Posted on 09/25/2003 5:02:55 PM PDT by blam
Was this the mother of all misjudgments?
David Blair
(Filed: 26/09/2003)
If Saddam destroyed all his weapons of mass destruction under pressure from the US, it was a mind-boggling error, says David Blair.
During Saddam Hussein's last fevered weeks in power, his increasingly desperate aides regaled the world's press with their official line on Iraq's weapons of mass destruction.
"Those programmes were completely removed in 1991," said General Amer al-Saadi, Saddam's British-educated weapons adviser. "Iraq does not have a single one of these weapons any more."
For all his persuasive charm, Gen Saadi's words sounded hollow. He had, after all, spent most of the past 12 years sabotaging the work of United Nations arms inspectors. If Saddam had decided to scrap his chemical and biological weapons in 1991, he would have had nothing to hide. So why the deception?
Moreover, Iraq never satisfied UN inspectors that this disarmament had taken place. Documents and witnesses were mysteriously unavailable. As late as March 7, less than a fortnight before the war began, Hans Blix, the chief weapons inspector, said: "Based on all the available evidence, the strong presumption is that about 10,000 litres of anthrax was not destroyed and may still exist."
And yet the evidence increasingly suggests that Gen Saadi really was speaking the truth. But if Saddam did destroy his banned arsenal after losing the 1991 Kuwait war, why not come clean? If he was going to scrap the weapons anyway, why not do so under UN supervision?
This would have undermined the Anglo-US case for maintaining sanctions and later for waging war. Instead, the signs are growing that Saddam decided to scrap his WMD arsenal in secret. Then he appears to have ordered the deception of the UN inspectors.
This left America and Britain able to claim that Iraq still possessed banned weapons and use this pretext to topple Saddam. If the dictator had wanted to guarantee his own downfall, he could scarcely have worked more effectively. He was surely guilty of the mother of all misjudgments.
How could this have happened? Trying to answer this question requires delving into his mindset. He clearly felt that the unmistakable removal of all his WMD would have damaged his regime.
After his defeat in 1991, he must have been under no illusions about the parlous state of Iraq's conventional forces. He probably calculated that a certain ambiguity about whether Iraq possessed chemical and biological weapons was crucial to deterring his enemies and preserving his regional power.
The British Government's dossier last September may have wrongly claimed that he possessed banned weapons, but its analysis of the way his mind worked remains pertinent. It said: "Saddam attaches great importance to the possession of chemical and biological weapons which he regards as being the basis for Iraqi regional power. He believes that respect for Iraq rests on [such] possession." Moreover, Saddam was justifiably obsessed with the possibility of domestic uprisings.
The Kurdish and Shia revolts in 1991 came within an ace of overthrowing him. He had already used chemical weapons against the Kurds - killing 5,000 at Halabja in 1988. He did not unleash the same horrors against the 1991 risings, but sent in soldiers in chemical-warfare suits to maintain his bizarre bluff.
In the end, there is no rational explanation for his apparent decision to disarm in secret. Instead of deterring attack, it did the opposite.
Saddam's career was littered with huge misjudgments. He invaded Iran in 1980, hoping for a lightning victory - only to find himself embroiled in a long and costly war. He mistakenly thought the world would overlook his annexation of Kuwait in 1990. The secret disarmament of 1991 - if that was what happened - was just another catastrophic bungle.
Regardless of whether or not we find WMD now, we must disposition "what happened to the WMD of 1991." We cannot leave Iraq until investigators have those answers. Should we find new WMD evidence, that should be added to our lists.
To fit what? I suspect that you are not exercising your imagination. Let me offer a few scenarios that are different but at least equally plausible.
1 The people who know where the WMDs are are very few in number and are keeping their mouths shut, and the weapons are hidden in Iraq.
2 The people who knew where the WMDs are hidden were killed during the war.
3 The WMDs were kept in discreet components and compartmentalized so that no one person other than Saddam and his sons knew how to collect them or put them together.
4 Saddam had the WMDs hidden, and all the people who knew about them killed.
There, that wasn't so hard, was it?
I'd love to drop a team of these critics in the middle of the California desert and tell them "I've hidden enough chemical weapons for a small campaign somewhere out here, 500 gallons of the stuff. Find it." It's not exactly easy, nor was it the inspectors' mission. As someone put it, "they're inspectors, not detectives."
But it is a rather larger quantity that worries me the most - the UN reported 30,000 gallons of anthrax media and organisms that have never been accounted for. That is one reason (besides their actual employment in the U.S. mail) that that particular threat was so emphasized. The media are easily drained into the sand. The spores are nearly immortal. That would not be a pleasant thing to stumble across.
Tonight, UNSPUN with AnnaZ and Guest Hostess DIOTIMA!
September 25th, 2003 -- 10pmE/7pmP
Second Anna-versary!
with special guest,
(who was also the first guest!)
Rev. Jesse Lee Peterson
Of
B.O.N.D.
Click HERE to LISTEN LIVE while you FReep!
Click HERE for the RadioFR Chat Room!
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.