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WEB-EXCLUSIVE COMMENTARY
By Christopher Dickey
Newsweek
Updated: 2:24 p.m. ET Oct. 13, 2004
Oct. 13 - The bones of the children should tell us why Saddam Hussein had to go. They’re being excavated right now from a killing field in Kurdish Iraq, where Saddam’s enemies were shot and bulldozed into mass graves. The men in one. The women and children in another—hundreds of them slaughtered in that one place back in the late 1980s. But in those days the Reagan administration and the first Bush administration couldn’t really be bothered about such things.
Human-rights organizations railed in vain against Saddam’s brutal regime, but Washington was happy to have him signing lucrative contracts and killing Iranians. He used more than 100,000 artillery shells and bombs filled with poison gas against Iran’s troops, sometimes aided by U.S. intelligence showing where to target the biggest concentrations.
Having spent a quarter century covering terrible atrocities in this world, I’d like to think we had the commitment to end them. But let’s not imagine that we invaded Iraq to wage a righteous crusade, or for that matter, even to assuage our guilt. And let’s hope the Bush administration, if re-elected, doesn’t think this is the moral model for new wars to come. Saddam’s worst atrocities, committed more than a decade before our invasion, had very little connection to American motives for war. And notwithstanding some of President George W. Bush’s campaign rhetoric, the United States still endorses the reigns of useful evildoers. Libya’s Muammar Kaddafi, one of the world’s looniest and most sinister despots, is now the toast of Washington and London.
Sadly, the more we know about the actual reasons that led us to war in Iraq, and the implications that those decisions have for the future, the more arrogant, dangerous and preposterous those reasons appear.
The latest voluminous history is the 900-plus-page report of the Iraq Survey Group, which has spent an estimated $900 million in the last year and a half looking for Saddam’s phantom weapons of mass destruction.
None were found. So Charles Duelfer, the head of the group, devoted much of his time and attention to the question of Saddam’s strategic intentions: the dictator did want such weapons, he would have liked to rebuild them. Sure. Yet reading the report and Duelfer’s testimony on Capitol Hill, you come away with the unsettling notion that we slogged into the Iraqi quagmire not because there was a clear and present danger to the United States. There was not. Nor because of the weapons that Saddam had. He’d destroyed the last of his WMD arsenals in the early 1990s. Nor because he was going to give those weapons to Al Qaeda-type terrorists, for which there’s no evidence at all. But because of what we thought he was thinking he might do with the weapons we thought he had but didn’t.
Our post-9/11 doctrine of pre-emptive war somehow turned us into global thought police. And in the many long months since, while we’ve been cogitating and speculating about Saddam’s once and future intentions, and killing and getting killed in the intensifying war on the ground, the real dangers posed by the atomized nation of Iraq keep growing.
As the Duelfer report mentions, and a letter to the United Nations Security Council by Mohammed ElBaradei of the International Atomic Energy Agency makes clear, there are still some very dangerous loose ends left over from the old weapons programs. And the passage of time and the persistence of chaos in Iraq makes those harder to find every day.
The ElBaradei letter, dated Oct. 1, but first reported earlier this week, simply points out that a lot of the machinery Saddam once employed to build components for atomic weapons seems to have disappeared. There’s no question that after the invasion looters did manage to pillage several sensitive sites. Radioactive “scrap metal” shipped out through Jordan has shown up as far away as Rotterdam, the Netherlands, according to the IAEA. But the machinery mentioned by ElBaradei in his letter is much more valuable. Based on satellite imagery, he discerns “the dismantlement of entire buildings that housed high-precision equipment (such as flow forming, milling and turning machines, electron beam welders, coordinate measurement machines).” More than a dozen sites are involved, according to IAEA officials. Given the international black market for nuclear technology, these aren’t the kinds of things you want to have floating around.
The interim Iraqi government has responded by saying everything’s under control. But, then, that’s what it always says. It has also suggested the IAEA come back for a firsthand look, which the United States generally has discouraged in the past. That would be a positive step, if it happens.
At the same time however, Duelfer notes that some chemical and biological weapons technology was in the hands of the former Iraqi Intelligence Service and may be finding its way into the armories of the insurgents. One passage in Duelfer’s testimony is especially spooky. His group “has uncovered evidence of such links and undertook a sizable effort to track down and prevent any latch-ups between foreign terrorists or anti-Coalition forces and either existing CW [chemical-weapons] stocks or expertise from the former regime that could be used to produce such weapons.”
But the results were not really conclusive. “I believe we got ahead of this problem through a series of raids throughout the spring and summer,” Duelfer told the Senate. “I am convinced that we successfully contained a problem before it matured into a major threat. Nevertheless, it points to the problem that the dangerous expertise developed by the previous regime could be transferred to other hands. Certainly there are anti-Coalition and terrorist elements seeking such capabilities.”
In other words, terrorists may have a better chance now of acquiring chemical or biological weapons from Iraq, or the techniques for making them, than they ever did when Saddam was in power.
Surely, that is not what we intended.
