HOME / war stories: Military analysis.

Vanishing AgentsDid Iraq really have weapons of mass destruction?

By Fred KaplanPosted Friday, May 30, 2003, at 2:01 PM ET

On a cold trailEnough already. Where are the weapons of mass destruction?

RSS

Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld appeared at the Council on Foreign Relations last Tuesday and, during the question-answer period, made the usual excuses for why his team of biochem-weapon hunters hasn't yet found any. "We've only been there seven weeks," he exclaimed. "It's a country the size of California—it's not as though we've managed to look everywhere," he added.

His point has some validity but less with each day. The size of Iraq was a pertinent obstacle before the war, when U.N. inspectors had few options beyond random drop-ins on suspect sites. But now we own the place. The Pentagon's WMD-hunters can operate unhampered by Baath Party minders and sovereign niceties, so square-footage becomes almost irrelevant. Today's inspectors are like heavily armed detectives. When detectives go looking for something, they don't scour aimlessly; they follow tips, offer bribes, exert intimidation.

Let's look at those 26 former Iraqi officials—out of the 55 most-wanted playing cards—who have surrendered or been captured, and have certainly been interrogated, since the war's end. They include the vice president, the deputy prime minister, the secretary general of the Republican Guard, the army chief of staff, the minister of military industrialization, Saddam's science adviser, the head of the national monitoring directorate (who served as liaison with the U.N. inspectors), and the minister of oil (who was believed to be in charge of facilities that weaponized anthrax and other toxins).

If Iraq had been developing biological, chemical, or nuclear weapons, several—perhaps all—of these officials would have known about it. They could have told the U.S. interrogators where to look. Yet, it seems, they haven't muttered a clue. Is there not a single cad among them who would trade his loyalty to Saddam for a slice of Andalucian beach property? (Spain might as well donate something for its "coalition" status.)

Or could it be—big gulp—that they haven't given up the goods because there are no goods to give up?

Much has been made this week of two trailers, found in northern Iraq near Mosul, that the CIA says are "mobile biological-weapon production plants." In a May 28 report, considered so significant that the administration released it to the public, the agency goes so far as to call the trailers "the strongest evidence to date that Iraq was hiding a biological-warfare program."

The report notes that the trailers contain a fermenter, water-supply tanks, an air compressor, a water-chiller, a device for collecting exhaust gases—just the right components for an "ingeniously simple, self-contained bioprocessing system." The trailers are also "strikingly similar" to descriptions of mobile-bioweapons plants provided by Iraqi exiles who claim to have worked in them or witnessed others who did. Secretary of State Colin Powell displayed drawings, based on these descriptions, during his Feb. 5 "smoking-gun" briefing to the U.N. Security Council.

Read closely, though, the CIA report reveals considerable ambiguity about the nature of these vehicles. For example, it notes that Iraqi officials—presumably those currently being interrogated—say the trailers were used to produce hydrogen for artillery weather-balloons. (Many Army units float balloons to monitor the accuracy of artillery fire.) In response to this claim, the report states:

Some of the features of the trailer—a gas-collection system and the presence of caustic—are consistent with both bioproduction and hydrogen production. The plant's design possibly could be used to produce hydrogen using a chemical reaction, but it would be inefficient. The capacity of this trailer is larger than the typical units for hydrogen production for weather balloons.

One could ask: Since when was Saddam's Iraq considered a model of efficiency?

The report concedes that U.S. officials found no traces of any bioweapons agent inside the trailers. "We suspect," it states, "that the Iraqis thoroughly decontaminated the vehicle to remove evidence." That's possible.

The report also notes that, in order to produce biological weapons, each trailer would have to be accompanied by a second and possibly a third trailer, specially designed to grow, process, sterilize, and dry the bacteria. Such trailers would "have equipment such as mixing tanks, centrifuges, and spray dryers"—none of which were spotted in the trailers that were found. The problem, the CIA acknowledges, is that "we have not yet found" these post-production trailers. Question: Is it that they haven't been found—or that they don't exist?

It could well be that the CIA is right about its inferences. Either way, these trailers—simply by being capable of producing biotoxins—constituted violations of U.N. Security Council resolutions barring such technology. However, we're beyond U.N. resolutions at this point. We're looking for evidence that Iraq actually did produce such weapons. From what we know so far, the trailers constitute less than airtight proof.

At his Council on Foreign Relations appearance, Rumsfeld expressed confidence that Iraq did have weapons of mass destruction and that we'll find the solid evidence someday. But he did seem perplexed about where they all went. "Now what happened?" he asked. "Why weren't they used? I don't know."

