Iraq: WMDs and the War
Hi, I am Keypusher, a lawyer and former foreign service officer. Thanks to Patterico for letting me guest-blog.
Big news from Britain: Blair has admitted, in a speech to the Labour Party conference, that intelligence on Iraq’s WMDs was wrong. http://tvnz.co.nz/view/news_world_story_skin/450363%3fformat=html This earned him a condescending pat on the back from the New York Times and a not-so-subtle hint that Bush should do likewise. http://www.nytimes.com/2004/09/30/opinion/30thu2.html. There will be a lot of this in the next 30-odd days, so it’s worth looking at the situation back before the war.
1. I think the administration honestly thought there were some chemical and biological weapons in Iraq, and that Iraq had some sort of nuclear program going. After all, Democrats and European leaders thought so too. http://cshink.com/on_iraq_and_wmd.htm. These weapons, assuming they existed, weren’t much of a threat to the U.S. I think everybody, including the administration, knew that too.
2. But the administration had bigger problems. The U.S. was in a long-term untenable position in the Gulf area before the war. Sanctions were entrenching Saddam. His government oversaw the distribution of food to 60% of Iraq’s people under the Oil-for- Food program. http://www.weeklystandard.com/Content/Public/Articles/000/000/002/459pqvob.asp?pg=1cite. Sanctions were becoming very unpopular in the UN. And they were a political and humanitarian disaster. One of the most widely disseminated stories in the Middle East was that sanctions had killed 500,000 Iraqi children. Thanks to a spectacularly inept interview by Madeleine Albright, then US ambassador to the UN, the 500,000 figure became entrenched as truth. http://www.reason.com/0203/fe.mw.the.shtml. * The U.S. had a de facto protectorate over Kurdistan and enforced no-fly zones in the north and south of Iraq. These commitments were expensive, and there was no end in sight to them. Worse, they meant a permanent armed presence in Saudi Arabia.
3. The administration believed it either had to go forward or retreat (first by abandoning sanctions, eventually abandoning the no-fly zones and the Kurds). This would have been a complete humiliation. Moreover, no one should doubt the Iraqis would have gone full-speed ahead with their chemical/biological and nuclear programs if sanctions ended. http://apnews.myway.com/article/20040917/D855CLS02.html. It chose to go forward.
4. The way in which it went forward has come in for some very strong criticism, which I hope to discuss in another post. But maintaining the status quo was not an option.
5. With apologies to the Angry Clam, I think double-spacing after a period gives the page a slightly more attractive, open look and makes the text slightly easier to read. But isn’t diversity of opinion the whole point of having multiple guest bloggers?
* The article cited to, by Matt Welch, is the best thing on sanctions I have ever read.
Welcome!
I offer you this laurel, and hearty handshake.
Looking forward to future posts.
arb
Comment by arb (2a7f99) — 9/30/2004 @ 3:37 pm
We’ve made finding chemical WMD’s pretty much a logical impossibility by the way we’ve termed things.
1) Piles of chemical rounds, both unitary and binary don’t count if they’re mostly empty or found in isolation (or both). The empty shells don’t even rate newsworthyness. (There’s a LOT of troops assigned to blowing up ammo dumps).
2) None of the ‘old tech’ chemical weapons count. So the unitary sarin/mustard etc just points to “Oh, he declared that. He hadn’t gotten rid of it, but he had declared it -> doesn’t count.”
3) The ‘new’ chemical weapons are binary. Let’s stick to sarin, which I know something about. The chemcials to make sarin are both pretty darn common in the US. One you are pretty much guaranteed to have if you have a house and use chemicals for your yardwork. The other is often in bathrooms or first aid kits. Neither is stunning. Both are ‘dual use’.
We’ve had several reports of buried chemicals. “Initial reports indicate this might be precursors…” a couple of days later the report is “Those chemicals we found turned out to be pesticides.”
The only way we’d find a ‘chemical weapon stockpile’ was if rounds containing both precursor A and precursor B were found in large numbers in one spot. Which… isn’t how they’re normally stored anyway.
Comment by Al (98e4ad) — 9/30/2004 @ 5:32 pm
Pesticide plants do dual duty as facilities to manufacture chemical weapons. I know whereof I speak; as a chemist who works for a major chemical company who has a large segment in the agricultural chemicals market, I know how easy it is to convert. I also know about the required reporting that the government requires to ensure traceability of chemical weapons and their components within the U.S. – I do a lot of the paperwork for my company, and we are subject to unannounced government inspections at any time 24/7. We can’t sell or ship certain chemicals to certain countries, under U.S. law. And all amounts of certain chemicals have to be accounted for, even production losses.
No, you don’t have chemical weapons just sitting around, assembled and ready to go. You have the components: empty shells, production facilities, stocks of precursors, all of which can be used for other purposes. As Saddam claimed. And as the international community willingly allowed itself to be persuaded to believe that only those alternate uses were intended, not chemical weapons. Because they wanted to believe. Because they did not want to deal with the alternative.
Comment by Claire (dd3e7c) — 10/1/2004 @ 8:20 am
It’s easy to forget that, prior to 9/11, the sanctions regime was falling apart. France, Russia and China were advocating a total lifting. The U.S. and Britain were proposing “smart sanctions” which would have lifted the embargo on all civilian goods. Even domestic lobbyists, most notably the American Petroleum Institute were pushing for lifting sanctions.
Comment by Dave Sheridan (5b08b6) — 10/4/2004 @ 11:12 am
Advance or Retreat?
On Patterico’s Pontifications, a former foreign service officer looks at the intelligence and the situation between the U.S. and Iraq before the war. There were only two ways to go, advance or retreat. You know which President Bush chose….
Trackback by Just Some Poor Schmuck (36e489) — 10/3/2004 @ 7:04 pm