In the four months that United Nations weapons inspectors spent in Iraq before the commencement of hostilities, little evidence of Saddam Hussein’s exotic weapons program was unearthed. With the exception of some empty rockets the al-Samoud 2 missile stands as the only clear example of arms or delivery systems expressly forbidden by the UN after the first Gulf War. Hardly the ‘smoking gun’ that the Security Council was looking for.

In the two months since the end of the war, precious little else - save a handful of truck-mounted facilities believed to be capable of producing biological toxins - has been found. This has led to charges that the Bush Administration mishandled or intentionally politicized intelligence reports about the scope and depth of Iraq’s weapons of mass destruction (WMD) program. The President’s apparent omission of the caveats and qualifiers contained in various CIA reports on Saddam’s WMD - including a lack of knowledge of their exact whereabouts - has prompted members of Congress to investigate the matter. At the same time a House of Commons committee in Britain has studied whether Prime Minister Tony Blair and/or his communications director erred in playing up an unsubstantiated report that Saddam could deploy his WMD against coalition forces at 45 minutes’ notice. It concluded that although there was no intention to deceive Parliament, the intelligence upon which this particular allegation was based was faulty.

Saddam is still missing in action, and the materials upon whose alleged existence the US-led war was justified remain MIA - and to the chagrin of more than the Anglo-American leadership. Almost all Western intelligence agencies concurred with a reports of suspicious activity in the weeks and months leading up to the war. While vehemently chastising the US for its haste in acting on incomplete information, former UN weapons inspection chief Hans Blix acknowledged that Iraq acted as if it had much to hide. Baghdad had toyed with his inspectors from the moment of their arrival in November of 2002, and had repeatedly declined to co-operate on ‘matters of substance’.

The disposition of the Saddam’s weapons and the facilities used to produce them has, understandably, become a cause célèbre for critics of the Administration’s decision to wage war. The White House is feeling the heat, as shown by its haste in deploying ‘mobile exploitation teams’ to ferret out banned substances, followed by their withdrawal empty-handed only weeks later. To be sure, visits to previously-identified weapons collection points by teams of semi-trained military inspectors does not constitute a thorough investigation. But other charges of negligence are harder to refute. The failure of US troops to properly secure the Tuwaitha nuclear complex - long suspected of being a clandestine research and weapons production facility - opened the door to looters intent on stripping out anything of monetary value, and to Iraqi officials eager to destroy materials and documents which might have borne out allegations of wrong-doing.

All this casts a dark shadow over the war, regardless of its virtue in bringing down one of the most odious regimes on earth. In hindsight, Messrs. Bush and Blair did their cause a disservice by focussing attention on the immediacy of the perceived threat from WMD. Had they stuck to the line agreed to by all members on the Security Council - that Saddam was, on the eve of war, still in a state of non-compliance with a litany of UN resolutions dating back 12 years - their post-war pledge to root out WMD would likely have raised fewer hackles. Even if the Baathist regime had been detoxified on day one of the war, military action could still have been justified on the basis that any professed disarmament had not been supervised, let alone verified, by proper UN authorities.

So where’s the loot? Where are the thousands of litres VX gas and anthrax that the UN had not been able to account for since 1991? Where are the 10-12 SCUD ballistic missiles that were not submitted for disposal? What became of the yellowcake (processed uranium) that had been under international safeguard through the International Atomic Energy Agency?

The latter may be of little concern as it was emptied onto the ground by looters eager to get their hands on the barrels in which it was stored (the receptacles being the only way of storing precious water resources). And the extensive and complex infrastructure needed to produce a bomb was verified by the IAEA as having been destroyed or rendered inoperative before the war. But remnants of the nuclear program inevitably survive. The head of Iraq’s uranium enrichment program, Dr. Madhi Obeidi, recently handed over components of a gas centrifuge as well as blueprints and technical documents for the design and construction of such a device to the coalition. He is reported to have told American investigators that he had hidden the items in his rose garden in 1991 on the orders of Saddam’s son, Qusay.

