Nearly four months after the fall of Baghdad, intensive searching across Iraq has failed to uncover any evidence of weapons of mass destruction (WMD). More surprisingly, there has been virtually no evidence of any production capability or even storage facilities. The British government still insists that the elusive smoking gun will be found, but it is now frankly implausible that the regime had, as it alleges, a 45-minute capability to use weapons of mass destruction at the time the war started in March 2003.
The Coalitions current fall-back position is that the large Iraq Survey Group will eventually find some evidence, but this conveniently omits a substantial earlier process from view. As soon as the Iraqi regime had fallen in April, the US armed forces put in specialist search groups to visit all the key sites earmarked by previous surveillance and intelligence reports. To their own surprise, and that of the US authorities, they found nothing of substance and were ultimately withdrawn.
Even so, controversy over the existence and condition of Iraqi WMD programmes continues. It is particularly significant in Britain, where a presumed immediate threat from WMD was heavily used to bring sceptical Labour MPs into line in crucial parliamentary votes before the war. It makes sense now to stand back and try to get an overview of what really happened.
The origins of Iraqs WMD programmes
The Baath regime was interested in WMD almost from the beginning. It saw Iraq as a major regional player, and one way to consolidate this was a significant deterrent capability, especially in the face of a singularly powerful Israel equipped with a substantial nuclear arsenal. Iraqs own WMD ambitions developed in the 1970s and focused on nuclear and chemical weapons, with biological weapons initially sidelined. However, progress on a plutonium-based nuclear programme came to an abrupt end with the Israeli destruction of the Osiraq nuclear reactor in 1981.
After that, Iraq ceased to concentrate on the development of plutonium-based nuclear weapons, because such a programme is necessarily centralised and thereby vulnerable to attack. Instead it opted for a dispersed programme based on uranium enrichment. It also accelerated its development of crude chemical weapons such as mustard gas, put more effort into developing nerve agents and also started a biological weapons programme. Chemical weapons were used repeatedly against Iranian ground forces during the eight-year Iran-Iraq war and also against Kurdish civilians, both at a time when Iraq was informally allied with the United States and with western Gulf states as a buffer against Iran.
At the time of the 1991 war, the nuclear programme still had some way to go, but Iraq had a range of chemical and biological weapons that it might well have used if the regime had been threatened with destruction.
After the 1991 war, the UN inspectorate, in the form of the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) and the UN Special Commission on Iraq (Unscom), proceeded to dismantle as much of the Iraqi WMD programme as they could. By all accounts they achieved a great deal. Large quantities of crude chemical weapons and their production facilities were destroyed, along with some nerve agents (see the interview with Ron Manley in openDemocracy). Unscom also oversaw the destruction of numerous missiles and their production lines. The IAEA was particularly successful in destroying nuclear production facilities, often after protracted searches.
By the time the inspectors withdrew in December 1998, virtually all of Iraqs nuclear and missile facilities had been destroyed, along with most of the chemical weapons facilities. It was not clear whether all of the crude chemical agents had been found, nor was there so much progress in uncovering all of the nerve agent work or the biological weapons.
The approach to war: three views of Iraqs capability
In the months leading up to the war, there were essentially three views about the extent of the Iraqi WMD programme.
The first was that a considerable clandestine programme should be assumed to exist, centred on chemical nerve agents and biological weapons, but also involving programmes to reconstitute a nuclear capability and to extend the range of missiles.
The London-based International Institute of Strategic Studies (IISS) took this view, although with significant notes of caution in its own analysis. The US and UK governments held a similar position but went quite a lot further in its claims, most notably with the British emphasis on the 45-minute capability and the overall view that Iraq was an immediate threat with aggressive intent.
Even in the run-up to the war, this stance was beginning to fray around the edges as the UN inspectors moved back into Iraq and could not find anything, even at sites identified by US and UK politicians.
The second view was that Iraq had probably retained a limited capability to use chemical and biological weapons, the aim being to have some kind of deterrent to help ensure regime survival. This appears to have been its aim in 1991, and may have been one of the reasons the US forces did not attempt to destroy the regime then.
The likelihood of such a limited deterrent was argued by a number of analysts and in earlier columns in this series, and there were two implications. One was that such weapons were inadequate to constitute a major threat and hence not sufficient to offer any justification for war; the other was that going to war against a regime with even this limited capability was highly risky, and could lead to the use of such weapons with the possibility of a US nuclear response.
The third view was expressed by some independent specialists in chemical and biological weapons, and is now largely forgotten. This was that it was unlikely that Iraq had any kind of effective capability, not least because its ability to produce stable forms of the weapons was highly limited. In other words, old chemical and biological stocks were in all probability virtually useless, and there was little evidence of a reconstituted programme.
On the evidence now available, it is looking increasingly likely that the third view is the most accurate and that Iraq did not have an active WMD capability by early 2003. Some politicians have suggested that the regime destroyed its own weapons in the immediate run-up to the war, but this makes little sense after all, if you expect that your regime is on the point of destruction and you have got even a crude deterrent, you hardly set about destroying it!
Who can be believed?
It is certainly possible that, in the expectation of an eventual end to sanctions, the regime had decided not even to try to redevelop its WMD programme, while preserving the possibility of going back to WMD at a later stage. If this was the policy, then the main reason that it came unstuck was the election of George W. Bush and the consequent intention of the United States to terminate the regime. This in turn went well beyond the WMD issue and had, as earlier articles in this series have outlined, much more to do with Washingtons need to ensure the security of Persian Gulf oil supplies.
The implication of all this is that the stated reason for going to war, the threat of Iraqs WMD, simply does not stand up. The political implications of such a situation have, until now, been far more problematic for Tony Blair than for George W. Bush, but this is now changing as the continuing level of US casualties suffered by US forces in Iraq puts pressure on the Bush administration to explain its real motives for war.
Under these circumstances, the political need to find the smoking gun increases. This raises a key issue. It is possible, indeed probable, that the Iraq Survey Group will find some limited evidence of a past Iraqi chemical and biological weapons (CBW) programme, and perhaps even some indications of the ability to redevelop one but all the signs are that such evidence will be very limited and a long way from that required to indicate a serious threat.
If indeed such limited evidence appears, the political pressure for it to be sexed up (to use a phrase that has become notorious in recent British controversy about the WMD issue) will be extreme, but any attempt to do so is likely to fail. Dodgy dossiers and previous examples of over-hype will then be recalled, to the extent that even legitimate evidence, albeit limited, will not be believed across much of the world.
The obvious way beyond the miasma of political mistrust which surrounds the issue would be for the US and its partners to invite the UN inspectors back, with unlimited powers to conduct a thorough search throughout Iraq. There is no sign of that happening. Indeed, the very unwillingness of the US and its British ally to countenance such a move has the ironic result of leaving them with little chance of convincing the world that, on the basis of Iraqi WMD at least, the war was ever justified.
