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WMD report provides respite for coalition BRIAN BRADY IT WAS hardly a comprehensive endorsement of their stubborn insistence that Saddam Hussein had Weapons of Mass Destruction, but it was as positive as George Bush and Tony Blair have heard for several months.
When the last Iraqi weapons inspector, David Kay, quit three months ago, his parting shot, warning that coalition leaders were "almost all wrong" in their pre-war assessment that Iraq had WMD, was viewed as a devastating indictment of the decision to go to war in the first place.
So when his successor in charge of the Iraq Survey Group (ISG), Charles Duelfer, took his place before a Congressional hearing last week, they hoped for a little better. Duelfer delivered more than that.
The second interim report from the ISG, which remains a strictly confidential document, reads like a billet-doux, compared to the horror stories presented in the past by Kay and the former United Nations chief weapons inspector, Hans Blix.
"Iraq did have facilities suitable for the production of biological and chemical agents needed for weapons," Duelfer said, in a declassified version of the report, obtained by Scotland on Sunday. "It had plans to expand and even build new facilities.
"There were plans under the direction of a leading nuclear scientist/WMD program manager to construct plants capable of making a variety of chemicals and producing a year?s supply of any chemical in a month. This was a crash program."
Duelfer also revealed that Saddam had used up to £500m a year from illicit arms sales to fund his Military Industrialised Commission weapons development programme, which appeared to be developing a nuclear capability, as well as a long-range missile system with the assistance of North Korea.
Chemical weapons, biological agents, production up until the very eve of the war itself, the hint of nuclear technology and the involvement of another pariah state: the ISG had done its work well. Where his predecessors brought negativity, Duelfer appears relentlessly upbeat. "It is hopeful," one restrained Foreign Office official said last night of the five-page summary, which breathed new life into the flagging campaign to prove Saddam?s guilt. "It looks better."
Duelfer?s first report is, indeed, an advance on its precedents, in substance as well as tone: his document is peppered with references to new information, new discoveries and progress on earlier revelations. But it is also liberally sprinkled with caveats and warnings as to the difficulties in turning up more evidence. Ultimately, it still fails to produce any tangible proof of the wide-scale WMD programmes the coalition assured the world lay within Saddam?s empire, and widely touted as the justification for the conflict.
The ISG has 1,400 staff in the field in Iraq, almost 70 from the UK, and a huge budget. It has worked around the clock for almost a year to uncover the truth about Iraq?s alleged arsenal. Duelfer confirmed that his staff had visited thousands of sites, spoken to hundreds of experts and turned up millions of pages of official documents. Yet they have still produced nothing that could charitably be described as a WMD.
Moreover, opponents of the war maintain that Duelfer?s full findings are even less conclusive - and, in fact, even cast doubt on the basic claim that Saddam had WMD in the first place.
Democrat senator Carl Levin has now challenged the CIA, which controls the survey group, to declassify the entire report, claiming it gives a misleading impression of the view on the ground in Iraq.
"Mr Duelfer?s statement is written to express the author?s ?suspicions? as to Iraq?s activities relating to possible weapons of mass destruction programmes or activities while leaving out information in the classified report which points away from his suspicions," said Levin, who is the Democrats? most senior defence spokesman.
It is a troubling accusation, which neither Duelfer nor the CIA has yet confronted, but it illustrates the climate of scepticism surrounding the ISG?s work. The lack of trust is also felt in Iraq, as well as in Washington and London. Duelfer, who has spent the last six weeks in Baghdad, complained that many former officials of the Saddam regime refused to speak.
"On one hand, there is a fear of prosecution or arrest. On the other, there is a fear [that] former regime supporters will exact retribution," he reported. Then, in an almost plaintive remark which exposed the true difficulty of his task, he added: "The people we need to speak to have spent their entire professional lives being trained not to speak about WMD."
Saddam Hussein has been defeated militarily and he lies in captivity, but he remains a powerful opponent of Bush and Blair as they continue the fight to win the post-conflict argument.
Duelfer appears a willing helper, but he may yet fall victim to the circumstances that demoralised his predecessors. His strategy for succeeding where they failed, however, owes more to psychology than practical action in the deserts of Iraq. | |
