Assessing Iraq's Weapons

In the months leading up to the March 2003 invasion of Iraq, President George W. Bush and his top officials issued a litany of serious allegations about Iraq’s weapons of mass destruction (WMD) and the threat they posed to the U.S. But their prime rationale for going to war has been severely undermined by the report of the Iraq Survey Group, headed by former United Nations inspector Charles A. Duelfer.

Duelfer’s report confirms that UN sanctions and inspections put in place after the first Gulf War in 1991, plus U.S.-U.K. enforced “no-fly zones,” had effectively contained Saddam Hussein’s capability to revive his weapons programs. Indeed, Duelfer found that Hussein’s weapons programs and knowledge base, far from being a threat to the U.S., had deteriorated and were smaller when the war began than in 1998 when UN inspectors left Iraq. Additionally, the report depicts Hussein’s interest in WMD as being driven more by his concerns about Iran and Israel than the U.S.

In his appearance before the Senate Armed Services Committee, Duelfer explained that his data-laden report aims “to identify the dynamics of the regime’s WMD decisions over time.” Hussein “committed the brightest minds and much national treasure to developing weapons of mass destruction [because he] saw this investment as having paid vital dividends,” Duelfer said.

Duelfer went on to say that after nearly 16 months of searching, the survey group found no evidence that Iraq had arsenals of WMD or active programs to produce them before the 2003 invasion. In fact, Duelfer said, Iraq had destroyed its stockpiles of chemical and biological weapons in the early 1990s, and had made no attempt to restart its nuclear weapons program after the first Gulf War in 1991.

Additionally, the survey group found no evidence that, after 1995, Iraq had plans to resume biological weapons (BW) production or to research new bioweapons for military purposes. And the report strongly undermines the Administration’s charge that prewar Iraq had mobile bioweapons facilities.

“In spite of exhaustive investigation, [the survey group] found no evidence that Iraq possessed, or was developing, BW-agent-production systems mounted on road vehicles or railway wagons,” the report states. In his February 2003 address to the UN Security Council, Secretary of State Colin L. Powell cited trailers that he said were mobile bioweapons facilities. The report, in contrast, supports U.S. analysts who contradicted Powell and insisted the trailers were intended to produce hydrogen for artillery balloons, as Iraq had claimed.

FROM CAPTURED documents and interviews with Iraqi officials, Duelfer’s group was able to conclude that former Iraqi president Hussein intended to resume WMD efforts once economic sanctions were lifted. Hussein believed in the utility of WMD both against his enemy Iran and in quelling internal uprisings.

The Iraqi president saw the extensive use of chemical weapons—mainly mustard agent and the nerve gases tabun and sarin—and of long-range ballistic missiles tilt the 1980s Iran-Iraq war in Iraq’s favor. Domestically, the use of chemical weapons against the Kurds in the late ’80s and against the Shi’a majority immediately after the 1991 war allowed him to retain his dominancy.

Hussein also assumed that having chemical and biological weapons deterred the U.S. from entering Baghdad and deposing him during the 1991 Gulf War. But he paid a price in sanctions and invasive UN inspections.

Duelfer made clear to the senators that after survival, Hussein’s “prime objective was the termination of the UN sanctions.” Hussein found sanctions so onerous that he destroyed his stocks of chemical and biological weapons to get out from under their economic stranglehold. Yet even with the weapons gone, he continued to thwart inspectors’ efforts. His aim was to preserve the requisite knowledge base and infrastructure that would enable him to ramp up his WMD programs once he was freed of sanctions.

To that end, Hussein pursued an aggressive course—through illegal financing and procurement efforts—to undercut the embargoes. And he was successful. “There is, in my mind, little doubt,” Duelfer told the senators, “that … the constraints that the UN was able to put around Iraq were collapsing.”

Hussein’s WMD capabilities, though diminished, survived.

For example, the survey group found that by the mid-1990s Iraq’s chemical production infrastructure—which suffered greatly under sanctions—had improved enough to allow a “modest amount” of dual-use research. By the time of the 2003 invasion, Iraq could have produced mustard agent within three to six months if Hussein had decided to do so, the report says. Iraq also had the requisite equipment to produce nerve agent within two years. But, the report says, Iraq had not yet obtained the necessary quantities of precursor chemicals to do so.

