muslims sitting the fence right now, and they are going to start to believe the jihadist vision that they’ll have an Islamic world in 20 to 50 years because they look at the U.S. thinking, "If they don’t have the guts to fight, they can be taken." So that, more than any other reason, is the reason we have got to go in and we have got to deal decisively with Saddam Hussein.
ROBERTSON: Bill Tierney, thank you very much for being with us.
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