The Boulder Daily Camera
July, 2003
The most astonishing aspect of the mysteriously missing weapons of mass destruction ballyhooed by the media in recent days is the nearly complete silence concerning the work of a dedicated group of UN inspectors in Iraq from the end of Gulf War I in 1991 to 1998 when the United Nations ended that operation and withdrew its personnel on the eve of the Anglo-American bombing campaign.
The one thing that everyone can agree on now is that before Gulf War I Iraq indeed had thousands of liters of biologic toxins, thousands of tons of lethal chemical agents and an active program to produce atomic bombs, all for the purpose of wreaking death and destruction on its enemies, including the United States. The difference between this reality and the spin concocted by the Bush Administration and its apologists is that they would have the rest of us believe Saddam possessed these weapons and continued to produce more up to the moment that American and British air and land forces launched Gulf War II.
However, the only credible evidence of WMD that Pentagon and the State Department have been able to cobble together, before the invasion and since, has relied on what we basically already knew from discoveries and intelligence collected during the earlier time. It is now clear from the dearth of any substantive new evidence, the recently uncovered forgery, and the suggestion emanating from the intelligence services themselves that their tenuous leads were deliberately manipulated and embellished by policy makers to enhance their case for war, that in fact the Bush Administration had nothing but a predetermined plan to attack Iraq, despite the frailty of the case and doubts of the dissenters. The first thing to do was to convince the public that Saddam was hiding WMD. The last thing that G.W.Bush and company wanted - or expected in the fall of 2002 - was for Saddam Hussein to capitulate to United Nations demands that he allow UN inspectors unimpeded access in Iraq - without notice, any place, any time. Preceding this momentous cave on September 16, the Bush Administration believed it had set the criteria so high that it was inconceivable that Iraq would accede to such humiliating terms. The UN resolution, crafted largely under US pressure, was deliberately designed to be rejected. A rejection by Iraq would provide the US the needed casus belli prelude to an invasion, whether or not sanctioned by the United Nations. Moreover, the White House fully anticipated that Iraq would reject the new, more stringent set of conditions contained in UN Resolution 1441, adopted unanimously by the Security Council on November 8. Indeed, the Iraqi Parliament obligingly complied with a unanimous rejection the following day. However, the Iraqi government's (i.e., Saddam) official announcement five days later, reiterating its acceptance of the latest conditions, finessed the Administration for a second time, forcing it to revise its rhetoric but not its ultimate goals.
If the double capitulation of Iraq in less than two months was insufficient to allay the purported concerns of the Bush team, what would - short of invading that beleaguered nation? Probably nothing. Only one question (the piteous state of the Iraqi people from thirty years of Saddam and twelve years of punitive UN sanctions aside) that need be answered: what threat did Saddam Hussein and his minions actually pose to the US and its allies? However badly Saddam would like to injure the US, the relevant facts are that he could not and would not. He could not because Gulf War I and the subsequent work of the UN inspection teams following the war destroyed his ability to do so. He would not because, though perhaps somewhat demented, the man is not suicidal.
A new book published in the fall, 'War on Iraq' by William Rivers Pitt and Scott Ritter (Chief UN weapons inspector in Iraq from 1991 -98), provides the most authoritative assessment to date of Iraqi's pre-Gulf War I offensive capabilities. The inspectors not only inspected, they destroyed - a fact perhaps not fully appreciated by most Americans. They destroyed not only the weapon stockpiles but the physical-industrial base required to produce them. "We can say unequivocally that the industrial infrastructure needed by Iraq to produce nuclear weapons had been eliminated."
The chemical weapon plant for manufacturing sarin and tabun was bombed during the Gulf War I and all remaining potential in this regard was destroyed upon the arrival of the inspectors. Further- more, any undiscovered caches of these chemicals would have degenerated into "useless, harmless goo" in less than five years. The inspectors also located and destroyed VX nerve gas supplies, their production plants as well as factories for the production of liquid anthrax and liquid botulinum toxin. The essential facts are that the destroyed chemical and biologic warfare facilities could be reconstituted only at great expense, relying primarily on sources external to Iraq, a virtual impossibility under the import embargoes imposed on Iraq since the first Gulf War.
As the details of these apparent deceptions foisted on the American and English peoples by their elected (almost elected in the case of G.W. Bush) leaders come into sharper focus as it must in the days leading to the 2004 election, we must wrestle with the possibility that as a nation we have suffered an insult equivalent to that poignantly expressed by a anonymous U.S. intelligence official assigned to the search for WMD "I feel almost duped". The Nation (June 23, 2003) put it even more bluntly, "Sending Americans to fight in a war fueled by deceit and fabricated intelligence would be a betrayal of the trust between citizens and their government."
Howard Garcia
Boulder Daily Camera, July 2003