Former UN weapons inspector Richard Spertzel emphasizes the potential threat of even nonmilitarily significant production of WMD. These weapons produced “in small scale for terrorist delivery are also a major hazard to modern free societies,” he tells C&EN. “Iraq had this capability for both biological and chemical weapons.”

TO UNDERSCORE just how dangerous the residual chemical capability was, the report reveals that survey group inspectors had uncovered evidence that former Iraqi chemical weapons scientists may be aiding insurgents.

Duelfer assured the senators that raids conducted by coalition forces over the past few months “successfully contained a problem before it matured into a major threat.” Still, he said, “it points to the problem that the dangerous expertise developed by the previous regime could be transferred to other hands.”

Former UN inspector Raymond Zilinskas paints this possibility as “an unprecedented threat.” Zilinskas, who directs a chemical/biological nonproliferation program for the Monterey Institute of International Studies, explains that terrorists might now turn to disaffected Iraqi weapons scientists because they apparently have not been “successful in recruiting former Soviet weapons scientists.”

By the mid-1990s, Iraq had a cadre of bioweapons scientists and a substantial dual-use biological capability to resume a basic bioweapons program within a few weeks to a few months. But, the report says, there was no evidence that Iraq planned to do so.

One of the report’s few new revelations was that the Iraqi Intelligence Service maintained a few small labs for research on chemical and biological agents. Although the survey group concluded that the research was likely intended for intelligence operations and not military forays, Iraq never declared the labs to UN inspectors.

The report also documents, in some detail, Hussein’s intentions to develop ballistic missile capability beyond the 150-km range allowed by UN resolutions. A larger liquid-rocket engine-test stand was under development, and Iraq was constructing solid-propellant facilities as well as conducting research into new types of rocket fuel.

In the nuclear arena, Hussein sought to retain intellectual capital. For example, in the 1990s, Hussein transferred several nuclear scientists to positions at the Iraqi Military Industrial Commission. There, they could conduct research that helped them retain their weapons expertise. However, the survey group found no evidence that Iraq had resumed nuclear programs.

The Duelfer report repudiates the Administration’s assertion that Iraq had acquired aluminum tubes to enrich uranium for nuclear weapons. In doing so, it upholds assessments reached in 2001 by analysts from the Departments of State and Energy who concluded that the tubes were not suitable for centrifuges used to enrich uranium.

At the Senate hearing, Duelfer said his report was basically a final document on Iraq’s prewar WMD activities. However, he noted that the survey group had recently received hundreds of new documents uncovered by coalition forces that might reveal additional information once they are translated and analyzed. And, he noted, there were lingering questions that needed answers, including whether WMD-related materials were transferred out of Iraq to Syria before the beginning of the war.

Duelfer’s predecessor, David A. Kay, tells C&EN that if Hussein had no WMD and no programs to produce them—as both he and Duelfer have documented—“he couldn’t have moved weapons to Syria. What was there to move to Syria?” he asks.

Analyses of the newly found documents and resolution of lingering issues could likely be concluded in a couple of months, Duelfer told the senators.

Duelfer’s report echoes and reinforces Kay’s earlier findings, although Duelfer offers more details than Kay tells C&EN he was allowed to reveal. For example, the Duelfer report names companies and countries—some of whom are U.S. allies—who aided Hussein’s effort to thwart UN sanctions.

At the Senate hearing, ranking Democrat Carl Levin (Mich.) said the “fundamental conclusion” of the Duelfer report “means that the Administration’s two major arguments for going to war against Iraq were incorrect.” He was referring to Iraq having WMD and sharing them with terrorists—like al Qaeda—with whom Iraq was allegedly allied. “We did not go to war because Saddam had future intentions to obtain weapons of mass destruction,” Levin stressed.

Committee Chairman John W. Warner (R-Va.) acknowledged that Duelfer’s conclusions differed considerably from the prewar assessments of intelligence agencies around the world. But he underscored Duelfer’s conclusion that Iraq had the “strategic intention” and the ability to reconstitute weapons programs.

Kay says that Iraq’s science and technology base was too seriously degraded, and Iraqi society too fragmented, to convert intentions into WMD. He says, “The regime was descending into this vortex of corruption,” and he doesn’t think Hussein could have revived his weapons programs.