He mused about "several possible reasons." First, he reminded his audience how quickly the U.S. ground troops advanced through the Iraqi desert. "Now," he said, "if the speed and the way that [war] plan was executed surprised [the Iraqis], it may very well be that they didn't have time to … use chemical weapons."

This hypothesis seems exceedingly unlikely. Surely they knew that war was coming; they had, as Rumsfeld admits, "strategic warning" of the invasion (even if they lacked "tactical warning" of just when, say, the 3^rd Infantry Division would reach Baghdad airport). If they had planned to use—or even contemplate using—chemical or biological weapons, there would have been plenty of time to place them on alert.

"It is also possible," Rumsfeld added, "that they decided that they would destroy [the weapons] prior to a conflict."

If this turns out to be true, it has profound implications. Under this scenario, Saddam would most likely have destroyed the weapons sometime during the Security Council's deliberations, to prevent the U.N. inspectorate from finding them and thus to keep the council from declaring Iraq in "material breach" of U.N. resolutions and, as a result, declaring war. In other words, he would have been disarming in order to avert a war. Such covert disarmament would have been foolish, clumsy, and in itself a violation. (The resolutions required Iraq to declare its weapons and all steps taken to destroy them.) Still, if this is what Saddam was doing, it might have been evidence—however stupidly kept hidden—that the inspections were working, that war was not necessary to disarm Iraq. (Of course, if the American WMD-hunters eventually do find the goods, it would confirm the view that the U.N. inspectors—with all the limitations placed upon them—never would have.)

All this speculation, of course, assumes that Saddam, who certainly had such weapons as late as 1995 (his son-in-law told us where they were, whereupon the U.N. inspectors of the day went and destroyed them), still had them in March 2003. Maybe he did, and maybe we will find out he did, but the case has yet to be made.

To some, this does not matter. In the latest Vanity Fair, Deputy Secretary of Defense Paul Wolfowitz, long the most vociferous advocate of ousting Saddam by force, is quoted as saying there were many issues that justified going to war. "For bureaucratic reasons," he says, "we settled on one issue, weapons of mass destruction, because it was the one reason everyone could agree on."

In one sense, Wolfowitz is right. Like most public events, wars, even premeditated wars, rarely have a single rationale. But a powerful rejoinder comes from Tony Blair, the British prime minister. "I have absolutely no doubt at all about the existence of weapons of mass destruction," Blair told reporters on Thursday. Asked if it matters whether they exist, Blair replied [Correction, June 3, 2002: Robin Cook, the former British foreign secretary, said this], "It matters immensely because the basis on which the war was sold to the British House of Commons, to the British people, was that Saddam represented a serious threat."

It was, of course, sold on that basis to the Congress and to the American people, too.

[Correction, June 3, 2002: Robin Cook, the former British foreign secretary, said, "It matters immensely because the basis on which the war was sold to the British House of Commons, to the British people, was that Saddam represented a serious threat"; not Tony Blair.]

E-MAIL

RECOMMEND... Get Slate RSS Feeds

Fred Kaplan is Slate's "War Stories" columnist and author of 1959: The Year Everything Changed. He can be reached at .

Photograph of serviceman looking for evidence of bioweapons by Robert Woodward/US Army/Reuters.

COMMENTS

Remarks from the Fray:

…It would be nice to say that the American people were stampeded into war by gov't lies. But the truth is, Americans were fooled because they WANTED to be fooled. They wanted something to happen to make all that Bin Laden aftertaste go away, and if beating up on Iraq and killing some thousands of innocent people might help, what the hey? Destroying that nation was downright cathartic-- it allowed us to wallow in the self pity surrounding our own meager casualties. It allowed us to manufacture absurd hollywood rescue myths. It provided no end of manufactured images harking back to a real war of liberation, last fought sixty years ago. It gave them a sense that there some control was restored to the world, by imposing fear of death on those who are too weak to defend themselves. Yet, there is less control now than before the war over forces that will determine our security. So, in a sense, it doesn't really matter if the gov't lied to get their war. Like a pathetically insecure wife who ignores her husband's cheating and pretends to believe his patently false lies, we begged to be fooled because we are afraid of the truth.But in another sense, it does matter. It matters in terms of the type of people who would create and propagate such lies. People who had to, at various points, sit down and plot and scheme: what lie will work? How can we pretend to substantiate the lie? What will be our fallback lies if the first lie is rejected? Who will spread which lie? Where will the lies be broadcast? All questions that had to be answered for the lies to be properly administered to the world. What kind of people do that kind of thing?…

