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Sunday, Jul 12, 2009
A purloined videotape leads to a wild tale of smuggling, greed, intrigue, thuggery, sex and Iraq's elusive weapons of mass destruction.
Sep 20, 2003 | In the State of the Union address he gave shortly before the U.S. invasion of Iraq, President Bush presented a nightmarish scenario to the American people. "Imagine those 19 hijackers with other weapons and other plans, this time armed by Saddam Hussein. It would take one vial, one canister, one crate slipped into this country to bring a day of horror like none we have ever known.
"We will do everything in our power," the president intoned, "to make sure that day never comes." Seven weeks later, the first bombs exploded in Baghdad.
Today, more than five months after the fall of Baghdad, none of the weapons of mass destruction that Bush cited as justification for the invasion, whether nuclear, biological or chemical, have been found. Despite the best efforts of the Iraq Survey Group, a team of 1,400 American and British inspectors led by David Kay who have been scouring the country for four months, not a single shred of evidence has so far appeared supporting the president's assertions. On Sunday, the Times of London reported that American and British officials had decided to delay indefinitely publishing the group's report. The reason: The inspectors had found no evidence that the weapons existed.
Former U.N. chief weapons inspector Hans Blix said this week that he doubted any WMD would ever be found: "I'm certainly more and more to the conclusion that Iraq has, as they maintained, destroyed all almost of what they had in the summer of 1991." Blix theorized that Iraq's evasive and suspicious behavior might have been part of a scheme to fool the U.S. into believing that it had WMD, to ward off a possible invasion -- a gambit which, if real, would have constituted the biggest misjudgment of Saddam's erratic career.
As the lightning victory over Iraq's pitifully overmatched army has turned into a bloody, ruinously expensive guerrilla war of attrition, and the American people are increasingly beginning to ask if it was worth the cost in lives and treasure, the question of the missing weapons of mass destruction looms larger and larger.
By a peculiar combination of circumstances, this reporter and a colleague stumbled upon a tiny piece of this gigantic puzzle. We obtained a videotape made in 2000 in which the all-powerful head of the Mukhabarat, Iraq's secret police, along with one of his informers and the head of Iraq's military intelligence science department are shown discussing a sting operation they mounted to retrieve a missing canister. The canister disappeared under mysterious circumstances at least seven years ago from Iraq's main chemical-weapons facility and ended up on the black market. It contained a chemical used in the production of nerve gas. The remarkable thing about this conversation, which we have confirmed was authentic, is that these top-ranking Iraqi officials say they turned over the canister to the National Monitoring Directorate -- an agency set up to coordinate activities between the Iraqi government and the U.N. inspectors -- and that they are going to harmlessly dispose of the material by having it turned into detergent. In short, the tape catches them apparently behaving in a responsible fashion -- and this during the four-year period when no United Nations inspectors were even present.
It is impossible to draw any firm conclusions from this videotape about the state of Iraq's chemical weapons program, if it existed, in the year 2000. There are too many unknown factors, and too many possible interpretations of the evidence. If anything, the byzantine tale of the rogue canister shows how fiendishly hard it is to reach any conclusions about what happened to Iraq's chemical weapons program -- or, for that matter, any of its weapons of mass destruction. Nonetheless, what we found tends to support, in however weak and inconclusive a way, those, like Blix, who argue that Iraq had destroyed its chemical weapons after the first Gulf War.
Scott Ritter, the controversial former chief weapons inspector in Iraq who is noted for his outspoken opposition to the war, said after hearing the details, "This is some of the hardest evidence that Iraq did not have a secret chemical weapons program."
The current U.N. inspectors would not go nearly that far. But UNMOVIC spokesman Euan Buchanan called it "surprising that the Iraqis did that even without the presence of UNSCOM [the previous U.N. weapons-inspection mission]."
Beyond the light, however faint, that the videotape sheds on Iraq's chemical weapons program, it also offers an extraordinary look at the workings of the Mukhabarat. It reveals the tribal side of Iraqi society, and the threat of violence that has always accompanied it -- even under Saddam. And it reveals, in ways that are by turns chilling and farcical, how ordinary Iraqis made their accommodations with Saddam's brutal regime -- which may help to explain why the American occupation has met with so much resistance and bitterness.