Zilinskas counters that much can be done with very little, especially in making biological warfare agents. Iraq “had about 80 biological facilities ranging in complexity from breweries to molecular biology laboratories.” So, “they automatically had the equipment they needed for this purpose,” he says.

Zilinskas also assumes that Iraqi scientists “retained cultures of the bacteria they had weaponized, and had plenty of substrate for growing them.” His bottom line: Iraq could have had a “militarily useful” bioweapons program “in place producing weapons within six months”—about the same timeline Duelfer estimates.

Reconstituting the chemical weapons program would have been more difficult and would have taken the Iraqis about a year, Zilinskas says. The requisite equipment and facilities are more complex than those used to produce bioweapons. The limiting factor, however, would have been obtaining the precursor chemicals needed to make the weapons. The movement of these precursors is tightly controlled.

Both Duelfer and Zilinskas overlook a key factor: international monitoring. “The UN Security Council had always envisioned that Iraq’s dual-use potential would continue to be monitored even after a lifting of sanctions,” Ewen Buchanan, spokesman for the UN’s inspection program, points out.

Inspections and monitoring “denied Iraq the ability to misuse dual-use equipment for weapons purposes, and if Iraq did break out, we could potentially have detected it,” Buchanan says. “Monitoring was always designed to take care of intent.”

Prior to the March 2003 invasion, UN weapons inspectors had reported that they could find no evidence of weapons arsenals or active programs to produce chemical, biological, or nuclear weapons. They also noted that they couldn’t account for some discrepancies in Iraq’s weapons declarations. Then-chief UN inspector Hans Blix cautioned not to equate “unaccounted-for stockpiles with existing weapons.”

In an Arms Control Association press advisory, Executive Director Daryl G. Kimball writes: “Not only did the White House continue to use dubious intelligence assessments, but the President ignored the on-the-ground reports from the UN weapons inspectors, which cast further doubt on the Administration’s claims.”

In harsher language, Blix, in a commentary in the British newspaper The Independent, writes that the publication of the Duelfer report forces the Bush Administration “to acknowledge that the reality on the ground was totally different from the virtual reality that had been spun.” Echoing Buchanan, Blix states that “nothing suggests that the [UN] Security Council would relax its ban on Iraq acquiring WMD” even after sanctions were lifted. “Indeed,” he continues, “binding resolutions foresaw a ‘reinforced system of monitoring and verification’ without any fixed end.”

KEY FINDINGS
Iraq's Chemical Weapons

◾ Iraq unilaterally destroyed its undeclared stockpile in 1991.
◾ The chemical weapons (CW) program was crippled by the 1991 Gulf War.
◾ The legitimate chemical industry suffered under sanctions and only began to recover in the mid-1990s.
◾ Subsequent changes in the management of key military and civilian organizations, plus an influx of funding and resources, allowed Iraq to reinvigorate its industrial base.
◾ Saddam Hussein intended to resume a CW weapons effort when sanctions were lifted and conditions judged favorable.
◾ After the mid-1990s, the chemical industry was organized to conserve the knowledge base needed to restart a CW program, conduct a modest amount of dual-use research, and partially recover from the decline of its production capability caused by the Gulf War and United Nations’ weapons destruction and sanctions.
◾ A number of new plants were constructed beginning in the mid-1990s that fortified Iraq’s chemical infrastructure, although the overall industry had not fully recovered from the effects of sanctions and had not regained pre-1991 technical sophistication or production capabilities prior to the March 2003 invasion.
◾ The nation’s historical ability to implement simple solutions to weaponization challenges allowed it to retain the capability to weaponize CW agents when the need arose.
◾ It is unclear whether Iraq’s revived rigorous and formalized system of nationwide research and chemical production was intended to underpin any CW-related efforts.
◾ No credible evidence was found that Iraqi field officers knew about plans for CW use during the March 2003 war.
◾ From 1991 to 2003, the Iraqi Intelligence Service maintained undeclared secret labs to research and test various chemicals and poisons, primarily for intelligence operations.
◾ Investigations of 11 major depots assessed by the Bush Administration before the 2003 invasion as having possible links to CW revealed alternative, plausible explanations for activities noted prior to the war.