--doodahman

(To reply, click here)

Somehow, the peaceniks are holding Rumfield responsible for Saddam's inability to use those deadly weapons, instead of giving him the credit for preventing WMD casualties in the war. The guardians of the WMD would have to be ultra-naive to preserve the evidence to be found by the victorious U.S. army, in spite of President Bush's solemn promise to prosecute them. Saddam's WMD stockpile could have taken three courses: some of it could have been destroyed before the arrival of the U.S. troops, some of it could have been still hidden under the sand, like the barrels of pesticide that also happens to be a nerve gas, and the remaining could be in the custody of Syria's Assad. Or, the program could be in the gestation period, in which case, destroying it before maturity was the right thing to do. In the final analysis, it is immaterial whether the chemical or biological agents used in WMD are discovered or not. The evidence of WMD program was in place even before U.N. inspections began and now it is confirmed with the discoveries of the equipment and questionable materials. Failure to disclose such equipment, materials and programs even if they were dual purpose, was violation of U.N. resolution 1441 and it amounted to constant threat to the security of the region, for which the military action in Iraq was fully justified. Neither Mr. Tony Blair nor President Bush needs to be apologetic about making the world a safer place to live. The purpose of the U.N. inspections was to assure that Iraq is disarmed. That means it has no viable stockpile of WMD, no means of producing them and no regime in power that is determined to use them. That being done, we should all rejoice the absence of WMD in Iraq, instead of lamenting about it.

--satish_desai

(To reply, click here)

Of course it matters if Iraq truly had WMDs. Even if, as some argue, there were overwhelming reasons to depose Saddam despite the lack of any such weapons, it matters because it says volumes about the way the U.S. government justified this war to the people it represents. The thing that is so striking about this situation - at least for me - is not simply that the evidence of WMDs has been underwhelming but that it has been virtually nonexistent. While a few things have turned up suggesting Iraq had some materials/facilities to build such weapons, there has been no weapons found themselves - not a lot, none! I find it almost impossible to believe that Iraq or any nations could have had such weapons or even the raw materials to create them in such quantities as little as eighteen months ago to be a significant threat to U.S. and world security without so much as a trace of them remaining today. Even if the Iraqi government sought to illegally destroy them before/during the UN weapons inspections process - one scenario suggested by Mr. Kaplan - we are talking about large-scale quantities of highly infectious/toxic materials. How could they hide them so adeptly that not a single instance has been uncovered to date or destroyed them so covertly so as to draw no attention during a period when the rest of the world's intelligence and security agencies were monitoring them with hawkeyed vigilance, some to justify war and others to prevent it? It just does not seem practicable or even plausible to me. I really think that leaves us with the conclusion that the U.S. and Great Britain never had any hard evidence of large-scale WMDs in Iraq, although they may have had hard evidence about them on a smaller scale or circumstantial evidence about materials that could be used to build such weapons that caused them to believe there could be (must be!) a larger presence than what they had detected…

--The_Bell

(To reply, click here)

…Whether we find weapons of mass destruction is beside the point. The real problem facing us now is how to finish the job and establish a regime friendly to the Unites States in Iraq. That is already proving harder to do than ousting Saddam. If we fail to accomplish this, all that has gone before will have been in vain.

--WashingtonBigfoot

(To reply, click here)

Tony Blair would not express such confidence in the existence of those weapons of mass destruction if he did not already know for a fact that they are there to be found. Then why keep it a secret from a skeptical media that demands (demands!) to know the truth? That's the wrong question. The right question is this: why reveal your hand now? It would serve no useful purpose whatsoever. The war was won in grand fashion, critics around the world have been mostly silenced, and George Bush stands tall (no matter how infuriating that may seem to those who detest him). That being the case, we don't need more evidence right now that invading Iraq was the right thing to do. But that evidence could come in handy down the line a bit, so it should be saved. If, for example, the situation in Iraq takes a terrible turn for the worse, then the site that actually has the weapons will be inspected. Or, if the Democratic presidential candidates begin to go on record against the war because no weapons were found ("George Bush lied to the American people!") then, again, that site will be inspected. If I were charge, my orders would be to search those hundreds of suspected weapons sites over the next few months, beginning with the ones that are least likely to yield fruit. Let the doubts grow, give the Democrats some rope to play with, and then it will be time to reveal what I suspect Tony Blair already knows to be true.

--Engram

(To reply, click here)

(5/31)

What did you think of this article?

Join The Fray: Our Reader Discussion Forum

POST A MESSAGE | READ MESSAGES