Zvi Bar'el
The discovery last Thursday of 12 empty chemical weapon warheads at the Ukhaider complex south of Baghdad created a great stir that died down almost immediately. The Ukhaider Ammunition Storage Area, one of the biggest in Iraq, which was bombed during the Gulf War, is not a secret site. Even the 122mm warheads were not unknown weapons to those monitoring the Iraqi arms program. The previous inspection team had already uncovered some before being kicked out of Iraq in 1998.
If there was anything interesting about these warheads, it concerns whether the Iraqi government mentioned them in the report it submitted to the United Nations Security Council on December 7 or concealed their existence. The document inspectors will have to answer that question soon, and that, too, is not particularly important. Because even if Iraq did not report them, it will be charged again with not providing a full accounting, and since the American administration has already determined that the report submitted on December 7 is incomplete, and its incompleteness represents an essential violation of Security Council Resolution 1441, another detail will neither add to nor detract from this determination.
Neither rockets nor empty warheads are of interest to the UN inspectors. Based on numerous reports from past inspection teams and calculations of the possible inventory, the Iraqis apparently have at least 1,500 bombs and empty bombs and rockets capable of carrying chemical warheads. These calculations indicate among other things that Iraq in the past provided false reports on the number of bombs, shells and rockets it dropped on Iran. The difference amounts to some 6,000 units of assorted chemical weapons, which are apparently located at sites somewhere in Iraq.
According to a Western intelligence official, "it is possible that this assessment also has no basis because it's hard to imagine that Iraq really counted every shell or bomb it dropped during the eight-year Iran-Iraq War. It's also impossible to know for sure how many such bombs and shells were destroyed in the Gulf War during American bombings of Iraqi bases.
Thousands of tons are missing
In January 1999, the UN inspection team published its last report after being kicked out of Iraq. According to this report, a total of 360 tons of chemical armaments are missing as well as another 3,000 tons of chemical components used to make arms in the chemical weapons industry. In contrast, during the years of monitoring, the inspection teams managed to destroy 40,000 elements of chemical weapons (shells, bombs and rockets) 500,000 liters of chemical substances usable as chemical weapons and 1.8 million liters of chemical components (the data on elements destroyed was published in volume, not weight). Amid these reports and mathematical inconsistencies, there are still several thousand tons of supplementary chemical substances missing as well as another several thousand liters of nerve gases such as XV, sarin and mustard gas.
These are the materials the UN inspection team headed by Dr. Hans Blix is searching for (in addition to biological weapons). And these are the items that probably will not be found even after the signing on Monday of an agreement between Iraq and the inspection team. Since November 27, 2002, the day the new team began its operations in Iraq, its inspectors, who now number close to 200, have conducted several hundred visits and inspections at diverse sites.
A quick look at the list of places inspected reveals that every institution, organization or lab that has any connection to chemical or biological substances was visited. So for example, the hospitals in Basra, the glass research center in Baghdad, a helicopter base in Suweira, an alcoholic beverage bottling plant, the faculty of agriculture in Basra, an irrigation system repair plant, the university in Mosul, the Faluja 3 fertilizer plant, a graphite manufacturing plant and dozens of other suspicious sites have all been inspected. In each place, no suspicious findings were uncovered. All of them represent a small share of the total inspections that the team must carry out to get a complete picture.
For the sake of comparison, previous UN inspection teams operating in Iraq for around eight years conducted several thousand inspections and then, too, did not manage to find the missing inventory or even find any of the documents they sought. They needed information from collaborators and defectors in order to fill in their lists with the information that they nevertheless obtained. The most famous case was in 1995 when Saddam Hussein's sons-in-law defected to Jordan. In the wake of that defection, an abundance of documents was found in a chicken coop on a farm near Baghdad. In addition to the discovery of those documents, the defection led to the dumping of many components intended for use in developing nuclear weapons (and which apparently came from Russia) into the Tigris River to prevent their discovery.
The hunt for these substances or documents detailing chemical, biological and nuclear weapons development plans is only one part of the monitoring operations. As a rule, Iraq's development plans for weapons of mass destruction are almost fully known. Numerous documents about Iraq equipping itself in the 1980s with materiel to develop biological and chemical weapons have reached the West from the Soviet Union and afterward were forwarded by the Russian authorities. American research institutes can describe in detail what Iraq was able to develop and what was planned, including the tests done in order to stabilize toxic substances so that they would not breakdown over time.
Other documents, if found, may shed light primarily on the past and in particular, the inspection team hopes to obtain documents about the abilities Iraq developed during the four years when there was absolutely no monitoring on the ground.
A review of the intelligence U.S. report prepared by the Central Intelligence Agency on the deployment of weapons of mass destruction and the British government's report on Iraq's non-conventional weapons capabilities, will make an impression primarily regarding the means Iraq possessed, but not about what it has today and what it may still develop. These reports rely due to the nature of the situation on many assessments and very little specific information. Even the intelligence the U.S. administration promised to relay to Hans Blix's delegation is moving too slowly and is coming in measured amounts. This method of relaying information prompts questions about the real information possessed by Western intelligence agencies. This matter has already prompted speculation that shortly before the war, America will disclose what it knows in order to justify the war, or alternately, the information will be divulged only after the war in order to justify it after the fact.
Another problem of the inspection team relates to the information stored in the heads of Iraqi scientists and researchers. They may be cooperating with the inspection team's experts, but it is cooperation that cannot yield results. So for example, the scientists are asked about trials that were conducted, materials that were used, the degree of success of the trials, the location of labs and documents that describe the trials. But these questions are based on material of which the inspectors were aware. The Iraqi scientists are not providing additional information beyond the answers to specific questions and thus far, they are denying that there exists any documentation of experiments. It is doubtful whether taking the scientists out of Iraq will help to facilitate the discovery of the missing substances or to understand what was developed over the last few years.
Supervision over the non-conventional weapons industry is therefore not solely intended to find and destroy what exists, but also to prevent its manufacture in the future. Such an objective requires constant and unending supervision that can locate in time any development in the field indicating the intent to produce such weapons. That is essentially what the previous UN inspection teams dealt with in Iraq.
The war against Iraq will not be able to knock out Iraq's ability to produce non-conventional weapons as it entails a broad-ranging and well-developed scientific community, perhaps the most developed in Arab countries that will have to be made to "disappear" in order for the know-how to disappear. The other way is to neutralize Iraq's motivation to produce such weaponry.
The American administration believes that by changing the regime in Iraq, the motivation to produce the weapons will also disappear. It is possible, but even when a new regime is set up in Iraq, it will be necessary to continue the monitoring, unless the U.S. plans to rule directly in Iraq for a long time. If we were to rely on reports coming from leaders of the Iraqi opposition, it would mean a transition period during which a local Iraqi regime would be set up, comprised of representatives of the various factions and ethnic groups. Even such a regime, should it be formed, will want to maintain an army and the ability to defend and attack and therefore, the inspections will still have lots of work.
The question now is to what extent will the U.S. agree to let the inspectors continue their work for anywhere from another three months to a year in order to try and locate new and incriminating findings. The American dilemma is that if inspectors uncover new findings and destroy them, there will be no pretext for war, because that is, after all, the purpose of the inspection; and if no such findings are uncovered, then too the pretext for a war disappears.
The American administration will have to decide within a short time whether it wants the inspectors' work instead of a war, as was the case before 1998 when the UN inspectors carried out their work without threats of war until they were kicked out, or if the current inspections are at most an excuse and a way to search for a pretext, a kind of American gesture to the international claim that it has designated a period of time, and one way or another, at the end of it, there will be a war.
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