Lowered WMD expectations

"People are realizing that Saddam Hussein may not have stored the weapons themselves, in part because when you put chemical or biological agents into weapons, they deteriorate very rapidly," one administration official told the Times' Steven R. Weisman. Said another official: "There may be weapons, and there may not be. But it will be clear that they were pursuing WMD actively." On that same day, the newspaper reported on exclusive interviews given to germ warfare reporter Judith Miller on Friday and Saturday in Baghdad by Nissar Hindawi. Freshly released from a Baghdad prison, Hindawi, "a leading figure in Iraq's biological warfare program in the 1980s," told Miller that Iraq produced liquid anthrax and botulinum toxin but there "were orders to destroy it."

None of this is to say that the WMD won't turn up; only 90 sites out of hundreds have been searched, and this shift in talking points comes in tandem with the deployment of 1,000 additional military and scientific personnel to help search for WMD. In Qatar on Tuesday, Central Command spokesman Navy Cmdr. Charles Owens told Salon that there have been no changes in "the way we do business" in the hunt for WMD; he referred questions about policy changes to the White House or the Pentagon. Asked if there had been any new discoveries of possible WMD in the field, Owens said, "No, not at all."

Some senior officials of the "coalition of the willing," however, are taking this backpedaling even further. On Monday, while British Prime Minister Tony Blair insisted that he remained confident that they will be found, his foreign secretary, Jack Straw, sounded a slightly different tune, saying that Iraq "had" WMD "recently." In case anyone missed the point, Straw's spokesman noted to reporters that "he used his words very carefully. The point he is avoiding making is that the war is justified only if we find weapons of mass destruction." The spokesman went on to describe the discovery of chemical or biological weapons as a "bonus."

In response, Labour M.P. Tam Dalyell, the father of the House of Commons, erupted, saying that the U.K. had been "told again and again the reason for going to war was that Iraq had weapons of mass destruction and that they could be used within 45 minutes. Now it's clear that the Iraqis have had no weapons for some time and that Parliament was given a completely false impression."

Many throughout the world community seemed similarly dismayed, and are not as easily swayed as the Times' Friedman. After a Tuesday meeting with Blair, Russian President Vladimir Putin remained skeptical, saying that "the world community must put period to the surmising on whether or not Iraq had the WMD," according to the Russian news agency TASS. Displaying remarkable pessimism that the word of coalition forces would suffice should weapons be found and destroyed, Putin called for U.N. arms inspectors to be sent "to Iraq if something is found there; let's not show empty barrels on TV."

The absence of WMD is also emboldening antiwar voices. In a Monday interview with Der Spiegel, the demand for U.N. arms inspectors by Heidemarie Wieczorak, the German minister of economic cooperation and development, was so strongly argued, the reporter said it sounded like she was "attempt(ing) to determine whether the US motive for the war was a lie." Wieczorak's response was hardly reassuring. "I have steered clear of speculation about whether or not those weapons exist," she said, "because that could not be determined from the outside. But the fact that this war was waged without the consent of the UN Security Council cannot be denied after the fact."

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