Wolf in sheep's clothing

Deputy Defense Secretary Wolfowitz was in San Francisco to indict Saddam Hussein. But despite growing impatience, he provided no evidence.

By Edward W. Lempinen

Dec 7, 2002 | Aides to Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein are expected to deliver the much anticipated report on their weapons program to United Nations officials Saturday, and it is no exaggeration to say that Saddam's future as the dictator of Iraq and the fate of millions of Iraqis will be determined by its contents. But as the deadline for delivery approached, top officials in the administration of President Bush made clear that, in a fundamental way, they don't care what's in the report.

They don't care because, they say, they know Saddam is guilty of developing and stockpiling weapons of mass destruction.

At an appearance Friday before the Commonwealth Club of California and the World Affairs Council of Northern California, Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz made explicit what has only been implicit in the administration's dealings with Saddam. Responding to a question at the end of his 30-minute speech, Wolfowitz cast the report as a devastating trap for Saddam: No matter what the report says, it will prove his guilt.

"If he flatly denies that he has weapons of mass destruction, that's good evidence [of his guilt]," Wolfowitz said. "If he comes forth with new programs that we didn't know about, that's good evidence." In other words, Saddam is guilty until proven innocent? "Yes," he said. "Until proven otherwise." Just how Saddam might prove he is not guilty remained unclear.

This week Saddam's regime issued its strongest statements yet that it has no weapons of mass destruction -- seemingly hastening the moment of confrontation with the U.S. But if the clock is ticking for Saddam, it is also ticking for the Bush administration. However much Wolfowitz and other officials insist on his guilt, their efforts to rally allied governments and world public opinion for a military takedown is at risk of failure unless the administration provides hard evidence that Saddam is guilty as charged.

Thus far, they have provided nothing of substance to prove that Saddam is holding biological, chemical or nuclear weapons. Indeed, in the absence of evidence, the Bush administration has seemed to hope at times that, by simply repeating the allegation over and over, it would become fact. On Thursday, White House spokesman Ari Fleischer was asked to detail the evidence, and he declined. "The president of the United States and the secretary of defense [Donald Rumsfeld] would not assert as plainly and bluntly as they have that Iraq has weapons of mass destruction if it was not true and if they did not have a solid basis for saying it," Fleischer explained. He said the United States would provide intelligence to U.N. inspectors.

After his speech yesterday, Wolfowitz also directly declined to offer such proof. "There's a time and a place for everything," he told reporters during a news conference that covered five questions in a little over three minutes. Yesterday was not the time and place.

It is widely assumed, of course, that Saddam has weapons of mass destruction. He has had them in the past, and he has used them with horrifying results. But Wolfowitz's appearance in San Francisco yesterday underscored that the report expected from Iraq on Saturday is, in some ways, only an exercise, a symbol that both sides will try to exploit and co-opt in a Kabuki dance of global diplomacy and power. Bush can insist on Saddam's guilt all he wants. He may be right. But if the administration and U.N. inspectors on the ground in Iraq are unable to find hard proof that Iraq is holding weapons of mass destruction, Bush will find it more difficult by far to win international support for military action against the Iraqi dictator. He could still launch a unilateral U.S. strike, but absent any evidence that Saddam has weapons of mass destruction, even domestic support might be scant.

Under the terms of the U.N. Resolution 1441, passed by the Security Council last month after an intense diplomatic campaign, Iraq has until Sunday to make "a currently accurate, full and complete declaration" of its banned weapons programs. That the U.N. was involved in the process at all was a defeat for Wolfowitz and other administration hawks who see regime change in Iraq as a crucial step in the war on terror and remaking a more stable Middle East and who feared that the international body would tie their hands. Their leverage is the provision of the resolution that warns of "serious consequences" -- war -- should Iraq fail to make full disclosure.

Iraq will deliver the report Saturday; according to a CNN account Friday, it will be 4,000 pages long, with up to 8,000 pages of supporting documentation. The document will then be subjected to an exhaustive review by U.N. and other experts, including a comparison to thousands of pages of documents and reports assembled by a previous team of U.N. inspectors before they left the country in 1998. Meanwhile, the inspections team headed by Swedish diplomat Hans Blix will be tracking leads in Iraq, using intelligence data, high-tech chemical detection equipment and basic detective work to search the nation for weapons of mass destruction.

Next Page: Perhaps both sides have already decided on war

• View blog reactions