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Whats he have Original Source Link: (May no longer be active)
http://www.cnn.com/2002/ALLPOLITICS/09/09/time.saddam.weapons/index.htmlStories will be told, like the one Administration officials are retailing about Iraq's efforts to acquire thousands of specialized aluminum tubes for possible use in centrifuges to enrich uranium.
http://www.cnn.com/2002/ALLPOLITICS/09/09/time.saddam.weapons/index.html
What does Saddam have?
Iraq may not have a nuclear bomb, but there's strong evidence it has chemical and biological weapons. Its past suggests it wants a bigger arsenal
By John F. Dickerson, Mark Thompson, Douglas Waller/Washington and J.F.O. McAllister/London
Not so long ago, another U.S. President was engaged in a protracted struggle against a far-reaching enemy. In the midst of the conflict, he came to believe one particular country threatened such immediate nuclear harm to the U.S. that he must prepare the citizenry for war to thwart it. A skittish world needed to be convinced of the danger. So he showed them a picture.
The President was John F. Kennedy. The country was Cuba, and the nuclear-capable missiles aimed at the U.S., captured on satellite photos, were plain to see. War in that instance was averted in large measure by the very nakedness of the threat. But it's just that sort of certainty--some incontrovertible evidence apparent to all--for which much of the world clamors while Washington considers a new assault on Iraq.
That, barring a surprise revelation, is not what the U.S. President is likely to produce this time. Stories will be told, like the one Administration officials are retailing about Iraq's efforts to acquire thousands of specialized aluminum tubes for possible use in centrifuges to enrich uranium. Pictures will be flourished, like the ones of sinister new structures at old nuclear-related sites in Iraq. But it's the inability to know what's under those roofs and what those aluminum tubes are really for that lies at the heart of the Bush Administration's case against Iraq: it's all about what we don't know.
A flurry of white papers will be brandished as evidence of what weapons Saddam has. But the Bush Administration's determination to topple him is based less on the weapons of mass destruction he has now than on what he might get later--and what he might one day do with them. Indeed, in the debate over how to manage Saddam, Bush is not operating from new intelligence but from a new doctrine of pre-emption. Though the hawks in the Administration argue that Saddam's weapons of mass destruction directly threaten his neighbors and even the U.S., to Bush the real issue is the risk that the dictator would hand them to the undeterrable enemies America awakened to on Sept. 11. Al-Qaeda, U.S. intelligence officials have been advising Bush, will never stop trying to get its hands on those weapons. And who, they ask, is most likely to supply them? Saddam, who has already used chemical weapons on his citizens and neighbors and who is cruel enough to share them. "What we know is that there is a network out there looking for this stuff, and Saddam's been spending all his time making it," says a senior White House official. "We'd be idiots not to think that at some point the two might connect."
Saddam's toxic record
According to the terms of the 1991 U.N. cease-fire resolution that ended the Gulf War, Iraq was supposed to destroy all stockpiles of biological and chemical weapons, along with the machinery and precursors to make them, and dismantle its entire nuclear-development program. By the time the U.N. inspectors left Iraq for the last time in Dec. 1998, sizable chunks of Saddam's weapons program were gone: 39,000 chemical munitions, 690 tons of chemical agents, 3,000 tons of precursors, 426 pieces of production equipment. The U.N. had also dismantled or accounted for 817 Scud missiles, which might have lofted toxic warheads at Iraq's neighbors.
Before the Gulf War, U.S. intelligence estimated that Iraq was five to 10 years away from building a nuclear bomb. When the International Atomic Energy Agency team went in after the war, it discovered Saddam was just six months from a crude device. Iraqi scientists had devised a workable weapon design, cobbled together tools and parts and had come very close to refining all of the 44 lbs. of highly enriched uranium necessary to fuel one bomb. But over the next seven years of intrusive watchdogging, Saddam's nuclear program was virtually wiped out, according to a broad range of U.N. and U.S. analysts.
Even so, in those seven years, the inspection teams were never sure of their accounting. While they were in Iraq, Saddam admitted to just a fraction of his missile and chemical stores and falsely denied the existence of a biological program. After Saddam finally quit cooperating in 1998 and the U.S. and Britain bombarded Iraq for four days, the inspectors were gone for good, immensely disturbed by what they had not found. Yet they knew, based on discrepancies in Iraqi documents they had seized, that Iraq still hid 6,000 chemical bombs. They discounted Iraq's contention that it had destroyed all of the 3.9 tons of deadly VX nerve poison that it admitted to having produced or the 500 tons of precursor chemicals to make more. They suspected Iraq retained 550 artillery shells filled with mustard gas.
