Posted on November
26, 2014
Gone With The WMD
Recalling the fleeting facts about Iraq
by
Daniel
Clark
The Ocober 14th New York Times story revealing a
stockpile of 5,000 chemical weapons in Iraq was not news. That’s why baffled conservatives like National Review’s Deroy
Murdock are mistaken when they wonder why George W. Bush would “cover up” this
information. The bulk of these pre-1991
weapons were stored at Saddam Hussein’s chemical weapons facility in al-Muthanna, and had actually been declared to the United
Nations at the end of that conflict. The
existence of al-Muthanna’s chemical weapons stockpile
had been revealed in the Duelfer Report (a.k.a., the
Iraqi Survey Group Report) back in 2004.
The Times and other major
media could easily have related the substance of the Dulfer
Report to their readers, if only they’d wanted it to. If there’s been any cover-up, it’s been
theirs.
For
those who require an explanation as to why President Bush hadn’t trumpeted this
discovery, there are at least three very good reasons. First, the al-Muthanna
facility had been turned over to the UN, so its contents were not among the
weapons of mass destruction that Saddam had hidden, moved, destroyed, or
otherwise failed to declare. Second, the
media and other opponents of the war had long ago established the “those old
things” rationale for dismissing any of Saddam’s weapons that had been
manufactured before the ’91 Gulf War. If
any WMDs that are arguably degraded to any degree are officially considered to
be nothing, then nothing times 5,000 is still nothing.
Third, Bush knows that his acknowledgment of something
is the surest way for the liberal media to declare it to be untrue. Remember the “16 words” scandal from his 2003
State of the Union Address, in which he said, “The British government has
learned that Saddam Hussein recently sought significant quantities of uranium
from Africa.” The Brits stand by that
claim, which leaves no basis on which to dispute Bush’s statement, yet the
media have thoroughly denounced it as a lie.
The revelation that should be taken from the Times story is not simply that a
stockpile of Saddam’s weapons exists, but that it exists in spite of having
been officially “destroyed.” If it became more widely understood that the
accepted conclusions about Saddam’s WMDs have been drawn in willful
contradiction of the truth, the 2003 invasion of Iraq would be unambiguously
vindicated.
We’re told that all of the al-Muthanna
weapons are too badly degraded to pose a threat, but nobody really knows
that. Because the UN inspectors detected
leakage at the site, they decided it was too dangerous to inspect, so they
sealed it off, tagged it, and deemed its contents “destroyed.” If there were still salvageable weapons and
materials there, Saddam could have recovered them after banishing the
inspectors in 1998. In fact, ISIS raided
that same facility early this year, and we have no way of knowing if they found
anything of value. We can only comfort
ourselves with the thought that whatever they took does not officially exist.
In addition to those weapons Saddam had declared,
hundreds of his undeclared WMDs have been found scattered throughout the
country in small numbers. Supposedly,
these do not count as WMDs, because every single one of them is old and
degraded. How seriously can we take that
explanation, in light of al-Muthanna? Have we really examined all the sarin and mustard rounds that have been recovered, and
found every single one to be inert, or was it simply predetermined that they be
classified as such?
Regardless of the weapons’ condition, Saddam’s failure
to declare them constituted a material breach of UN Resolution 1441, which is
what the inspectors had originally been tasked to look for. Only when Hans Blix introduced the “smoking gun”
standard did the inspections turn into a cat-and-mouse game, in which success
was defined as nothing short of finding huge stockpiles of recently produced
WMDs, and having their existence
verified by people who behaved as if they were doing pro bono legal work for
Saddam’s government.
It’s
not that no WMDs created since 1991 have been found, it’s just that they’ve
been in small enough numbers that the Duelfer Report
found them not to be “militarily significant” – a dubious distinction, since
our primary concern was that they be used for terrorism, and not in a
conventional military setting. Among the
report’s many WMD revelations was the fact that Saddam’s government had
admitted to producing 3.9 tons of VX.
Experts say that 10 milligrams of VX is enough to kill a person, yet 3.9
tons was deemed not to qualify as “large scale production,” and therefore was
not “militarily significant.” Under the
accepted ground rules, that means it never existed at all.
One section of the Duelfer
Report details an Iraqi Intelligence Service project in which Saddam operated a
ring of clandestine chemical and biological laboratories during the 90s, often
relocating them to elude UN inspectors.
The information in this section backs up what it says an IIS officer had
confessed to, which is that, “Iraq dismantled its capability to mass produce CW
[chemical weapons] agent in favor of retaining the ability to produce smaller,
batch scales of agent at covert labs.
That assessment is corroborated by a 2004 report from
the UN Monitoring, Verification and Inspection Committee on 58 missile sites
where the inspectors had found dual-use equipment that could be used to produce
chemical or biological weapons. UNMOVIC
reported to the UN Security Council that all of these sites were swiftly
dismantled before and during the 2003 invasion.
Saddam never discontinued his WMD program; he only made it leaner, and
easier to conceal.
