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October 28, 2002 12:15 p.m. The Anthrax Slander Is Saddam’s bio-weapons program our fault?

t is a sign that Saddam Hussein has truly entered the pantheon of the world's great evils that his creation is now, in sophisticated quarters, being blamed on the United States.

"We shipped seven strains of anthrax to Iraq between 1978 and 1988," New York Times writer Nicholas Kristof maintained in a recent column retailing the budding conventional wisdom about Saddam's unconventional weapons program: Namely, it's all our fault.

America did, in an understandable strategic calculation, back Saddam in his war in the early 1980s with the Ayatollah's Iran, a regime that called the United States the "Great Satan," took hundreds of American hostages and practically invented contemporary Islamic terrorism.

But to leap from this fact to the notion that the United States aided the Iraqi bio-weapons program is a slander. It is a convenient lie that undercuts the case for war by making President Bush's anti-Saddam campaign seem a fickle bait-and-switch, and bolsters the sly anti-Americanism of so many doves on Iraq.

"I think it's absolute nonsense," Richard Spertzel, the former head of the United Nations' biological inspections team in Iraq, says of the bio-weapons charge. "To help the program implies doing something consciously. There is absolutely no indication whatsoever that the U.S. did anything to help the Iraqi biological-weapons or chemical-weapons program on a knowledgeable basis."

The American Type Culture Collection, a Manassas, Va.,-based nonprofit that makes biological cultures and products available for research purposes around the world, shipped anthrax strains to Iraq in the 1980s — providing the basis for the charge that "we" gave Saddam anthrax.

But the culture collection isn't an arm of the U.S. government. Nor did it intend to give the material to Iraq for nefarious purposes. The transfers occurred at a time when anthrax was still primarily thought of as a veterinary disease.

"Anthrax is found in nature," explains Michael Moodie of the Chemical and Biological Arms Control Institute. "People who want to do research for legitimate medical or other reasons have these strains."

Anthrax is caused by the spore-forming bacterium Bacillus anthracis and infects mostly cattle, sheep and the like, although humans can get it from infected animals.

According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, it is common in agricultural regions in South and Central America, Southern and Eastern Europe, Asia, Africa, the Caribbean and the Middle East — including Iraq.

So it wasn't unusual for Iraq to gather strains of anthrax in the 1980s, as it did not just from the American Type Culture Collection, but also from the Paris-based Pasteur Institute.

One of the destinations for the strains was the University of Baghdad, which at the time, according to former inspector Spertzel, had a solid reputation.

It only seems scandalous that Iraq got anthrax from a U.S. source if today's attitude toward the disease is projected back 20 years. Anthrax began to secure its association with terror only with the revelation that the Soviet Union had a massive biological-weapons program and the discovery of the Iraqi program in 1995.

Iraq now maintains that its program used the anthrax strains from the United States, a way to score propaganda points by stamping its terror weapons "Made in the U.S.A." This, however, appears to be untrue.

"I found no hard indication that said that the U.S. strains were used in the program," says Terence Taylor of the International Institute for Strategic Studies and a former weapons inspector. "And I'm not alone in that point of view."

All this aside — what if the United States did knowingly advance Iraqi unconventional weapons programs in the 1980s? Would that make it OK for Iraq to have these weapons programs now?

Of course not.

By pointing out the U.S.-Iraq anthrax connection, doves aren't making a serious policy point so much as reinforcing their attitude to American power, which they consider always in the wrong — wrong when it supposedly gives Saddam anthrax, and wrong when it prepares to take it away.

© 2002 by King Features Syndicate