WMD: The hunt is just beginning, says Blair
“Army Col Richard McPhee … said he
took seriously US intelligence warnings on the eve of war that Hussein had
given ‘release authority’ to subordinates in command of chemical weapons. ‘We
didn't have all these people in [protective] suits’ for nothing, he said. But
if Iraq thought of using such weapons, ‘there had to have been something to
use. And we haven't found it. … Books will be written on that in the
intelligence community for a long time’”
These
days the Prime Minister pleads Blix-like for more time to find Iraq’s “weapons
of mass destruction”. The latest excuse
for not finding anything is that the occupying powers have only just begun
looking for them – because their first priority was to attend to the
humanitarian needs of the Iraqi people.
As Blair told
Oona King at Prime Minister’s Questions on 4 June 2003:
“In respect of the search for weapons of mass destruction, I would
point out to the House that the Iraq survey group, which is 1,300 to
1,400-strong, is literally now just beginning its work, because the priority
after the conflict was to rebuild Iraq and to make sure that the humanitarian concerns
of the Iraqi people were achieved.”
The imprint of the Downing Street
communications directorate is clearly visible on that formula. As usual with formulae from that source, the
accompanying instructions were to repeat it over and over again, making sure to
mention the strength of the Group each time, in order to ram home the message
that a big effort was about to begin to hunt down “weapons of mass
destruction”. Blair duly obliged, and
repeated it six times in the House of Commons that day.
This formula, like others from the
same source, was designed to put Mr Blair and his government in a good
light. The absence of “weapons of mass
destruction” is an acute political embarrassment to them. Nevertheless, so the story goes, they care
so much for the Iraqi people (having killed countless thousands of them, and
injured a great deal more) that they were prepared to put the hunt for these
weapons on the backburner, and bear the political embarrassment for now.
As usual with these formulae, this
one doesn’t bear close textual analysis.
Are we really supposed to believe that by early June Iraq was
reconstructed, and the humanitarian needs of the Iraqi people attended to (and
aid workers retrained as weapons inspectors) so that the hunt for “weapons of
mass destruction” could begin in earnest?
This formula seems to have been a
one-day wonder, not surprisingly, since it suffers from a serious design flaw,
which Labour MP, Denzil Davies, exposed in a question
to his leader:
“My right hon. Friend has made much of the survey teams that will look
for weapons of mass destruction in Iraq, but is he not concerned that the
failure of the coalition to look for those weapons as a matter of the highest
priority in the immediate aftermath of the war could well have provided the
opportunity for many of the weapons — if they are there — to find their way
into the hands of the various terrorist groups that are operating in and around
the middle east?”
Since the justification for war
was, not merely that Saddam Hussein had “weapons of mass destruction”, but also
that he might pass them on to people even more evil than himself, there was no
satisfactory answer to that.
So, what are the facts about the
fruitless hunt for these weapons in Iraq?
The
truth is that the hunt began before the first US/UK bombs fell. They were particularly worried about Iraq’s
capacity to hit Israel with chemical or biological weapons delivered by
missiles from sites in Iraq’s western desert.
So before the first bombs fell, special forces had raided these sites
but found nothing. They also raided
other sites throughout Iraq, ahead of the US ground advance, without success.
Behind the ground advance came
searchers from the 75th Exploitation Task Force, which visited,
literally, hundreds of sites all over Iraq.
It has now been withdrawn, and replaced by the Iraq Survey Group, which,
as we will see, is a very different animal.
On 11 May, the Washington Post
carried an article by Barton Gellman, entitled Frustrated, US
Arms Team to Leave Iraq. Gellman
had spent a week with the 75th Exploitation Taskforce in Iraq, and
he paints a graphic picture of their frustration at their lack of success:
“The 75th
Exploitation Task Force, as the group is formally known, has been described
from the start as the principal component of the US plan to discover and
display forbidden Iraqi weapons. The group's departure, expected next month,
marks a milestone in frustration for a major declared objective of the war.
“Leaders
of Task Force 75's diverse staff - biologists, chemists, arms treaty enforcers,
nuclear operators, computer and document experts, and special forces troops -
arrived with high hopes of early success. They said they expected to find what
Secretary of State Colin L Powell described at the UN Security Council on
February 5 - hundreds of tons of biological and chemical agents, missiles and
rockets to deliver the agents, and evidence of an ongoing program to build a
nuclear bomb.
“Scores of
fruitless missions broke that confidence, many task force members said in
interviews.
“Army Col Richard McPhee, who will close down the task force next
month, said he took seriously US intelligence warnings on the eve of war that
Hussein had given ‘release authority’ to subordinates in command of chemical
weapons. ‘We didn't have all these people in [protective] suits’ for nothing,
he said. But if Iraq thought of using such weapons, ‘there had to have been
something to use. And we haven't found it. … Books will be written on that in
the intelligence community for a long time.’
“Army Col
Robert Smith, who leads the site assessment teams from the Defense Threat
Reduction Agency, said task force leaders no longer ‘think we're going to find
chemical rounds sitting next to a gun.’ He added, ‘That's what we came here
for, but we're past that.’
“Motivated and accomplished in their fields, task
force members found themselves lacking vital tools. They consistently found
targets identified by Washington to be inaccurate, looted and burned, or both.
Leaders and members of five of the task force's eight teams, and some senior
officers guiding them, said the weapons hunters were going through the motions
now to ‘check the blocks’ on a pre-war list.”
Major General Keith Dayton, the
head of the Iraq Survey Group, gave a briefing to the press at the Pentagon on
30 May before he set off for Baghdad (see transcript here). He said that searchers from the 75th
Exploitation Taskforce had “visited over 300 sensitive sites”, mostly from a
list of 900 sites selected on the basis of pre-war intelligence, and found
nothing. And it had now been decided
that visiting more sites on the pre-war list was a waste of time; that what is
required is more reliable intelligence on sites before making a decision to
visit them.
It is the task of the new Group to
acquire that intelligence. In other
words, it is the failure to find anything based on pre-war intelligence that
has prompted the setting up of the new Group, which is an intelligence
gathering/collating organisation, rather than a body that merely searches
sites.
Furthermore, its role goes way
beyond gathering intelligence on “weapons of mass destruction”. General Dayton
described its role as follows at the Pentagon briefing:
“But in addition to WMD, the ISG will collect and exploit documents and
media related to terrorism, war crimes, POW [prisoner of war] and MIA [missing
in action] issues, and other things relating to the former Iraqi regime. It will interrogate and debrief individuals,
both hostile and friendly, and it will exploit captured materiel. The goal is to put all the pieces together
in what is appearing to be a very complex jigsaw puzzle.”
General Dayton also made it clear
that the number of searchers on the ground will increase very little (from 200
or so, to “probably between 200 and 300”) and that 250 out of the 1300 to 1400
are media personnel, who will be based in Qatar.
That is not quite the story that
the Prime Minister told the House of Commons on 4 June 2003.
Labour &
Trade Union Review
July 2003