- 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 ö those weapons that President Bush, on the eve
of hostilities, said were a direct threat to the people of the United States
ö have still to be identified.
-
- Many influential people ö disarmament experts, present
and former United Nations arms inspectors, our own Robin Cook ö 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
ö the odd barrel here, a few dozen shells there ö 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 ö and
it should be stressed that we can't yet know that ö 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 ö 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 ö 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 ö 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 ö which has every motivation
for stirring up trouble for its hostile Arab neighbours ö 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 ö 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.
-
- http://news.independent.co.uk/world/middle_east/story.jsp?story=396733
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