These revelations, and earlier discoveries of documents hidden in the houses of other scientists, do not in an of themselves indicate a vibrant WMD program. Still, they suggest a pattern of behaviour consistent with the deception tactics and obfuscation of the 1990s. They indicate a willingness to squirrel away proscribed materials. They also suggest that Saddam’s weapons-making programs had not been eradicated but lay dormant, and that the regime had every intention of re-constituting them as soon as the Security Council’s back was turned.

Might this explain the inability of coalition troops to unearth biological and chemical agents, considered even by the UN to exist in significant quantity? The fate of these materials has spawned theories ranging from the plausible to the downright fanciful. One posits that the Iraqis trucked their chemicals into neighbouring Syria before the bombs began to fall. This is well within the realm of possibility, as tanker trucks full of Iraqi oil are known to have travelled to Syria on an almost daily basis in defiance of UN sanctions. But it is unlikely that the chemicals could be stored next door indefinitely. Damascus would want to either send that back, dispose of them, or store them. The first option is a political non-starter, while the other two may be impossible to conceal indefinitely and would only delay the inevitable reckoning.

Another theory is that the weapons are still in Iraq and are extremely well hidden. By the middle of May US military investigators had fruitlessly searched 75 out of 600 ‘suspect’ sites believed to house or produce banned weapons. Most of the 19 high-probability sites named in Britain’s intelligence dossier on Iraq had also been scoured without result. The dearth of incriminating evidence which so befuddled senior US military officers should not be all that surprising. After all, why would Saddam’s security apparatus consider stashing vital materials in places where the coalition was sure to look? No wonder that the Amiriyah Serum and Vaccine Unit, the Iskanderiyah munitions factory, and the Salman Pak training camp, and various weapons depots had nothing to offer. Much better to disperse them in rural areas or in innocuous-looking buildings in cities other than Baghdad. Smaller caches are by harder to find, and some chemical and biological weapons production can be camouflaged as civilian activity. In 1991 Iraq declared that it had no biological weapons program. The UN took four years to expose that lie, and only will the help of inside information.

Rolf Ekeus, the head of the UN Special Commission - the body which oversaw the partial disarmament of Iraq in the 1991 to 1998 - has suggested that the legacy of the Baathist regime may be the greatest obstacle to getting to the very bottom of Iraq’s WMD program. He cited Dr. Obeidi’s willingness to divulge state secrets as an anomaly; that since it is difficult to fully comprehend the state of fear in which Iraq’s scientific élite lived, one cannot reasonably expect civil servants and scientists to come forth with information. This, he said, will remain so as long as the fate of Saddam and his sons is undetermined because the risk of reprisals against the individual and his family is simply too great. The spate of deadly attacks on Iraqi civilians employed by the coalition to help re-build Iraq would seem to bear this out. Thus only by creating an environment free from terror can there be full (and voluntary) disclosure.

One final theory - that Saddam secretly disarmed during the 1990s - is somewhat more difficult to fathom. Although bending to the Security Council’s will would have gotten him off the hook, it would have represented a personal and political defeat with which a megalomaniac could not abide. A public admission of being WMD-free might also have emboldened restive Kurds, Marsh Arabs, and other domestic opponents of the regime. It would also, according to Ekeus, be inconsistent with another, lesser-known imperative for having WMD: the perceived need for a counter-measure to Iran’s nascent nuclear weapons program.

Two months after the end of ‘major combat’ in Iraq, the most one can say for certain is that the facilities needed to produce exotic weapons still exist, albeit in truncated form. The fruits of Saddam’s evil labours may also exist, in varying quantities, at locations yet to be determined. If they do not, if Saddam did indeed disarm during the 1990s without bothering to inform the UN, it can only be because he somehow thrived on creative ambiguity, the thrill of watching his Western enemies twist in the wind. If he was successful in drawing an impatient America into an unnecessary war, and making his country suffer mightily for it, it will surely rank as one of the great tragedies of our time.

David Rudd is the President and Executive Director of the CISS.

Copyright CISS 2003

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