© 2004 Newsweek, Inc.
By Christopher Dickey
Newsweek
Updated: 2:24 p.m. ET Oct. 13, 2004
Oct. 13 - The bones of the children should tell us why Saddam Hussein had to go. They’re being excavated right now from a killing field in Kurdish Iraq, where Saddam’s enemies were shot and bulldozed into mass graves. The men in one. The women and children in another—hundreds of them slaughtered in that one place back in the late 1980s. But in those days the Reagan administration and the first Bush administration couldn’t really be bothered about such things.
Human-rights organizations railed in vain against Saddam’s brutal regime, but Washington was happy to have him signing lucrative contracts and killing Iranians. He used more than 100,000 artillery shells and bombs filled with poison gas against Iran’s troops, sometimes aided by U.S. intelligence showing where to target the biggest concentrations.
Having spent a quarter century covering terrible atrocities in this world, I’d like to think we had the commitment to end them. But let’s not imagine that we invaded Iraq to wage a righteous crusade, or for that matter, even to assuage our guilt. And let’s hope the Bush administration, if re-elected, doesn’t think this is the moral model for new wars to come. Saddam’s worst atrocities, committed more than a decade before our invasion, had very little connection to American motives for war. And notwithstanding some of President George W. Bush’s campaign rhetoric, the United States still endorses the reigns of useful evildoers. Libya’s Muammar Kaddafi, one of the world’s looniest and most sinister despots, is now the toast of Washington and London.
Sadly, the more we know about the actual reasons that led us to war in Iraq, and the implications that those decisions have for the future, the more arrogant, dangerous and preposterous those reasons appear.
The latest voluminous history is the 900-plus-page report of the Iraq Survey Group, which has spent an estimated $900 million in the last year and a half looking for Saddam’s phantom weapons of mass destruction.
None were found. So Charles Duelfer, the head of the group, devoted much of his time and attention to the question of Saddam’s strategic intentions: the dictator did want such weapons, he would have liked to rebuild them. Sure. Yet reading the report and Duelfer’s testimony on Capitol Hill, you come away with the unsettling notion that we slogged into the Iraqi quagmire not because there was a clear and present danger to the United States. There was not. Nor because of the weapons that Saddam had. He’d destroyed the last of his WMD arsenals in the early 1990s. Nor because he was going to give those weapons to Al Qaeda-type terrorists, for which there’s no evidence at all. But because of what we thought he was thinking he might do with the weapons we thought he had but didn’t.
Our post-9/11 doctrine of pre-emptive war somehow turned us into global thought police. And in the many long months since, while we’ve been cogitating and speculating about Saddam’s once and future intentions, and killing and getting killed in the intensifying war on the ground, the real dangers posed by the atomized nation of Iraq keep growing.
As the Duelfer report mentions, and a letter to the United Nations Security Council by Mohammed ElBaradei of the International Atomic Energy Agency makes clear, there are still some very dangerous loose ends left over from the old weapons programs. And the passage of time and the persistence of chaos in Iraq makes those harder to find every day.
The ElBaradei letter, dated Oct. 1, but first reported earlier this week, simply points out that a lot of the machinery Saddam once employed to build components for atomic weapons seems to have disappeared. There’s no question that after the invasion looters did manage to pillage several sensitive sites. Radioactive “scrap metal” shipped out through Jordan has shown up as far away as Rotterdam, the Netherlands, according to the IAEA. But the machinery mentioned by ElBaradei in his letter is much more valuable. Based on satellite imagery, he discerns “the dismantlement of entire buildings that housed high-precision equipment (such as flow forming, milling and turning machines, electron beam welders, coordinate measurement machines).” More than a dozen sites are involved, according to IAEA officials. Given the international black market for nuclear technology, these aren’t the kinds of things you want to have floating around.
The interim Iraqi government has responded by saying everything’s under control. But, then, that’s what it always says. It has also suggested the IAEA come back for a firsthand look, which the United States generally has discouraged in the past. That would be a positive step, if it happens.
At the same time however, Duelfer notes that some chemical and biological weapons technology was in the hands of the former Iraqi Intelligence Service and may be finding its way into the armories of the insurgents. One passage in Duelfer’s testimony is especially spooky. His group “has uncovered evidence of such links and undertook a sizable effort to track down and prevent any latch-ups between foreign terrorists or anti-Coalition forces and either existing CW [chemical-weapons] stocks or expertise from the former regime that could be used to produce such weapons.”
But the results were not really conclusive. “I believe we got ahead of this problem through a series of raids throughout the spring and summer,” Duelfer told the Senate. “I am convinced that we successfully contained a problem before it matured into a major threat. Nevertheless, it points to the problem that the dangerous expertise developed by the previous regime could be transferred to other hands. Certainly there are anti-Coalition and terrorist elements seeking such capabilities.”
In other words, terrorists may have a better chance now of acquiring chemical or biological weapons from Iraq, or the techniques for making them, than they ever did when Saddam was in power.
Surely, that is not what we intended.
© 2004 Newsweek, Inc.