Saddam also appeared to have held on to a few delivery vehicles. The U.N. thought it had accounted for all but two of Saddam's Scuds, but the CIA suspects he may have as many as 12 to 24 of the 360-mile-range missiles still hidden. Under the terms of the cease-fire, Iraq was allowed to build only missiles that could fly no more than 93 miles. And during the 1998 U.S.-British air strikes, analysts caught a glimpse of previously unknown unmanned planes hidden in a bombed Iraqi hangar; they theorized that these were equipped with nozzles and tanks to spray deadly gases and toxins at low altitudes. The drones were jury-rigged clandestinely from Czech L-29 jet trainers legally bought years before.
Saddam's biological-weapons program was the deepest black hole. Despite more than 30 searches for various unconventional arms, inspectors did not even know of its existence until mid-1995, when Saddam's defecting son-in-law Hussein Kamal revealed that secret labs buried in Iraq's security, not military, apparatus were cooking up deadly germs. Iraq subsequently admitted it made batches of anthrax bacteria, carcinogenic aflatoxin, agricultural toxins and the paralyzing poison botulinum. Iraqi officials reported they had loaded 191 bombs, including 25 missile warheads, with the poisons for use in the Gulf War. They said they destroyed them after the conflict, but they presented no proof, and Western officials don't believe them.
What has he done lately?
Rolf Ekeus, the Swedish former director of the inspection team--officially, the U.N. Special Commission--has said those leftovers from before the Gulf War constitute a "marginal" threat. The real anxiety is over what Saddam, free of prying spies, has been brewing during the past four years. In August, Iraqi Deputy Prime Minister Tariq Aziz told CBS Evening News his country possessed no "nuclear or biological or chemical weapons." The CIA maintains Iraq's race to acquire a fresh supply of weapons has accelerated. The evidence it has presented so far is somewhat soft. Without inspectors on the ground, U.S. intelligence has been doing mostly guesswork. Spy satellite photographs can show sites and buildings but not what's inside them. That has left the CIA to rely largely on reports from Iraqi defectors, and their anti-Saddam stories are hard to verify. Analysts have also patched evidence together by following the smuggling trail that Saddam leaves when acquiring equipment and material, which he does through hundreds of front companies scattered across the world. Key questions about Iraq's unseen war machine focus on so-called dual-use purchases: fermenters that can brew beer or biological agents, sprayers that can spray crops or chemical toxins, machines that can mold tools or missile parts. Since 1998, the CIA believes, on the basis of the kinds and quantities of purchases it has tracked, "the risk of diversion has increased."
According to the CIA's assessment, Iraq can reactivate modest production of chemical weapons "within a few weeks to months." But if Saddam were stocking up new stores of chemical agents, he would still face challenges putting them to use. There is no evidence that the Iraqis have built devices able to deliver chemical weapons beyond Iraq's borders. He does not seem to have perfected chemical-tipped missiles, or the fusing devices and sophisticated sprayers needed to release the poison before it hits the ground. As of now, Saddam's most effective use of lethal chemicals would involve stuffing them into artillery shells and firing them at invading troops.
Biological weapons present a scarier prospect. Iraq is believed to have fermentation equipment at animal-feed facilities near Baghdad and the ability to convert workaday centrifuges into Cuisinarts for whizzing up lethal agents. But weaponizing most pathogens so that airborne bombs can spray them effectively over large areas remains a challenge for Saddam's engineers. Nonetheless, a gram of anthrax could serve as a poor man's suitcase bomb: that's 1 trillion spores, enough for 100 million fatal doses. Hiding, transporting and disseminating that type of poison is relatively easy: no missiles are needed, just a crop duster, backpack sprayer, even a perfume atomizer.
And then there is the possibility of a nuclear showdown with Iraq, which the Bush Administration has zeroed in on to make urgent the need for war. In his two red-alert speeches late last month, Vice President Dick Cheney flatly warned that Saddam would acquire an A-bomb "fairly soon." With it, he said, Saddam could "seek domination of the entire Middle East, take control of a great portion of the world's energy supply, directly threaten America's friends and subject the U.S. to nuclear blackmail."
Most experts, including the CIA, say that while Saddam may lust for a bomb, he hasn't got one yet. But he has demonstrated a continued interest in acquiring one. Iraq still has the technical capacity: military officials point to Saddam's continued employment of 200 nuclear Ph.D.s and 7,000 ancillary workers at a secret location near Baghdad, who, the Americans say, perfect bomb designs through low-level R. and D. Inspectors were not able to destroy all of Iraq's nuclear-manufacturing equipment, and U.N. experts say Saddam has been able since 1998 to smuggle in material to replace much of what was lost.
