War Diary: Friday, Dec. 6, 2002

STRATFOR ^ | Dec 05, 2002 | Staff

[Axion]

War Diary: Friday, Dec. 6, 2002
Dec 05, 2002

The saga continued Dec. 5 with a spat between the United States, United Nations arms inspectors and Iraq over intelligence.

White House spokesman Ari Fleischer told reporters on Dec. 5 that the United States had solid intelligence that Iraq is continuing to conceal weapons of mass destruction. Fleischer said that the administration "would not assert as plainly and bluntly as they have that Iraq has weapons of mass destruction if it was not the truth and if they did not have a solid basis for saying it."

"We will of course provide intelligence to help the inspectors do their job," he added. But he refused to say whether Washington would share all that it knows with the U.N. team, stating, "I will not get into what is being provided and when it is being provided." Fleischer also said the U.N. inspectors needed to expedite their searches by deploying enough teams to inspect multiple sites at one time.

Responding to U.S. criticism, Dimitrius Perricos, team leader of the United Nations Monitoring, Verification and Inspection Commission (UNMOVIC) in Iraq, said: "It is the United Nations that sent us here, we are not serving the U.S., we are not serving the U.K., we are not serving an individual nation. We're here for the implementation of the resolution." Perricos added that if Washington preferred his team inspect specific sites, it should provide the United Nations with better intelligence. "What we're getting and what President Bush may be getting is very different, to put it mildly," he said.

For its part, Iraq contends that the U.N. team already is working too closely with Western intelligence. Iraqi Vice President Taha Yassin Ramadan put it bluntly, declaring to a visiting Egyptian delegation that the inspectors were spies for the CIA and Mossad.

Perricos confirmed Thursday that his team was using Western intelligence to help guide its searches but argued it was the only way the inspectors could ensure they did a thorough job. "National intelligence services have much more intelligence than what we have," Perricos said. Agence France-Presse cited European diplomats as concurring, quoting one as saying: "Other than by pure fluke, the inspectors have no chance of finding anything Iraq has hidden, if indeed they have. They have got to be given intelligence reports."

But wait, let's step back for a moment. Washington claims it has intelligence that proves Iraq is concealing WMD. U.N. inspectors complain that the United States is not sharing that intelligence, a charge backed by Stratfor sources in Europe and apparently supported by Fleischer's semantic gymnastics. So, is Washington intentionally sandbagging the inspections in Iraq? And, if so, why?

On Sunday, Dec. 8, Iraq is scheduled to deliver to the United Nations its inventory of stockpiled WMD and programs and materials that were, are or could be used in the creation of chemical, biological or nuclear weapons.

On Dec. 4, Iraqi National Monitoring Directorate head Hussam Mohammed Amin told reporters: "We are going to deliver this declaration in the proper time. Of course the declaration will have new elements, but these elements will not, shall we say, necessarily include a declaration of the presence of weapons of mass destruction. We are a country devoid of weapons of mass destruction."

"It will be a huge, complex and detailed declaration containing new elements, about new sites and new activities conducted during the absence of the inspectors," Amin said. "Those activities are dual-use activities, in biological, chemical, nuclear and missile fields but not prohibited activities."

In all likelihood, he was lying.

It is reasonable to assume that, after personal survival and retention of power, Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein's third goal in his standoff with the United States and the United Nations is to retain as much of his strategic weapons systems -- weapons of mass destruction -- as he can. This is not because he is evil. It is because no leader of a sovereign nation in his right mind would want to disarm, or place himself and his country at a strategic disadvantage to hostile powers.

WMD are a strategic deterrent. They have been for the United States for the past 57 years. One reason Baghdad's neighbors oppose an attack on Iraq is that they are more comfortable with the proverbial devil they know than with the unknown who might replace him. But the other reason is that there is always a chance that Iraq does have WMD and just might use them if provoked. Better not to force the devil you know into a corner.

So now Hussein has a calculation to make. How much do they know? U.S. intelligence does not have the best of track records in Iraq since 1990, and Iraq is a big country. So if Baghdad had weapons to hide, it could probably hide some. But how many? This dilemma explains why Iraq reportedly is trying to spy on the inspectors, and why the administration has no intention of revealing all it knows. Yet.

Washington expects Hussein to lie. It hopes Hussein will lie. More important, it hopes its intelligence is good enough to catch Hussein in that lie. Intelligence is the trump card with which Washington hopes to retake the initiative and advance the case for war on Iraq. On Dec. 8, Baghdad will not report what it thinks is still secret. If the United States has substantial intelligence on programs or weapons that Baghdad believes are still secret and does not admit to, then Washington can argue that inspections can never work.

U.S. Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld made the case in a press conference on Thursday, saying, "Inspections only work if the country being inspected truly wants the world to know it has reformed," and adding, "U.N. inspectors cannot hope to find all weapons of mass destruction without Iraqi cooperation."

A single, post-Dec. 8 snap inspection of a site on the U.S. list but not on Baghdad's could shift control over how to deal with Iraq from the United Nations to the United States. This quickly could reset the clock on any potential attack, erasing months of delays for inspections, negotiations and reports.

All this assumes Iraq does still have weapons to hide, though the United States comes out ahead whether or not it actually has any solid intelligence. The calculation for Hussein is the same, since even if Washington lacks intelligence on existing Iraqi WMD, a bluff might force Baghdad to reveal more than it otherwise would have to on Dec. 8. Catch him in a lie or force him to reveal too much: a win-win proposition.

[CatoRenasci]

It seems pretty simple to me: let the Iraqis turn in the list, and only after its locked in, does the US then reveal what our intelligence shows on these guys.