Iraq and weapons of mass destructionThe possibility that the government of Iraq used, possessed or intend to acquire weapons of mass destruction (WMD) has been a major international issue in the last dozen years. The threat of WMD in the hands of Saddam Hussein was given as the chief of several reasons for the decision of the United States to invade Iraq and topple his regime in the 2003 invasion of Iraq. Iraq acceded the Geneva Protocol on September 8, 1931, the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty on October 29, 1969, signed the Biological Weapons Convention in 1972, but did not ratify until June 11, 1991. Iraq has not signed to the Chemical Weapons Convention. In the 1991 Gulf War ceasefire terms Iraq was forbidden from developing, possessing or using chemical, biological and nuclear weapons of mass destruction. Other items proscribed by the treaty included missiles with a range of more than 150 kilometres. The UN established a commission, UNSCOM, to verify Iraq's adherence to the treaty. At the time adherence was established economic sanctions against Iraq were to be lifted. Iraq's adherence to the treaty was, however, never established to the satisfaction of the United Nations Security Council and the sanctions were not lifted until after the 2003 war. UNSCOM encountered various difficulties and lack of cooperation by the Iraqi government. In 1998, UNSCOM was withdrawn at the request of the United States before Operation Desert Fox. Despite this, UNSCOM's own estimate was that 90-95% of Iraqi WMD's had been successfully destroyed before its 1998 withdrawal. After that Iraq remained without any outside weapons inspectors for five years. During this time speculations arose that Iraq had actively resumed its WMD programmes. In particular various figures in the second George W. Bush administration went so far as to express concern about nuclear weapons:
The 2003 warPreludePrior to the invasion, the United States said that Iraq had weapons of mass destruction, and that it must either give them all up or undergo a regime change. However, immediately prior to the invasion, the United States made a further demand that Saddam Hussein step down from power and vacate Iraq. Still later, the United States announced that even if Saddam Hussein abdicated and his government was changed, it would send in forces to verify disarmament and oversee the transition to a new government. Iraq variously claimed that it never had any WMD, or that it had gotten rid of them all (and asserted that it was thus in compliance with United States and United Nation demands). Some said before the invasion that if Iraq were to prove credibly that it no longer had such capability, by allowing unfettered access to inspectors and permitting the destruction of WMD stocks and production facilities as they were found, the primary claimed justification for the proposed US invasion would vanish. At the United Nations Security Council French and Russian Foreign Ministers Dominique de Villepin and Igor Ivanov garnered an unusual applause inside the chamber with their speeches against the war and for a continuation of the weapons inspections. For more details: Iraq disarmament crisis, The UN Security Council and the Iraq warThe fall of IraqAs of April 16, 2003, Iraq's Baath regime had fallen to the invasion, all major cities have been captured, and no weapons of mass destruction had been reported found. As of April 24, 2003, the United States had started backing off[1] on the search for weapons of mass destruction. Although no WMDs have yet been found, UNMOVIC chief inspector Hans Blix has called for UN inspections to resume.[1]Aftermath of the 2003 warWolfowitz makes a controversial statementOn May 30, 2003, Paul Wolfowitz stated in an interview with Vanity Fair magazine that the issue of weapons of mass destruction was the point of greatest agreement among Bush's team among the reasons to remove Saddam Hussein from power. In Vanity Fair, he said, "The truth is that for reasons that have a lot to do with the U.S. government bureaucracy, we settled on the one issue that everyone could agree on, which was weapons of mass destruction as the core reason..." The remainder of the quote, which was not included in the article, is as follows, according to a Pentagon transcript: "...but, there have always been three fundamental concerns. One is weapons of mass destruction, the second is support for terrorism, the third is the criminal treatment of the Iraqi people. Actually I guess you could say there's a fourth overriding one which is the connection between the first two." [1] The same day, General James Conway, senior Marine commander in Iraq, expressed similar thoughts in a satellite interview with reporters at the Pentagon.The New York Times, Ahmad Chalabi and WMDIn the build up to the 2003 war the New York Times published a number of stories claiming to prove that Iraq possessed WMD. One story in particular, written by Judith Miller helped persuade the American public that Iraq had WMD: in September 2002 she wrote about an intercepted shipment of aluminium tubes which the NYT said were to be used to develop nuclear material. It is now clear that they could not be used for that purpose. The story was followed up with television appearances by Colin Powell, Donald Rumsfeld and Condoleezza Rice all pointing to the story as part of the basis for taking military action against Iraq.. Miller's sources were introduced to her by Ahmad Chalabi, an Iraqi exile favourable to a US invasion of Iraq. Miller is also listed as a speaker for The Middle East Forum, an organisation which openly declared support for an invasion. In May 2004 the New York Times published an editorial which stated that its journalism in the build up to war had sometimes been lax. It appears that the Iraqi exiles used for the stories about WMD were either ignorant as to the real status of