Posted on 06/07/2003 11:55:17 AM PDT by The KG9 Kid
As conspiracy theorists get into a lather about the lack of weapons of mass destruction, they should consider that Western intelligence has consistently underestimated Iraq's capabilities, writes Tony Parkinson.
The last time I looked, Hans Blix was not a foaming-at-the-mouth neo-conservative. In fact, the United Nations chief weapons inspector has been profoundly sceptical of many aspects of US strategy in Iraq.
But in his presentation to the UN Security Council on Thursday night, Dr Blix remained perplexed by one simple question: why, if Iraq had no weapons of mass destruction, did Saddam Hussein persist in putting his nation through the misery of sanctions for 12 years?
It is a question that should give pause to those anxious to embrace speculation that Iraq's weapons of mass destruction simply do not exist.
Seven weeks after the US-led military victory in Iraq, conspiracy theorists are in a lather over what they claim has been a pernicious strategy of deception by the US, British and Australian governments. One over-excited columnist wrote this week of another Watergate in the making.
According to critics of the war, the failure by coalition forces to produce tangible, verifiable evidence of Iraq's WMD has exposed The Big Lie.
Citing reports from unidentified sources, they claim political leaders put pressure on intelligence agencies to spice up reports so as to dramatise the need for urgent armed intervention. The US and British governments have ordered inquiries.
This is a necessary, and desirable, response. It goes to key questions of credibility. But critics of the war should be careful not to overreach.
Fresh inspections are soon to start. The mystery of the missing weapons is far from resolved.
And what should not be forgotten is the track record of Western intelligence agencies on this issue: if anything, they have a history of under-estimating the extent and sophistication of Saddam's WMD programs, rather than the reverse.
In 1991, to the shock of the international community, inspectors found Iraq had an active and advanced uranium enrichment program.
In 1995, the UN Special Commission on Iraq was ready to give Saddam's regime a clean bill of health on biological weapons - until a high-level defector revealed a massive germ warfare program concealed from inspectors for five years.
In 1997, despite the most intrusive on-the-ground weapons inspections regime in history, UNSCOM belatedly discovered Iraq was able to produce a new generation of nerve agent, VX.
Yesterday, in an address to the Australian Institute of International Affairs in Melbourne, visiting US defence and intelligence expert Anthony Cordesman retraced this history to put the debate into proper perspective.
As a former senior official in US defence intelligence, Dr Cordesman said he had no delusions about the infallibility of intelligence gathering, or the assessments that flow from it. "Intelligence isn't psychic," he said. "It can't look inside buildings. There's no magic capabilities involved."
But none of this, he cautioned, should obscure the basic, long-established, facts. Saddam's illegal and incorrigible pursuit of weapons of terror has been documented extensively since 1990.
The only open question was to what extent his regime maintained these capabilities up to the moment of the US-led invasion, and in what shape or form. Were they destroyed, buried in the desert - or concealed in more advanced "breakout" technologies, hard to distinguish from industrial chemicals or conventional bio-tech?
"We still don't know the answer," Dr Cordesman admitted. "But what we do know is that from 1982 onwards, this government proliferated relentlessly, at immense cost to its people. For this, there is no shortage of material evidence."
Nor, he might have added, is there any lack of evidence of crimes against humanity.
Indeed, the job of tracking weapons in Iraq has been diverted, at least in part, by the grisly task of uncovering mass graves. Human rights groups fear more than 200,000 corpses will be found - silent victims of a murderous tyrant.
Surely, this will put to rest any lingering debate over the legitimacy of the war in Iraq, whether or not WMD is found. If the accumulating evidence of mass murder doesn't meet the definition of a smoking gun, nothing will.
Tony Parkinson is The Age's international editor.
It is looking more and more like Saddam and his regieme WAS a weapon of mass destruction.
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No, sweetheart, it isn't. You dond't declar war on someone and look afterwards to see, perchance, if there was justification for doing it. Your original reasons are those you must fulfill.
Justification is not the issue. The issue is the means used by the administration to gain support for America to invade another country for the first time in her history.
Support was gained on the assurance by the administration that Iraq was a threat to America because Iraq had weapons of mass destruction. Support was not based on mass graves or humanitarian reasons.
Gaining support was so important that Powell appeared on television to share intelligence documents with the people and the world. These documents were selected to illustrate what caused the administration to take the decision that Iraq was a threat. The administration later admits that some of these documents were proved to be forgeries.
It is beginning to appear that the administration was taken in by bogus intelligence, at least I hope so. A huge intelligence failure is easier to take than the thought that my government lied to me to gain my support.
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