Col E. D. Doyle critiques two recent books on the issue of weapons inspection and verification
Are there significant amounts of "weapons of mass destruction" (WMDs) and/or manufacturing facilities still in Iraq? The repeated claim that they do exist has been used to justify, indeed to require, the invasion. Saddam Hussein, it was said, would give WMDs to terrorist states and organisations. They could be used against the US, its allies and neighbouring countries in the Middle East.
Iraq had attacked neighbouring countries four times. The Iran attack drew considerable Western approval. Iran had violated international law and diplomatic custom by taking over the US embassy, imprisoning the staff for 440 days.
Iraq's invasion of Kuwait drew worldwide disapproval. The country had also participated in the Arab attack on Israel in 1948 and sent reinforcements to the 1973 Yom Kippur war.
Israel has long had nuclear weapons. It has invaded neighbouring countries and territories six times. It has annexed, and still occupies, land in two of them despite international law.
In April 1991, after the Gulf War, Security Council Resolution 687 imposed on Iraq a requirement to :
Disclose the total extent of its stockpiles of WMDs.
Provide the details of their composition (including ballistic missiles).
Provide details of the means of production including materials.
A United Nations Special Commission (Unscom) was set up to verify the completeness and accuracy of the information. Under the commission's supervision, weapons and materials were to be destroyed, made harmless or removed.
These were measures imposed on the losing side after the Gulf War, to remove a perceived serious threat. In the 1980s Iraq had used chemical weapons against the mass attacks of Iranian boy soldiers and against the Kurds of Hallabja and Dojaila.
The political and propaganda stakes in retained WMDs and associated production facilities are high. ("Retained" means still held by Iraq, after Unscom's seven years of activity, followed by Iraq's own destruction programme and the devastation caused by US/RAF bombing). Claims have been made at top political levels in the US and Britain. Iraq denies that anything was retained.
One has to be careful here. Significant discoveries could be made any day by some of the specially equipped search teams, ordinary patrols etc. The discoveries so far made seem to have been false alarms.
If no evidence of WMDs appears there may be a temptation to plant some. But Watergate is a warning that the US is an open society. If evidence-planting is a considered contingency, one thinks great efforts will have been put into making the evidence impeccable. But the fact that the UN inspectors could not finish their job will always feed conspiracy theories.
Maj Scott Ritter, the former US marines officer and chief weapons inspector for Unscom, resigned in controversial circumstances in September 1998.
He claimed that the US government and his own executive were not supporting his efforts in the field. Since then he has written one book, Endgame, and co-written the very different War on Iraq.
The latter consists largely of a long interview given to William Rivers Pitt, a Middle-East "expert and activist".
When Ritter resigned from Unscom, he became a hero to the American right wing. He was in demand for lectures and TV programmes. He testified to a combined session of the Senate Foreign Relations and Armed Services Committees that Iraq was "winning its bid to retain its prohibited weapons".
Endgame sold well (though close reading might have raised rightist doubts). It was fascinating to anyone with verification experience. The UN has also run verification inspections on a smaller scale in much smaller areas in the Sinai Desert and the Golan Heights.
Irish officers were part of 17-nation observer groups verifying treaty limitations on troops, tanks, artillery, missiles and fortifications. One recognises some of his experiences, especially the attempts to mislead his inspectors.
War in Iraq appeared last year as war threatened. It has a central contradiction. Ritter writes (page 26) that when Unscom left Iraq in 1998 the WMD infrastructure and facilities had been 100 per cent eliminated. But he also writes (page 23) that since 1998 90-95 per cent of Iraq's WMD capability has been eliminated by the Iraqis themselves.
This includes all of the factories. When the inspectors left in 1998, "Iraq chose to destroy - unilaterally, without UN supervision, a great deal of this equipment". My italics.
How could the Iraqis destroy 90-95 per cent after Unscom had destroyed 100 per cent? This weakens his arguments.
He then writes that the missing 5-10 per cent doesn't necessarily constitute a threat. There is no evidence that Iraq retains production facilities, but considerable evidence that it doesn't.
The US can do air and vehicle monitoring of electronic and gas emissions. Because of Iraq's past record some say we have to "assume the worst" and launch a pre-emptive strike. But so far, and one stresses so far, no discovery has been made to change Ritter's somewhat unclearly argued view.
Ritter's popularity dropped. We did not see them here, but it seems that talk-show hosts confronted him with discrepancies between more recent remarks and former ones.
As the existence of WMDs is increasingly queried, two answers have been suggested:
They have been sent to Syria.
The search will really start in earnest once the fighting is over.
Priority must be given to ensuring stability. But people with suspicious minds will say that gives time for suspicious actions.
The Endgame book has a detailed appendix that deals with each WMD in turn. Each one begins with a summary and goes on to include approximate transport estimates e.g.
The Iraqis maintain, at a minimum, the capability to produce, weaponise (i.e. put the chemicals into shells, missiles etc), store and employ chemical weapons.
The Iraqis have at least the capability to produce, weaponise, store and employ biological weapons.
Iraq retains a limited operational capability for using long-range (i.e. over 150km) ballistic missiles.
The Iraqis maintain as a minimum the capability to conduct active research and development in centrifuge uranium enrichment and the weaponisation of a nuclear device. The centrifuge programme should have a fixed site.
This reads like a typical example of good American staff work, though one cannot judge if it is as clinical as estimates should be. Transport estimate: about 100-200 trucks, dependent on utilisation etc.
Obviously, moving any or all of Iraq's WMD into Syria would be a major operation, detectable by air or ground surveillance.
The Americans are sending 1,000 scientists, weapons technicians and intelligence experts to Baghdad to find the weapons. The pressure is rising.
Necessarily, the foregoing is much compressed. The arguments should be read in full; they are not simple.
One has to decide between two Ritters - one nuanced, detailed, influenced by his frustrations in Iraq and leaning towards rightist interpretations. The other is forthright, down to earth and given to sweeping statements which seem, nonetheless, to summarise things well.