Iraq's WMD or lied to journalists to achieve their own ends.Looting of nuclear facilitiesVarious nuclear facilities, including the Baghdad Nuclear Research Facility and Tuwaitha Nuclear Research Center, were found looted in the month following the invasion. On June 20, 2003, the International Atomic Energy Agency reported that tons of uranium, as well as other radioactive materials such as thorium, had been recovered, and that the vast majority had remained on site. There were several reports of radiation sickness in the area. By June 7, 2003, many American and British media sources [1] [1] began questioning the credibility of the Bush administration, and John Dean even brought up the possibility of impeachment [1] for "lying to Congress and the American people", although this idea has largely fallen by the wayside since some members of Congress had access to much of the same information as the White House. Bush suggests that all the documents and suspected weapons sites were looted and burned in Iraq by looters in the final days of the war before the US could find them. [1]Blair maintains that Iraq had WMD'sOn July 17, 2003, the British Prime Minister Tony Blair said in an address to the US congress, that history would forgive the United States and United Kingdom, even if they were wrong about weapons of mass destruction. He still maintained that "with every fiber of instinct and conviction" Iraq did have weapons of mass destruction.Hans Blix weighs inIn an interview with the Australian Broadcasting Corporation in September Hans Blix expressed his belief that the former Iraqi regime had destroyed all or almost all of its banned weapons after the First Gulf War. Quotes: "I'm certainly coming more and more to the conclusion that Iraq has, as they maintained, destroyed all, almost, of what they had in the summer of 1991." "The more time that has passed, the more I think it's unlikely that anything will be found." \nThe ISG Interim ReportOn October 3, 2003, the world digests David Kay's Iraq Survey Group report that finds no stockpiles of WMD in Iraq, although it states the regime intended to develop more weapons with additional capabilities. Such programs appear to have been largely dormant. Weapons inspectors in Iraq do find some "biological laboratories" of unclear purpose and a strain of botulinum bacteria which had been declared. The US-sponsored search for WMD had at this point cost $300 million and was projected to cost around $600 million more. In David Kay's statement on the interim report of the ISG the following paragraph is found: "We have not yet found stocks of weapons, but we are not yet at the point where we can say definitively either that such weapon stocks do not exist or that they existed before the war and our only task is to find where they have gone. We are actively engaged in searching for such weapons based on information being supplied to us by Iraqis." Another notable statement is the following: "We have discovered dozens of WMD-related program activities and significant amounts of equipment that Iraq concealed from the United Nations during the inspections that began in late 2002." The phrase of 'WMD-related program activities' was later used in George Bush's state of the union speech. Bush's critics, often not realizing the origin of the statement, derided Bush for unclear wording and trying to "lower the bar" on confirming his pre-war WMD-claims. Demetrius Perricos, then head of UNMOVIC, stated that the Kay report contained little information not already known by UNMOVIC. Many organizations, such as the biosecurity journal, have claimed that Kay's report is a "worst case analysis" [1] On October 29 U.S. intelligence spokesmen claimed that Iraqi WMDs and programmes had been comprehensively hidden before or immediately after the fall of Bagdhad, with some elements of the programmes being shipped out of the country.Saddam captured: Insists "no WMD's"On December 14 Saddam Hussein was captured by U.S. forces. In his first interrogation he was asked whether Iraq had any WMD's. His reply was: "No, of course not, the U.S. dreamed them up itself to have a reason to go to war with us."Butler InquiryOn 3 February 2003, British Foreign Secretary Jack Straw announced an independent inquiry, to be chaired by Lord Butler, to examine the reliability of British intelligence relating to alleged weapons of mass destruction in Iraq. The Butler Review was published 14 July 2004.Iraq Intelligence CommissionOn 6 February 2003, U.S. President George W. Bush named an Iraq Intelligence Commission, chaired by Charles Robb and Laurence Silberman, to investigate United States intelligence, specifically regarding the 2003 invasion of Iraq and Iraq's weapons of mass destruction.Blix interview fuels calls for enquiries into Intelligence gatheringOn 8 February 2003, Dr Hans Blix, in an interview on BBC TV, accused the US and British governments of dramatising the threat of weapons of mass destruction in Iraq, in order to strengthen the case for the 2003 war against the regime of Saddam Hussein. Quote: "It was to do with information management. The intention was to dramatise it."\n[1]U.S. Senate Committee on Intelligence ReviewOn 4 June 2003, U.S. Senator Pat Roberts announced that the U.S. Select Committee on Intelligence that he chaired would "as a part of its ongoing oversight of the intelligence community...conduct a Review of intelligence on Iraqi weapons of mass destruction."