WEB NOTES

 Iraq's Weapons: The US fails to best UNMOVIC

Trevor Findlay and Ben Mines, VERTIC
June 4, 2003

US takes over UNMOVIC’s mission

In the four months that the United Nations Monitoring, Verification and Inspection Commission (UNMOVIC) was allowed to conduct inspections in Iraq, little evidence of the country’s alleged weapons of mass destruction (WMD) programmes was found. Besides a disturbing project aimed at illicitly extending the range of Iraq’s permitted short-range missiles, a handful of empty chemical shells was about the only hard evidence uncovered. While UNMOVIC rightly worried about the implausibility of Iraq’s repeated ‘final and complete’ declarations and about the multiplicity of ‘unresolved issues’, such as the fate of large amounts of biological ‘growth media’, the US and UK repeatedly insisted that actual weapons and substantial related capabilities existed. Senior US officials hinted at UNMOVIC’s incompetence and naivety, scorned its unwillingness to countenance the removal of Iraqi scientists from the country to facilitate more productive interrogation and berated Executive Chairman Hans Blix’s attempts to act independently and impartially. Although conceding the Iraq probably did not have nuclear weapons, they portrayed its chemical and biological weapons, deliverable at 45 minutes notice as amounting to a ‘clear and present danger’.

With the war over, UNMOVIC out of the way and the US able to conduct its own ‘anytime anywhere’ inspections, aided by its powerful national intelligence-gathering capabilities and the ability to freely interview captured Iraqi military and scientific personnel, damning revelations were expected. Yet verification is not proving so easy. Indeed, US inspectors have, with the exception of alleged mobile biological agent production facilities, turned up less than UNMOVIC did.

The US has employed resources from both the military and other agencies in the hunt. The first waves of investigation were done even before the war ended by front-line troops armed with hand-held detectors. The use of soldiers untrained as inspectors and the tendency of the detectors to produce false positives resulted in an initial flurry of unsubstantiated ‘finds’. The troops were also accused of inadvertently destroying evidence in their enthusiasm to find hidden WMD.

More professional activity has been carried out by four Mobile Exploitation Teams (METs), which visit sites showing initial positive readings for more detailed inspection and analysis. Each is staffed by about a dozen specialists from several agencies, including the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), Federal Bureau of Investigation (fbi) and the Pentagon. METs carry complex field equipment, including gas chromatographs, mass spectrometers and portable isotopic neutron spectroscopes.

The METs and smaller Chemical Biological Intelligence Support Teams are supported by the 75^th Exploitation Task Force, the main military unit tasked with finding WMD in Iraq, and responsible to the Defence Intelligence Agency. The Task Force is equipped with two mobile laboratories for testing and analysing suspected biological and chemical weapons. Also in Iraq are teams from the Defense Threat Reduction Agency (DTRA), the US defence organisation charged with WMD arms control, which are responsible for the destruction of any WMD found. Along with producing and distributing 9000 copies of a WMD-Facility, Equipment and Munitions Identification Handbook’ to troops, the DTRA has provided the little-known Direct Support Teams. These are small special operations units comprising Special Forces and nuclear experts that provided the initial search and assessment of Iraq’s nuclear sites. In total, in the initial investigation phase the US engaged about 600 specialists¾150 responsible for finding WMD and the rest support staff. Meanwhile, it attempted to recruit former inspectors from UNMOVIC’s predecessor, the UN Special Commission (UNSCOM), and to poach them from UNMOVIC itself.

Progress in the hunt for weapons

By 12 May the US had searched about 75 of the 600 ‘suspect’ sites identified before the war, as well as 40 subsequently identified as a result of new information. The sites were ranked in order of priority: 19 were identified as top WMD sites, of which 17 had been searched by 12 May. These included several identified in the UK and US dossiers released in support of their case for a war against Iraq, such as the Amiriyah Serum and Vaccine Unit, Iskanderiyah munitions assembly plant and the Salman Pak training camp. Most had already been inspected by UNMOVIC without result. The US also listed 68 lower priority sites, ranked as ‘non-WMD’, of which 45 have been searched to date.

The US has made its task more difficult by failing to plan for the protection of sensitive sites, despite the long lead-up to war. As a result many sites have been looted. Documentation, materials and other evidence, if not destroyed has been tampered with, thus compromising its provenance and rendering it of questionable value for verification purposes. Most alarmingly from a non-proliferation perspective, weapons or weapons materials may have been released onto the black market, where the highest bidder, criminal or terrorist, can acquire them. The most scandalous example is the failure of US troops to guard the Tuwaitha nuclear facility which the US had long suspected of being a nuclear weapons research and production facility. Equipment and materials have been removed from the site by looters and drums emptied of yellowcake (processed uranium) by local residents so that they could be ‘recycled’ to hold water. Adding further to the proliferation risk, the US refused for several weeks to permit the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) to urgently inspect the site to account for nuclear material that had been under international nuclear safeguards.

Despite numerous false alarms reported in the media, the only success that US inspectors have had to date is the discovery of three mobile biological agent production facilities: two truck-mounted units in northern Iraq and a small trailer in Baghdad. Despite Iraqi claims that they were for producing hydrogen for weather balloons, US analysts have concluded that they could only have been used for the production of biological agents. However, as the units had been thoroughly decontaminated there is no evidence as to whether or not they had ever produced such agents.

Alternative explanations

Although the mobile laboratories violated UN Security Council resolutions, they do not by themselves represent the large-scale WMD capability that Iraq was alleged to possess. From this failure several different conclusions can be drawn.

1)   Iraq may have destroyed all of its presumed WMD capability either before UNMOVIC arrived in December 2002 or just prior to the US attack.

2)   Iraq may have hidden its WMD capability so well that despite UNMOVIC and US searches it has still to be found. 

3)   A third possibility is that Iraq transferred its capabilities to another country either with or without its permission: given that Iraq is surrounded by hostile states and the danger that it could have been caught in the act by UNMOVIC or the US, this seems highly implausible. 

4)   The most likely scenario would seem to be that, although retaining a small research and development capability and some remnants of its former arsenal (those discovered by UNMOVIC), Iraq did not have the substantial arsenal of weapons of mass destruction identified by the coalition as the pretext for war. UNSCOM’s discovery and destruction of major components of Iraq’s capabilities between 1991 and 1998, 13 years of economic sanctions, the tightening noose of UNMOVIC inspections and the credible threat of force appear to have done the job well. This begs the further question of the extent to which the British and American governments knew this, but were prepared to exaggerate the threat and stretch intelligence findings as a pretext for war.

US response

Affording themselves a luxury that they had denied UN inspectors, US officials now concede that it may take years before an ‘accurate picture’ of Iraq’s WMD capabilities emerges. In stark contrast to dire warnings of the proliferation threat that Iraqi WMD capabilities posed before the war, the US has, within a month of hostilities ending, reduced the number of its forces engaged in the search. Two METs have been downgraded and are instead investigating non-WMD sites, while the DTRA Direct Support teams have been reduced by a third. The Task Force has handed responsibility over to the Iraq Survey Group, comprising 1000-2000 personnel, mainly civilian experts and former weapons inspectors. While numerically larger, the continued search for WMD will be just part of the group’s remit, along with identifying war criminals and dealing with prisoners of war. Although no time limit has been placed on the group’s deployment, it is not clear whether the search for weapons will continue indefinitely.

A critical role for UNMOVIC