WEB NOTES

 Compliance or Non-Compliance in Iraq: 
Who Should the Public Believe?

by Dr Ian Davis and Dr Trevor Findlay
January 30, 2003

But wait a moment. Might there be another way of looking at the evidence? Perhaps the glass is half full rather than half empty?  The IAEA report clearly indicates that there is no evidence that Iraq is producing nuclear weapons—by far the most destructive of the three categories of nuclear, biological and chemical (NBC) weapons, which are the focus of efforts to disarm Iraq. This is a somewhat embarrassing finding since allegations to the contrary were made in both the British and American dossiers last year. Indeed, President Bush claimed at the UN General Assembly on September 12 that Iraq was seeking to acquire aluminium tubes for use in centrifuges in a secret uranium enrichment programme. These tubes according Mohamed El-Baradei, the IAEA director-general, are consistent with efforts to reverse engineer rockets. Moreover, if, as has been reported in the US media, the Bush administration is seriously considering the option of attacking Iraqi underground facilities with nuclear weapons, the moral and legal high-ground appears to have been squandered.

The report by the IAEA, since it does not fit the established ‘facts’, has been downplayed, and instead the focus has switched to the Blix report, which is much more damming towards Iraq. Hans Blix raises a number of outstanding questions regarding Iraq’s past chemical and biological weapons programmes, and the fact that Iraq probably retains some chemical and biological weapons today, is a genuine concern.  But most of what has been reported in the media about what Iraq has or does not have in the way of chemical and biological weapons suffers from a lack of context.

Most of what has been discovered so far appears to be militarily insignificant. The January 6 discovery by UN inspectors of previously undisclosed warheads for chemical weapons is often quoted as an example of Iraqi lies and deception. However, even the Bush administration has downplayed that discovery, recognizing that it is far from a smoking gun. And as a threat to the United States, the discovery is risible. Artillery shells have a limited range, so they can only be a threat to Iraq's citizens and those within a few kilometers of its borders.

The failure to account for missing quantities of VX nerve agent are more serious. In 1998, UNSCOM found evidence that Iraq had weaponised this potent biological weapon. Iraq later claimed that the 1.5 tonnes of VX agent was discarded by dumping it on the ground, and despite finding traces of it in January 1999, UNSCOM were unable to verify that all of the agent had been destroyed. However, given that VX degrades over time, the IISS dossier of September 2002 concluded that any stocks that Iraq concealed from UNSCOM are likely to been of little use by now.   

Similarly, with regard to the biological weapons that Iraq is said to have, nobody ever points out that many of these weapons have short shelf lives. In the case of the missing quantities of anthrax, for example, Iraq did not seem to have produced dry, storable anthrax; rather, it appears that only wet anthrax agents were deployed, and it has a relatively limited shelf life.

Of course, Iraq needs to be more forthcoming with information about its prohibited weapons programmes in order to account for gaps in the inspectors’ information. But accounting gaps and irregularities are not just the preserve of Iraq: in 1988 the US discovered in a warehouse, long after it was required to declare and destroy them, several intermediate-range nuclear missile components, banned under the 1987 INF Treaty. Technically this was a violation of the treaty, but it had no strategic significance and the Soviets did not make a fuss.

Of course, authoritarian regimes like the one in Baghdad normally keep excellent records, so Iraq has little excuse on this score. Saddam’s full, final and complete declaration to the UN is a sham and everyone knows it. Baghdad is obliged to provide full details about past and current activities and if these have been destroyed, by whom, when, how and where. Moreover, Iraq’s past record of non-compliance and deception means that we certainly cannot afford to give Saddam the benefit of the doubt. However, ongoing inspections and monitoring provide the international community with the ability to contain any further Iraq attempts to develop militarily significant NBC weapons. Inspections have already clarified some key questions about Iraq’s weapons programme and have a track record of success: more weapons were destroyed by UN inspectors between 1991-1998 than during the Persian Gulf war.

The inspectors have only recently begun receiving the necessary equipment and personnel to perform inspections at their full capacity. It has also only just begun to receive intelligence information from states (although the US has been parsimonious enough to arouse suspicions that it might want UNMOVIC to fail or to use the information to discredit UNMOVIC later). As Blix himself noted at the end of his report “We now have an inspection apparatus that permits us to send multiple inspection teams every day all over Iraq, by road or by air.” Any deadlines set should not be based on uninformed political considerations, but on the practical realities of conducting inspections, which could take several more months to provide a full picture of Iraq’s past and current NBC capabilities. Diplomatic and political pressure calling for Iraq to provide further cooperation is essential, but military action under the UN Charter cannot yet be justified.

Even if further weapons and capabilities are found by UNMOVIC, this does not logically lead to the need for a military attack. It is a key part of UNMOVIC’s role to destroy such weapons or to supervise Iraq in doing so.  

The general public in Britain and the United States instinctively seem to know this – as reflected in almost all recent opinion polls on both sides of the pond – and this may by why our political leaders in London and Washington seem unable to trust us with the facts.