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The World Waits: Where Are The Banned Weapons?
April 6, 2003
By HOWARD WITT

WASHINGTON -- A war President Bush launched expressly to rid Iraq of its weapons of mass destruction has yet to uncover any, and with each passing day the question grows more acute: Where are the huge caches of chemical, biological and nuclear materials Saddam Hussein is supposed to possess?

Much of the political, diplomatic and legal justification for the U.S.-led war rests on the assertion that Hussein is hiding weapons of mass destruction and has defied repeated United Nations demands to surrender them.

If that proves not to be true, the Bush administration's diplomatic credibility would be shaken, the Muslim world would be reinforced in its belief that Washington is waging war against Islam and U.S. leaders might even be vulnerable to legal challenges in international courts.

"We know we need to find this stuff," said one State Department official, "and we know that we will."

Pentagon officials remain confident that they will eventually find evidence of chemical, biological or nuclear weapons. They insist that they are still deeply engaged in fighting the war and have scarcely had time to search for the banned materials, some of which Hussein may have hidden in areas of Baghdad or Tikrit not yet under their control.

"Let's remember that this regime has been involved in a campaign of denial and deception for decades and has been very effective at it," Army Brig. Gen. Vincent Brooks said in Doha, Qatar, on Friday.

"And so we don't expect that we're just going to walk up on any WMD [weapons of mass destruction]. We'll have to do things that give us control of areas that let us then do deliberate work. Our first efforts are to destroy the regime and cause its removal. Secondary efforts will be related to WMD."

But American and British forces are operating in vast sections of northern, southern and western Iraq where intelligence sources and Iraqi defectors had reported that parts of the deadly arsenal were located, yet nothing definitive has been found.

In one of the Bush administration's more dramatic public assertions, Secretary of State Colin Powell told the U.N. Security Council in February that, during last November's U.N. debate on Iraq, "We know - we know - from sources that a missile brigade outside Baghdad was dispersing rocket launchers and warheads containing biological warfare agent to various locations, distributing them to various locations in western Iraq."

Pentagon officials admit intense searches of top suspected weapons sites by U.S. special operations forces in western Iraq have failed to find any such rockets or warheads.

A suspected chemical-weapons plant in the southern city of Najaf turned up empty. In northern Iraq, U.S. forces discovered equipment and recipes for concocting chlorine gas and the deadly ricin toxin, but none of the materials themselves, in a camp used by a Kurdish Islamic militant group with uncertain ties to Hussein.

On Friday, U.S. troops reported finding thousands of boxes containing vials of unidentified liquid and powder, as well as manuals on chemical warfare, at two sites near Baghdad. Officials said the materials required analysis by experts to determine their composition, but initial testing indicated they might be explosives.

U.S. and British troops also have come across stockpiles of protective chemical-weapons suits and injectors of atropine, a nerve gas antidote, at several sites abandoned by Iraqi forces. That is proof enough, Powell says, of Iraqi intentions.

But Iraq also fought a long war with Iran in which both sides used chemical weapons, experts note, so the Iraqi protective gear also could have been intended as a defense against a future attack by its neighbor.

The search is complicated by Iraq's industrial development.

Iraq has the most extensive petrochemical industry in the Middle East and a wealth of vaccine factories, single-cell protein research labs, medical and veterinary manufacturing centers and water treatment plants.

Nearly all are dual-use facilities, capable of civilian or military employment, but most were devoted to legitimate activity even at the height of Iraq's secret weapons programs.

As they search that industrial landscape, U.S. and allied ground forces will inevitably find, as U.N. inspectors have found since 1991, thousands of potential weapons sites. But few, if any, that could be nothing else.

The Bush administration's confidence that Iraq possesses weapons of mass destruction is founded on several facts, including Hussein's use of them against Iran and Kurds in northern Iraq, and discoveries of extensive stockpiles by U.N. weapons inspectors after the 1991 war.

Iraq contends that it has destroyed all of its remaining weapons of mass destruction. But when the most recent round of U.N. inspections ended last month, the inspectors said Iraq had failed to account for suspected weapons stocks that included 1.5 tons of VX nerve gas, 1,000 tons of mustard gas, as many as 26,000 liters of anthrax, at least 19,000 liters of botulinum toxin, and tens of thousands of artillery shells and bombs designed to deliver chemical and biological agents.

U.S. officials offer several theories about the locations of those weapons. Large quantities might have been issued to Hussein's most loyal forces for use in coming days as U.S. troops move deeper inside Baghdad; other stockpiles could be hidden inside secret bunkers or stashed in mobile storage such as trucks or railroad cars.

"The fact that we haven't found anything thus far is not necessarily indicative that we won't find anything at the end of day," said Jonathan Tucker, senior fellow at the U.S. Institute of Peace and a former U.N. inspector.

But it is also possible, notes Joseph Cirincione, a nonproliferation expert at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, that Hussein did indeed dispose of many of his deadliest weapons, choosing instead to retain the scientists and expertise to reconstitute the weapons programs once the world turned its attention elsewhere.

"If it's all over and there's no weapons," Cirincione said, "then what we've basically done is occupy a foreign country for the wrong reason, and there will be a lot of questions about why we did this."

Those questions, legal experts say, could take the form of international civil lawsuits in the International Court of Justice against the United States or its leaders for allegedly violating U.N. charter prohibitions against the use of force.

But the prospect of international criminal charges is much more remote. The new international war crimes court would not have jurisdiction because neither Iraq nor the United States has ratified participation in the court.

Howard Witt is a Chicago Tribune reporter. A Washington Post report is included.

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