Where Did Iraq's Weapons Go?

WASHINGTON: American David Kay, head of the Iraq Survey Group in Baghdad, has just reported that despitethe $300 million in expenditures and the efforts of many hundreds of individuals working for him, no Iraqiweapons of mass destruction have been found in Iraq. The good news is that this fact makes it less likely thatal Qaeda has managed to sneak into that country and obtain some chemical or biological materials for itsterroristic purposes. But the bad news is that a war that was already so controversial in much of the worldseems to have lost its main rationale.

There are, however, several points to make right away. First, while it is increasingly clear that there wasno imminent threat from Iraqi weapons of mass destruction (WMD), Saddam did not do what was demanded of him bythe unanimous U.N. Security Council vote on Resolution 1441 last November. His subsequent December declarationmade no effort to explain where all the various materials of potential use in chemical or biological programs- and with precious little plausible use for anything else - had gone. We know he imported such materials,primarily in the 1980s, so Saddam did fail to comply even in the event that he had no weapons at that point.

Second, David Kay and his team have uncovered several prohibited activities and materials inside Iraq. Theyrange from vials of biological pathogens to active plans for importing banned missiles to undeclared unmannedaerial vehicles or drones that Saddam was under clear international orders to account for. These things arenot workable weapons, to be sure. But even if they are not smoking guns, they are "smoking holsters"- indicating intent to have weapons, or the ability to do so again on short order - and violations just thesame.

Third, Saddam still had interest in a nuclear weapons program. Indeed, given his history, we hardly neededinspectors to know this. And if Saddam or his sons someday obtained the ultimate weapon, they might have feltemboldened to again invade Kuwait or another neighbor in the belief that their nukes insulated them from apossible U.S.-led operation to evict Hussein from the occupied country or to overthrow him.

All that said, let's call a spade a spade - Kay's report hurts the Bush administration and the UnitedStates. The demonstrable lack of an imminent threat means that, at a minimum, President Bush did not have tobe in such a hurry to wage war almost unilaterally last winter. Saddam may not have deserved many more monthsto come into full compliance with the demands of Resolution 1441, but the opinion of the internationalcommunity did deserve to be heard - and it was not. As a result, international law has suffered, thelegitimacy of the war has been degraded, and the postwar effort is requiring far more troops and money fromthe United States than it might have otherwise. Most of all, the image of the United States as a fair-mindedcountry that leads in security policy without ignoring the wishes of its friends, allies, and neutralcountries has suffered greatly.

In fairness, everyone thought Saddam had chemical and biological arms. The Clinton administration did; mostindependent analysts like myself did; the UN did; France and other foreign nations skeptical of the need forwar also did. It now looks like we all were wrong.

But the Bush administration made three main mistakes, at least some of them deliberate, that went beyondthese commonly shared errors. First, the White House suggested a more imminent chemical/biological threat thanthe evidence warranted. Here in the US, there was much talk of unmanned aircraft being used to disseminateagents; in Britain, the Blair government (with US support) made its famous allegation that Iraq could deliversuch weapons of mass destruction on the battlefield within 45 minutes of a decision to do so. Second, the Bushadministration exaggerated the state of Iraq's nuclear program. It took questionable evidence about Iraqpursuing - and probably failing to obtain - materials that would be needed even to begin to set up a nuclearprogram. This was used it to back up lines like that of Vice President Cheney, who claimed that Saddam had"reconstituted his nuclear weapons." Third, the Bush administration continued to exaggerate (even ifit did not totally manufacture) evidence about possible links between Saddam and al Qaeda - even insinuatingthat Saddam may have had a hand in 9/11. If that was the case, even small stockpiles of chemical or biologicalarms in Iraqi hands would take on far greater and more immediate strategic significance than previouslybelieved.

On these three points, the Bush administration was wrong and misleading - if not necessarily deceitful. Theevidence to contradict its arguments was available in unclassified form during the course of last fall's andwinter's debates, and a number of us, who tried to refute the worst of the misleading allegations, made use ofit. By contrast, there was what increasingly appears to have been a broad analytical failure in the US andabroad about the state of Saddam's chemical and biological weapons programs.

Why then did Saddam not bother to correct us? If even those who wished to avoid war had a misperceptionabout his chemical and biological arms, why did Saddam not come clean, owning up to where he had destroyedsuch arms so that soil samples and paper documents and testimony from his scientists could verify the claims?

Several theories have been advanced about this, most recently by former chief UN inspector Hans Blix whoposits that perhaps Saddam wanted the deterrence associated with the world's fear of his weapons of massdestruction. That may be right. I tend to think, however, that Saddam had spent so long defying theinternational community and the United States on his WMD stockpiles that his own pique clouded his judgment,and he simply made a strategic miscalculation. Wishing to continue to defy the US, he assumed that theopposition to war of France, Germany, Russia and others - together with what he still may have mistakenlyassumed was an American unwillingness to risk major casualties in urban warfare - would save his hide.

But this is all speculation. What is not speculation are the two central points. One, Mr. Bush's criticsshould remember that most of them shared in this administration's assessment about Saddam's chemical andbiological arms, meaning we were all wrong together. A combination of Saddam's history in using such arms, hishistory of hiding such arms, various defector reports, and his inventories of materials usable only to makesuch arms all seemed to point in the same direction. Yet in retrospect, that may have been exactly the wrongdirection to take analytically. So on this point Mr. Bush deserves a break. But second, the Bush team does notdeserve a break for its consistent and thus almost certainly intentional efforts to stretch other evidence.The hyping of Iraq's progress towards nuclear arms and its possible ties to al Qaeda contributed to the senseof urgency Mr. Bush used to justify a war and postwar operation that, had they been delayed only anothermonth, could probably have been waged with far more international legitimacy and assistance.