\n \nOn 9 July 2004, the Committee released its report. intelligence.senate.govKay calls Blair "delusional"In an interview with BBC in June 2004 David Kay, former head of the Iraq Survey Group, made the following commment: "Anyone out there holding - as I gather Prime Minister Blair has recently said - the prospect that, in fact, the Iraq Survey Group is going to unmask actual weapons of mass destruction, [is] really delusional."Claims of Chemical Weapons finds since 2003Since the 2003 invasion of Iraq, several reported finds of chemical weapons were announced. During the invasion itself, there were half a dozen incidents in which the US military announced that it had found chemical weapons. All of these claims were based on field reports, and were later retracted. After the war, many cases - most notably on April 7, 2003 when several large drums tested positive - continued to be reported in the same way. Another such post-war case occurred on January 9, 2004, when Icelandic munitions experts and Danish military engineers discovered 36 120mm mortar rounds containing liquid buried in Southern Iraq. While initial tests suggested that the rounds contained the banned chemical weapon blister gas, [1] subsequent analysis by American and Danish experts showed that no chemical agent was present. [1] It appears that the rounds have been buried, and most probably forgotten, since the Iran-Iraq war. Some of the munitions were in an advanced state of decay and most of the weaponry would likely have been unusable. The reason for the high false positive rates is that field tests using the ICAM (Improved Chemical Agent Monitor) are very inaccurate, and even the more time consuming field tests have shown themselves to be poor at determining whether something is a chemical weapon. According to Donald Rumsfeld, ""Almost all first reports we get turn out to be wrong," he said. "We don't do first reports and we don't speculate." [1]. Many chemicals used in explosives, such as phosphorus, show up as blister agents. Other chemicals, such as pesticides (especially organophosphates such as malathion), routinely show up as nerve agents. Chemically, they are quite similar - the main difference is that some organophosphates kill only insects, and are consequently used as insecticides. On May 2 2004 a shell reportedly containing mustard gas, was found in the middle of street west of Bagdad. Officials from the Defense Department commented that this was part of an Improvised Explosive Device (IED). They were not certain that use was to be made of the device as a bomb.[1] On May 15 2004 a 155-mm artillery shell was used as an improvised bomb. The shell exploded and two US soldiers were treated for minor exposure to a nerve agent (nausea and dialated pupils).[1] [1] On May 18 is was reported that the preliminary field tests indicated that the shell contained about a gallon of the chemical agent sarin. This would seem quite illogical, especially in the case of Sarin. Iraq never produced high purity Sarin. Early in the Iran-Iraq war, Iraq's production process produced low purity Sarin (60%), which lost effectiveness relatively quickly, so that they could produce it in bulk and without more complex refining equipment. Even refrigerated, it would drop to 10% purity in only 2 years, and without refrigeration it would take weeks to months to reach this level. Early during the Iran-Iraq war, it was critical that the Iraqis move their chemical weapons from the production lines to the front in short order. In response to these inefficiencies, Iraq developed binary weapons, in which the Sarin is developed right before use. However, to use a binary weapon, methylphosphonic difluoride had to be added to the shell immediately before use by a soldier wearing a gas mask, where it would be mixed with cyclohexanol. The reportedly simple IED found on the 15th would have little ability to do such an action; it would require separate tanks and a pumping/mixing system to produce any Sarin in this manner. The use of high explosives in the IED, however, would destroy most of the Sarin if this were the design. Based on the limited information that has been released to the public so far, some observers have suggested that the shell might have been an American-made M687, possibly provided to Iraq during the late 1980s.See also\n*U.S.-led occupation of Iraq\n*U.S. plan to invade Iraq\n*Operation Rockingham\n*Office of Special Plans\n*September Dossier\n*Dodgy Dossier\n*Iraq Survey GroupExternal links and references\n* Statement by David Kay on the Interim Progress Report\n*Iraqi Nuclear Site Is Found Looted, Washington Post, May 3, 2003\n*According to Physicians for Human Rights, evidence exists that Iraq has manufactured and used nerve gas\n*Victims eyewitness accounts of the effects of chemical weapons used by Iraq in the Iran-Iraq war\n*International Institute of Strategic Studies Report\n*U.S. Had Key Role in Iraq Buildup, Washington Post, December 29, 2002\n*UNMOVIC February report\n*UNMOVIC May report\n*Time interview with Scott Ritter\n*U.S. Diplomatic and Commercial Relationships with Iraq, 1980 - 2 August 1990\n*Iraq destroyed WMD years ago says Blix\n*STATEMENT ON THE INTERIM PROGRESS REPORT ON THE ACTIVITIES OF THE IRAQ SURVEY GROUP\n*TIME Exclusive: Notes from Saddam in Custody\n*Bearing Questions, 4 New Iraqi Leaders Pay Hussein a Visit\n*U.N. Inspector: Little New in U.S. Probe for Iraq Arms\n*A War Crime or an Act of War? (An article on the Halabja incident.)\n* The very secret service Michael Meacher, Blair's former minister, on Operation Rockingham The Guardian, 21. November 2003\n* The Butler Inquiry\n* International Law and the War in Iraq\n* US tried to plant WMDs, failed: whistleblower Daily Times, May 2004\n* Odyssey of Frustration: In Search for Weapons, Army Team Finds Vacuum Cleaners Washington Post, May 18, 2003\n* U.S. Faulted for Leaving Tons of Uranium in Iraq Washington Post, July 8, 2004\n* U.S. Removed Radioactive Materials From Iraq Facility Washington Post, July 7, 2004\n* U.S. Quietly Sneaks Once-Looted Uranium Out of Iraq Reuters, July 8, 2004 \nCategory:IraqCategory:US-Iraqi relations\nCategory:Weapons of mass destruction |
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"Sometimes a scream is better than a thesis." - Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803-1882) |