But Saddam is still thought to lack the essential ingredient: fissile material to spark nuclear combustion. Before the Gulf War, Saddam paid German scientists to help assemble hundreds of gas centrifuges to cook bomb-grade enriched uranium from tons of raw ore. The Germans are gone now, and so are nearly all those centrifuges, although both the Atomic Energy Agency and U.S. intelligence say Iraq probably managed to squirrel away a dozen. But even if the Iraqis could put those centrifuges back together without foreign help and operate them around the clock, in five years they still could not distill enough highly enriched uranium to make one bomb. Saddam could make one faster by stealing or buying enriched uranium on the black market from former Soviet republics--which U.S. intelligence believes he has not yet succeeded in doing. If he could make such a deal, however, U.S. officials say Iraq could have a crude nuclear weapon in months, with a yield equivalent to the ones that devastated Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
So how dangerous is he?
Despite Defense Secretary Rumsfeld's constant tease that the Administration will soon flash hot new information, there appears to be nothing in U.S. intelligence reports showing that Iraq has made so great a leap forward in its dangerous arsenal as to require an immediate invasion. As the National Security Council sifts through what it can publish to persuade the public, its chief, Condoleezza Rice, is advising her colleagues that "there's no smoking gun."
In lieu of that, the let's-roll camp emphasizes--as one Administration official put it--"what we do have that's new adds to the whole narrative of the story." The hawks mean that to assess the risk properly, Saddam's weapons potential must be laid alongside the dictator's well-known nasty past. The way they see it, Saddam already has all the weapons of mass destruction he needs to pose an intolerable threat--because he would use them, personally or by terrorist proxy. They point out that he used chemicals against Iran during his eight-year war with his neighbor, and he gassed 50,000 to 100,000 rebellious Kurds inside his own country. Saddam may be contained "in his box" for now, but he is not likely to stay there: deterrence, which kept the cold war cold, simply won't work with someone this "evil."
But can Saddam, even with a nuclear weapon or two, really dominate the oil-rich Middle East or blackmail the U.S., as Cheney has warned? In the region these days, he's generally considered less, not more dangerous. In his refusal to give up his weapons and thus release Iraq from U.N. sanctions, he has beggared his country. His conventional forces are so degraded and demoralized that he can't invade another nation. He might try to subjugate his neighbors just by threatening a nuclear attack. But the threat would be weakened by the knowledge that if he ever dared use a bomb, it would provoke Washington to destroy him.
That leaves Saddam with few ways to make his cache pay off. Many experts say the day the U.S. invades is the day Saddam will unleash his weapons. It would be his moment to use them or lose them. If lethal toxins and gases failed to stop the onslaught, they might at least cause a fair number of American casualties. But most vulnerable to Saddam's arsenal are those who have always been his chief victims: Iraqi civilians.
Saddam could offer some of his bio-germs to a terrorist proxy--not for strategic gain but, presumably, just to get even for the Gulf War. He showed a taste for revenge when he dispatched assassins to kill the first President Bush during Bush's visit to Kuwait two years after the Gulf War. If Saddam manages one day to build a crude nuclear device, he's still far from having the technology to make a small, transportable weapon that terrorists could deploy. Saddam could give chemical agents to a third party, but, says David Kay, another former U.N. inspection leader, "chemical weapons are very hard to use in a terrorist scenario because the physical amount that has to be used must be huge." A biological weapon like anthrax would make the easiest hand-off package. Yet if Saddam lent terrorists his pathogens to use against the U.S., Washington might well find out, and Saddam could reasonably expect a crushing retaliation that would end his regime, if not his life.
Up to now, though, Saddam has never been detected sharing his weapons with others, and few who study him closely see signs that he would. Although a segment of the Bush Administration has tried diligently to tie him tight to al-Qaeda to justify launching a war on Iraq, they have failed to make public their facts.
For the post-9/11 Bush Administration, the maybe-nots pale in comparison with the maybes. Bush is proposing a doctrine of pre-emption that claims the right and the duty to invade another country--not based on a clear and present danger but on what he sees as an equally clear and future danger. By nature and tradition, Americans shy from pre-emptive strikes. The U.S. way has been to take on aggression after it has happened.
For this Administration, the Twin Towers attacks stood that principle on its head. "If the U.S. could have pre-empted 9/11, we would have, no question," said Cheney. "Should we be able to prevent another, much more devastating attack, we will, no question." Or, as one senior official puts it, "if we wait for a smoking gun, we'll have a mushroom cloud."
So George Bush doesn't need any Cuba-style pictures to prove Saddam is an intolerable risk. He knows it "no doubt," as Cheney repeated. Now the rest of the world has to decide if it does too.
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