The United States’s Central Intelligence Agency’s (CIA) Director George Tenet warned last fall that if the United States attacked Iraq, President Saddam Hussein might hand off his forbidden weapons to Islamic terrorists for a counterattack.
Some analysts say that scenario cannot be ruled out now that 60 days of searches by US troops have produced scant evidence of the doomsday weapons Saddam supposedly had.
Did they wind up in the hands of terrorists?
Charles Pena of the Cato Institute said if Tenet’s speculation was correct, it would be the ultimate irony because, he said, the whole point of invading Iraq was to prevent Saddam from passing his weapons on to the al-Qaedas of the world.
There are more benign theories for the lack of progress in finding weapons though.
Peter Brookes of the Heritage Foundation said Saddam may simply have decided to hide the armaments. Or, he said, perhaps Saddam destroyed them to leave United Nations (UN) weapons inspectors with no smoking guns and thus diminish the possibility that President George Bush would make war against him. (The inspectors came up empty-handed, but Bush attacked anyway.) To Brookes, it matters little whether weapons are found.
”The important thing is that we’ve eliminated the regime’s capacity to use these things,” he said.
But, politically, the administration is eager for firm evidence of Saddam’s arsenal because its existence was the main justification for the war.
Pictures of American troops standing astride a chemical weapons depot would go a long way toward silencing critics, including those who believe intelligence agencies doctored evidence to support the administration’s claims about Saddam’s weapons.
Some Democratic presidential candidates who backed the war are seizing on the administration’s missing weapons problem.
Senator Joe Lieberman of Connecticut, writing an opinion piece on Monday in The Boston Globe, said, ”Before the war began, I urged the president to form task forces to swiftly locate and secure all suspect sites the moment the shooting stopped.
”To those of us who supported Saddam’s removal, this was a critical priority. Yet it was not done, and the failure to do so might someday be measured in American lives.”
Secretary of State Colin Powell told a German interviewer last Friday he believes it’s just a matter of time before weapons turn up.
”We are flooding it [Iraq] with inspectors; we are flooding it with experts who will look in every place that one can look in to find documents and to get evidence of their programmes of weapons of mass destruction. And we’re quite sure we’ll find it,” he said.
He said two vans discovered recently in Iraq may have contained equipment designed for biological warfare. The equipment is being tested.
Joseph Cirincione, of the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, agrees that more time is needed.
But, he said, ”It’s obvious that the WMD [weapons of mass destruction] program did not exist on the scale that the administration claimed. If it did, we would have seen it by now.”
Beyond that, he said, large numbers of Iraqis would be volunteering information to American search teams about where the weapons were made and where they are being hidden.
Still, Cirincione finds the absence of firm answers to be frustrating.
”What the heck happened there?” he asked.
Bush professes no alarm.
”We’ll find them, and it’s just going to be a matter of time to do so,” the US president said earlier this month. ‒ Sapa-AP