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March 15, 2005
Iraq did have WMD capability
I'd heard about this story yesterday but couldn't find the link. Thanks to LGF, I've got it now (should have checked there first).
On with the story.
The New York Times reported (or admitted?) yesterday that Iraq did in fact have the equipment to produce parts for missiles, nuclear, chemical, and biological weapons when the United States invaded in April of 2003.
In the weeks after Baghdad fell in April 2003, looters systematically dismantled and removed tons of machinery from Saddam Hussein's most important weapons installations, including some with high-precision equipment capable of making parts for nuclear arms, a senior Iraqi official said this week in the government's first extensive comments on the looting.There it is; Saddam may or may not have had actual weapons, but he did retain the capability to manufacture them.
The Iraqi official, Sami al-Araji, the deputy minister of industry, said it appeared that a highly organized operation had pinpointed specific plants in search of valuable equipment, some of which could be used for both military and civilian applications, and carted the machinery away.
...
Dr. Araji said equipment capable of making parts for missiles as well as chemical, biological and nuclear arms was missing from 8 or 10 sites that were the heart of Iraq's dormant program on unconventional weapons. After the invasion, occupation forces found no unconventional arms, and C.I.A. inspectors concluded that the effort had been largely abandoned after the Persian Gulf War in 1991.
...
The United Nations, worried that the material could be used in clandestine bomb production, has been hunting for it, largely unsuccessfully, across the Middle East. In one case, investigators searching through scrap yards in Jordan last June found specialized vats for highly corrosive chemicals that had been tagged and monitored as part of the international effort to keep watch on the Iraqi arms program. The vessels could be used for harmless industrial processes or for making chemical weapons.
The article reports that while US forces were "... aware of the importance of some of the installations, there was not enough military personnel to guard all of them during and after the invasion."
Now, I've gone over the issue of "not enough troops" before, but in case you missed it here it is again. It's easy to sit around and sway "we need (or needed) more troops!" but it's quite another to look at the situation as if you were a decision maker. Consider;
- The size of the US military diminished so much during the 90s that we could barely come up with the number we did without compromising security in other parts of the world. I forget the exact number (and if someone wants to correct me please do so) but we went from something like 19 army divisions in 1990 to 10 in 2000.
- As implied above, yes we could have come up with more troops but at the cost of compromising minimal security requirements in other parts of the world. If North Korea or someone else took advantage of the situation to attack, the same people who criticize the Bush administration for not having enough troops would turn around and criticize him for leaving other areas of the world unprotected.
- Logistics would have been even more strained with more troops. It's one thing to land troops somewhere, quite another to get their equipment there and keep them supplied. Unlike in the Gulf War, in 2002/3 we did not have access to either the same number of port facilities or staging areas.
- The more American troops in the Mideast, the more tensions are inflamed. Arabs like us to provide security, but they don't like a large American presence. More American troops simply give radicals a propaganda tool.
- So the decision to invade with the number of troops that we did was a calculated risk. But then so is everything else in life.
Back to WMD
The Times article does not prove that Saddam had WMD, as I've heard some conservative commentators come close to alleging. But it does help put the lie to those who claim that Saddam was in compliance with the UN and the mean 'ol US was just itching to invade to steal their oil.
But in reality, nothing in the NYT story should be new. In October of 2003 David Kay (of the Iraq Survey Group) reported to Congress that
One of the problems that we faced in searching for anything in Saddam's arsenal was the shear size of their arsenal. Kay describes the scope of their arsenal, and the difficulty in finding chemical weapons, especially when they're not specifically marked as such.We have discovered dozens of WMD-related program activities and significant amounts of equipment that Iraq concealed from the United Nations during the inspections that began in late 2002. The discovery of these deliberate concealment efforts have come about both through the admissions of Iraqi scientists and officials concerning information they deliberately withheld and through physical evidence of equipment and activities that ISG has discovered that should have been declared to the UN. Let me just give you a few examples of these concealment efforts, some of which I will elaborate on later:
A clandestine network of laboratories and safehouses within the Iraqi Intelligence Service that contained equipment subject to UN monitoring and suitable for continuing CBW research.
In searching for retained stocks of chemical munitions, ISG has had to contend with the almost unbelievable scale of Iraq's conventional weapons armory, which dwarfs by orders of magnitude the physical size of any conceivable stock of chemical weapons.It looks like Kay was more right than he knew.For example, there are approximately 130 known Iraqi Ammunition Storage Points (ASP), many of which exceed 50 square miles in size and hold an estimated 600,000 tons of artillery shells, rockets, aviation bombs and other ordinance. Of these 130 ASPs, approximately 120 still remain unexamined.
As Iraqi practice was not to mark much of their chemical ordinance and to store it at the same ASPs that held conventional rounds, the size of the required search effort is enormous.
While searching for retained weapons, ISG teams have developed multiple sources that indicate that Iraq explored the possibility of CW production in recent years, possibly as late as 2003.
As for the length of time it would take Iraq to resume actual production, Kay said that his sources estimated 6 months. From what we know now, it could have been considerably shorter.
To be fair, Kay did, in the end, report that his group found "no evidence" that Iraq had stockpiles of WMD immediately before the US invasion.
And who knows, it is still possible that Saddam did have at least some WMD, and that it was spirited out of the country to Syria or Iran. Had we invaded in 2002 or earlier in 2003 we might just have found it, or incepted the transfers. That we wasted so much time at the United Nations was due to then Secretary of State Powell's insistence on following legal niceties. We're paying the price for that delay today, both because it allowed Saddam to dismantle his WMD machinery, and because it allowed him to organize an insurgency in advance.
Update
Marc, at USS Neverdock, posts on a story in the UK Telegraph "where they reported 'Saddam Hussein's regime offered a $2 million (£1.4 million) bribe to the United Nations' chief weapons inspector to doctor his reports on the search for weapons of mass destruction.'"
He asks "If, as the left claims, there were no WMDs in Iraq, why would Saddam need to bribe the United Nations' chief weapons inspector?"
Indeed, why?
Posted by Tom at March 15, 2005 1:45 PM
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