By Ben Russell
Sydney Morning HeraldMay 1, 2003
President George Bush's National Security Adviser, Condoleezza Rice, is now acknowledging that Iraq's weapons of mass destruction program is less clear-cut, and probably more difficult to establish, than the White House portrayed before the war. She has no doubt that the US-led coalition, assisted by experts from Britain and Australia, will find Iraq's WMD programs. But for the first time, Dr Rice is saying publicly that it is less likely many actual weapons will be found. Rather, she described the programs as being hidden in so-called "dual use" infrastructure. In other words, chemicals and biological agents could be in plants, factories and laboratories capable of being used for legal and prohibited purposes.
Almost three weeks since the fall of Baghdad, with senior Iraqi scientists and officials in US custody, no chemical or biological weapons stockpiles have been found. Neither has any evidence been uncovered that Iraq had restarted a nuclear program. In explaining the gap between the prewar and postwar claims on Iraq's WMD, Dr Rice said the US was now seeing the programs in a different light. "The fact is that we are beginning to see a kind of pattern on how Iraq may have hidden its weapons of mass destruction from the outside world for all of these years," she said this week.
According to Dr Rice, the weapons programs are "in bits and pieces" rather than assembled weapons. "You may find assembly lines, you may find pieces hidden here and there," she said. Ingredients or precursors, many non-lethal by themselves, could be embedded in dual-use facilities. She had a new explanation too for Iraq's ability to launch these weapons that were not assembled. "Just-in-time assembly" and "just-in-time" inventory, as she put it. But in the months before the Iraq war, Mr Bush and his advisers, including the Secretary of State, Colin Powell, gave far more frightening descriptions of Iraq's stockpile of weapons of mass destruction.
Addressing the UN Security Council on February 5, Mr Powell said recent intelligence showed a missile brigade outside Baghdad was "dispersing rocket launchers and warheads containing biological warfare agent to various locations". Mr Bush was equally alarmist, describing satellite evidence showing that Saddam Hussein was reconstituting Iraq's nuclear weapons programs with his top nuclear scientists, his "nuclear mujahideen". Iraq's deadliest weapons could end up in the hands of terrorists. "We cannot wait for final proof," Mr Bush said. "The smoking gun that could come in the form of a mushroom cloud."
When Hans Blix, the chief UN weapons inspector, suggested Iraq's WMD program could be more fragmented and degraded, he was pilloried as naive or incompetent. When his inspectors talked of a more complex search for WMD, where components or precursors could be in the form of legal, dual-use chemical or biological agents that had to be monitored, they were dismissed as flatfooted and overcautious. Yet Dr Rice's descriptions of Iraq's weapons program is far closer to Dr Blix's analysis than she would want to concede. Throughout Dr Blix's reports to the Security Council he spoke of the need to track down the components of Iraq's old biological and chemical programs, the bits and pieces, and to monitor all activity at dual-use facilities.
Many international weapons experts believed that the threat from Iraq did not come from chemical-filled Scud missiles or aircraft, as sometimes cited in Washington. The threat was less direct. It was about whether Saddam was trying to maintain the core of a WMD program, both raw ingredients and scientific expertise, which he could reconstitute when the world got tired of containing him. For arms control experts around the world that threat was a very real one. But it was far less dramatic and threatening than that presented by the US to justify a pre-emptive war. Now the US, Britain and Australia, which have taken on the mission to find Iraq's WMD program, have to explain this more complex and diffuse threat to the world. Dr Rice's public comments will help. But the US's refusal to accept a role for Dr Blix and his team to verify what actually made up Iraq's WMD program in the last years will only encourage scepticism of all the coalition claims.
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