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Glen Rangwala Iraq Index
The Final Nail
(17 October 2003)
Published in Labour Left Briefing (November 2003)
Glen Rangwala - gr10009@cam.ac.uk
The year-long rigmarole undertaken by the British government to justify
the invasion of Iraq finally lost its last veneer of credibility on 2
October. In April, Tony Blair had said
that, "once we have the cooperation of the scientists and the experts,
I have got no doubt that we will find them", referring to Iraq's weapons
of mass destruction. He told
the House of Commons on 4 June that he still lacked the ability to
think critically: "it is only now that the Iraq Survey Group has been
put together ... As I have said throughout, I have no doubt that they
will find the clearest possible evidence of Saddam's weapons of mass destruction".
Well, now the Iraq Survey Group (ISG) has reported - and they found no
evidence of any prohibited weapons.
David Kay, who has spent the last few years as a media pundit talking
up the Iraqi threat, boasted
before entering Iraq to act as the unofficial head of the ISG that the
US forces would find not only a "smoking gun", but a "smoking arsenal",
in Iraq. Even he was unable to put a positive spin on his report to the
US administration. He reported
that the ISG's sources inside Iraq recognised that Iraq did not have a
chemical weapons programme after 1991. He acknowledged that the putative
mobile laboratories found in Iraq after the invasion did not have the
technical requirements for the efficient production of biological weapons.
And he does not even mention the alleged attempts by Iraq to import uranium
or the supposed battlefield munitions ready to fire within 45 minutes.
He made a few half-hearted attempts to claim Iraqi production of prohibited
weapons was continuing. A reference to a "a vial of live C. botulinum
Okra B. from which a biological agent can be produced" seems to have made
Jack Straw quiver with delight. It's "15,000 times more toxic than the
nerve agent VX", he thundered on Radio 4 the next day.
Err, no. That's botulinum type A, one of the most lethal substances known
and one that was loaded into missiles by Iraq before 1990. Type B, by
contrast, has never been successfully weaponised: the US should know that,
because it tried and failed. It is also much less dangerous. Kay later
disclosed in an interview that this vial had been in a scientist's
kitchen fridge since 1993: there had been no attempt to extract the toxin
from the live agent, and no attempt by the regime to reclaim this vial
from the scientist, even when weapons inspectors were out of the country.
An investigation
by the Los Angeles Times traced the probable source of the botulinum
to a centre in Manassas, Virginia, barely
thirty miles west of Washington D.C. They sold at least seven batches
of botulinum to Iraq between 1986 and 1988.
Kay provides the most detail in his findings of Iraq's missile programmes.
Kay claimed that Iraq sought to "obtain from North Korea technology related
to 1,300km range ballistic missiles", maintained facilities that could
produce fuel propellant for SCUD missiles, and had designs for long-range
missiles. What Kay never shows is that Iraq had produced anything that
was prohibited.
The standard imposed on Iraq for missiles is different from that in place
for chemical, biological and nuclear weapons. The Security Council in
1991 prohibited
Iraq from even having any research and support facilities for weapons
of mass destruction. For missiles, though, it was simply prohibited from
actual having the longer range missiles themselves, together with major
parts and repair and production facilities. Kay did not demonstrate that
Iraq had any of these things. Iraq was not barred from developing technology
so that when the prohibition on missiles was lifted, it could go ahead
and produce them. Kay does not show that Iraq violated any Security Council
resolutions; in fact, his description seems to indicate that Iraq in fact
stuck to the letter of the law.
Kay does attempt to salvage his survey group by claiming that his staff
of 1,400 have only examined 10 out of Iraq's 130 "Ammunition Storage Points"
(meaning their military depots), and that there could be chemical weapons
hidden in these depots. He asked for a doubling of his budget so that
they could be searched. This was directly in contrast with the view
I obtained from officials associated with the ISG whom I interviewed
in Baghdad in September. They saw their work as more or less finished,
that they'd done all that they could do to find those elusive weapons.
It is also in direct contrast to what the ISG was originally set up for
at the end of May. It was explicitly
not meant to be a hunt through various sites in Iraq for rogue facilities:
that was the approach of the original US military unit sent in to look
for Iraq's weapons in March, which was seen to have failed because it
found nothing. The ISG by contrast was meant to have an "intelligence-led"
approach that would start off by interrogating scientists and officials,
and by going over their documents. This, they thought, would reveal where
the weapons were and how the programmes were working.
However, the views of those individuals seem to be quite straightforward.
The nuclear weapons programme had been shut down in 1991, explained
a former senior Iraqi nuclear scientist to the Financial Times. The whole
nuclear programme had been dismantled, a former high-ranking Iraqi official
told
Reuters. All the prohibited programmes had been shut down for early 1990s,
a senior Iraqi military advisor told
Time Magazine. Iraq only managed to produce unstable forms of VX nerve
agent in the late 1980s and stopped after that, one of the heads of Iraq's
chemical weapons programmes before 1991 told
the New Republic journal. Even though there is every incentive for these
individuals to tell stories of weapons production, it is possible that
they are all lying. Personally, I'm more inclined to believe that Blair
is.
Page created October 28, 2003 by Charlie Jenks
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