There is no denying it: whereabouts of the Weapons of Mass Destruction is very puzzling and extremely troubling. Finding them, or at the least what has happened to them, is a matter of great importance. It is fully as important — and as assured — as eventually running down Saddam Hussein, his sons, and their assorted cohorts.
Part of the puzzle is not complicated, at all: The United States and its allies did not fabricate the existence of WMD or the danger of letting the Butcher of Baghdad and his scientific henchmen continue to develop such awful weapons. George Bush, Dick Cheney, Colin Powell, Condoleezza Rice, and Donald Rumsfeld never considered using the nonexistent existence of WMD as an excuse for invading Iraq and deposing its despots. Those who wish the United States harm, whatever the cost, created a monstrous myth.
We need only remember the dossier Secretary of State Powell presented to the U.N. Security Council. It was comprehensive, highly detailed and virtually impossible to fabricate, sufficient that after three days study, even the cautious Powell was convinced. The intelligence material the U.S. possessed, much of it finally shared with other members of the Security Council, was replete with photographs and corroborating eyewitness reports. (The information had not been displayed previously because of the well-earned reputation of Hans Blix’s inspection operation for leaking key information to Iraqi agents.)
There is no way that countless human contacts and electronically gathered data could have been manufactured. Moreover, it would have been equally impossible to keep secret the bogus nature of such a huge enterprise.
It is beyond all logic to think any organization could put up such a complex case, without there being at least one person of the hundreds involved who would leak “the true story.” Those who would use any pretext to denigrate America have put forth a thoroughly improbable and patently unprovable theory, as virtually all serious analysts have concurred from its first being floated.
Indeed, like an accused felon pleading nolo contendere, no contest, in a trial, the absence of any meaningful Iraqi documentation on the disposition of tens of tons of biological, chemical and nuclear materials that were clearly useful only for terrible weapons, stood as mute admission.
Consider some of the other, equally sinkable, canards:
the two “mobile bio factories” of an estimated 15, those creatively constructed semi-trailers, were simply used to manufacture, well, something (it is possible they in fact could make fertilizer);
the trailers were left without any trace of their previous usage (“scrubbed clean” as investigators reported) because of the inherent neatness of the technicians involved;
the warehouses of chemicals discovered in numerous locations were part of the country’s massive fertilizer program, although admittedly they could have been used for WMD, but of course no WMD have been found;
the extremely dangerous radiation levels at the Al-Tuwaitha nuclear facilities not far from Baghdad and the holy city of Najaf were simply left over from the time 15-20 years earlier, when Iraq had a nuclear weapons program, which has long since been discontinued;
“Madame Anthrax” and “Doctor Germ”, Western sobriquets applied to Huda Ammash and Rahib Taha, the two top female WMD scientists now under detention, were a bizarre attempt by Saddam to seem to support feminine affirmative action.
The underlying and persistent contention that Iraqi WMD never existed is particularly dangerous, however. Coming from the Left, it is a pernicious attempt to lull the U.S. and its allies into dropping the search for them. Coming from the right, it is naïve and, worse, unwittingly defeatist.
The idea that hundreds of Iraqis employed to develop WMD were only claiming, but not actually, doing so to humor and deceive Saddam is preposterous. Such a concept mirrors the leftist proposition that hundreds of American and British intelligence personnel contrived — and managed to keep secret! — the tale of Iraqi WMD. Similarly, large-scale destruction of WMD would have been revealed by now: if any renegade Baathist lieutenant could do so, he would try to earn his freedom by revealing either story in provable detail.
So, where are they? What happened to these vaunted Weapons of Mass Destruction under development and manufactured by Saddam’s minions? Although finding them has proved vexing, the answer is neither complicated nor remotely approaching rocket science in sophistication.
There are in fact two highly credible — and probable — answers. In the months of contrived and contorted, seemingly endless U.N. diplomacy, Saddam and company had ample time [a] to hide any type and number of weapons in difficult to detect places around California-sized Iraq, and/or [b] to export them into safe havens controlled by the world’s far flung, loosely allied terror network.
Biological weapons, including the notorious anthrax and the deadly sarin, take up minimal space and there is no difficulty whatever hiding them. A filled letter envelope can immobilize a metropolis. The greater challenge is making certain the awful stuff does not escape from whatever contains it, unless and until the terrorist wishes to release it. A few Baath, al Qaeda, Hamas, or Al-Fatah thugs could already have carried enough to blackmail the world or destroy much of its citizenry, or both.
Chemical weapons carry a different advantage for the terrorist. Most of the key ingredients can be readily purchased in a supermarket or hardware store. Thus, when a large cache of an innocent sounding material is found, the professional doubters can attribute its presence to the much abused fertilizer ingredient scam. Can anyone seriously believe all the stuff found in a dozen sites was solely to produce more artificial manure than the entire Middle East could use in a decade?
Nuclear weapons, which no one had claimed Iraq as yet possessed in ready-to-use form, are last but far from least. It has of course been well documented that Saddam’s minions purchased several key materials for building nuclear weapons and were negotiating with at least three different national organizations for more. Moreover, radiation levels at Al-Tuwaitha, located between Baghdad and Najaf were such that the site was being used for atomic R&D, unless perhaps we are to believe Saddam had conceived a creative way to Chernobylize thousands of Shia, whom he detested, flocking to their holiest center of worship.
More worrisome are the ongoing reports that several so-called suitcase nuclear bombs, missing following the fall of the Soviet Union from its inventory, were delivered to Baghdad by newly entrepreneurial Russians. Each such weapon would have the force of the bomb dropped on Nagasaki and if true, could have been secreted in the country or shipped to foreign collaborators, or both.
Coalition of the willing experts are certain Iraq maintained a major WMD program to the end of the late hated Iraqi regime, and thankfully are dedicated to locating the potentially devastating weapons. The most dangerous see-no-evil attitude imaginable is to claim they do not exist, just because they have not as yet been found. While many may have been destroyed in the run-up to war; all serious observers believe a dangerous number still exist. Arguing otherwise serves to weaken allied will to find and destroy them. We must, in short, crack this potentially lethal case.
— Hussain Hindawi is a native Iraqi historian, humanitarian, and journalist who currently serves as editor of United Press International’s Arabic News Service. John R. Thomson has been involved in the Middle East since 1966 as businessman, diplomat, and journalist. This was originally written for UPI and is reprinted with permission.