UNMOVIC spokesman Ewan Buchanan presented
before-and-after pictures of one of these sites, where the inspectors had found
fermenters, a reactor vessel and a freeze drier, in addition to missile
components. In explaining the
significance of one dual-use item, he said, “You can make all kinds of
pharmaceutical and medicinal products with a fermenter. You can also use it to breed anthrax.” Which conclusion must we have drawn, to have
taken the report as anything short of irrefutable proof that Saddam had an
active WMD program?
The Duelfer report goes on
to discuss research that was done at one of the IIS facilities, in which deadly
chemicals were tested on animals, and studied to see if they altered the smell
and appearance of certain foods and beverages.
If the media were at all interested in connecting the dots, they would
have recalled this in 2006, when several of Saddam’s secret recordings were
released. In one of them, he daydreams
about a WMD attack by terrorists against the USA or England. One of his aides speculates about how easy it
would be to taint a water supply with a biological agent, and argues that
because this could be done by an individual, it would be easy for a government
to deny culpability.
One
IIS laboratory produced what the Duelfer Report
dismisses as “no greater than a few kilograms” of ricin, which doesn’t sound
like much as long as it’s preceded by the words “no greater than.” That is, until you realize that two
milligrams is usually enough to kill a person.
The site was dismantled and moved at some point in the mid-90s, and we
have no idea how much more ricin was produced at its new location. Not that it matters. According to the established WMD calculus, an
unknown quantity of ricin is nothing, and an “insignificant” few kilograms is
nothing, so together, they equal nothing.
Another method that’s consistently been used to
dismiss WMD finds is to define WMDs in such a way that the chemical and
biological agents themselves do not qualify.
At most, they may be considered “WMD components,” to only graduate to
full-fledged WMDs once they are loaded into bombs or warheads. The Times
story accused Bush of covering up the fact that soldiers have been exposed to
deadly chemical agents, but this, like al-Muthanna,
is not news. Repeatedly during the
postwar search, soldiers had been treated for exposure to barrels of chemicals
that were found in camouflaged ammo dumps.
Again, we’ve been remarkably generous in our
assumptions about dual-use materials.
These concealed chemicals are precursors to nerve agents, but they can
also be used in the production of pesticides.
Naturally, the official conclusion has been that they were meant for the
latter of these purposes. Presumably,
they had to be disguised as military supplies in order to prevent the insects
from becoming suspicious.
Even if none of the officially nonexistent WMDs had
actually been discovered, the documentary evidence of their existence would be
enough to justify the invasion. Chief
inspector David Kay came home frustrated that he hadn’t found the large
stockpiles he’d expected to, but that does nothing to discredit the paper trail
he told Tom Brokaw about in 2004. In
that interview, Kay said he had seen purchase orders for WMD components from
other countries, progress reports on the development of WMDs, and evidence of
rewards paid out by Saddam for breakthroughs in WMD production.
A popular but logically incomprehensible excuse for
dismissing this evidence is that Saddam was only bluffing, as a show of
strength to his Iranian enemies.
Supposedly, he had to make the Iraqis believe it themselves, in order to
be really convincing. Therefore, he
produced massive amounts of falsified documentation to support his claims, even
though it would never be read by the Iraqi people, to whom he was not
accountable anyway.
Try this for a more plausible theory. Saddam had all the WMDs that the documents
suggest he did, but because he did not cooperate with the inspectors, we didn’t
find all of them.
Still unconvinced?
Take it from Saddam’s son-in-law, Hussein Kamel,
who was in charge of Iraq’s WMD programs, and who had claimed in 1995 to have
destroyed all the WMDs after the Gulf War.
In another of Saddam’s secret tapes, estimated to also be from 1995, Kamel gloats about having deceived the inspectors. “We did not reveal all that we have,” he
says. “Not the type of weapons, not the
volume of the materials we imported, not the volume of the production we told
them about, not the volume of use. None
of this was correct. They don’t know any
of this.” Which do you believe, Kamel’s public statement meant for Western media
consumption, or his secretly recorded boasting about how totally they were
fooling us?
Decades from now, historians who have no political
stake in the Iraq War are going to conclude that we were the most oblivious
people who ever lived, to have concluded in spite of all the evidence that
Saddam Hussein had no weapons of mass destruction. The facts that have supported the invasion
have been reported only fleetingly, however, never again to be treated as
relevant by the same media where they had originally appeared. When UNMOVIC reported on Saddam’s
disappearing missile sites, for example, the Times actually ran the story, but try finding any mention of it in
the countless WMD-related reports or “Was the Iraq War worth it” retrospectives
that the paper has published since that time.
Whenever the subject of Saddam’s WMDs comes up,
conservatives in the media should take the opportunity to put all these
forgotten fragments together, so that the American people can get an idea what
the picture really looks like. Instead,
they’re only helping liberals confuse the issue, by blaming President Bush for
covering up facts that are available to whoever wants to find them.
The Shinbone: The
Frontier of the Free Press