(C) Common Dreams
This story was originally published by Common Dreams and is unaltered.
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The Great Terror [1]
['Condé Nast', 'Jeffrey Goldberg']
Date: 2002-03-25
Peter Galbraith told me that in 1987 he witnessed the destruction of Kurdish villages and cemeteries—”anything that was related to Kurdish identity,” he said. “This was one of the factors that led me to conclude that it is a policy of genocide, a crime of intent, destroying a group whole or in part.”
9. IRAQ’S ARMS RACE
In a series of meetings in the summer and fall of 1995, Charles Duelfer, the deputy executive chairman of the United Nations Special Commission, or UNSCOM—the now defunct arms-inspection team—met in Baghdad with Iraqi government delegations. The subject was the status of Iraq’s nonconventional-weapons programs, and Duelfer, an American diplomat on loan to the United Nations, was close to a breakthrough.
In early August, Saddam’s son-in-law Hussein Kamel had defected to Jordan, and had then spoken publicly about Iraq’s offensive biological, chemical, and nuclear capabilities. (Kamel later returned to Iraq and was killed almost immediately, on his father-in-law’s orders.) The regime’s credibility was badly damaged by Kamel’s revelations, and during these meetings the Iraqi representatives decided to tell Duelfer and his team more than they had ever revealed before. “This was the first time Iraq actually agreed to discuss the Presidential origins of these programs,” Duelfer recalled. Among the most startling admissions made by the Iraqi scientists was that they had weaponized the biological agent aflatoxin.
Aflatoxin, which is produced from types of fungi that occur in moldy grains, is the biological agent that some Kurdish physicians suspect was mixed with chemical weapons and dropped on Kurdistan. Christine Gosden, the English geneticist, told me, “There is absolutely no forensic evidence whatsoever that aflatoxins have ever been used in northern Iraq, but this may be because no systematic testing has been carried out in the region, to my knowledge.”
Duelfer told me, “We kept pressing the Iraqis to discuss the concept of use for aflatoxin. We learned that the origin of the biological-weapons program is in the security services, not in the military—meaning that it really came out of the assassinations program.” The Iraqis, Duelfer said, admitted something else: they had loaded aflatoxin into two Scud-ready warheads, and also mixed aflatoxin with tear gas. They wouldn’t say why.
In an op-ed article that Duelfer wrote for the Los Angeles Times last year about Iraqi programs to develop weapons of mass destruction, he offered this hypothesis: “If a regime wished to conceal a biological attack, what better way than this? Victims would suffer the short-term effects of inhaling tear gas and would assume that this was the totality of the attack: Subsequent cancers would not be linked to the prior event.”
United Nations inspectors were alarmed to learn about the aflatoxin program. Richard Spertzel, the chief biological-weapons inspector for UNSCOM, put it this way: “It is a devilish weapon. Iraq was quite clearly aware of the long-term carcinogenic effect of aflatoxin. Aflatoxin can only do one thing—destroy people’s livers. And I suspect that children are more susceptible. From a moral standpoint, aflatoxin is the cruellest weapon—it means watching children die slowly of liver cancer.”
Spertzel believes that if aflatoxin were to be used as a weapon it would not be delivered by a missile. “Aflatoxin is a little tricky,” he said. “I don’t know if a single dose at one point in time is going to give you the long-term effects. Continuous, repeated exposure—through food—would be more effective.” When I asked Spertzel if other countries have weaponized aflatoxin, he replied, “I don’t know any other country that did it. I don’t know any country that would.”
It is unclear what biological and chemical weapons Saddam possesses today. When he maneuvered UNSCOM out of his country in 1998, weapons inspectors had found a sizable portion of his arsenal but were vexed by what they couldn’t find. His scientists certainly have produced and weaponized anthrax, and they have manufactured botulinum toxin, which causes muscular paralysis and death. They’ve made Clostridium perfringens, a bacterium that causes gas gangrene, a condition in which the flesh rots. They have also made wheat-cover smut, which can be used to poison crops, and ricin, which, when absorbed into the lungs, causes hemorrhagic pneumonia.
According to Gary Milhollin, the director of the Wisconsin Project on Nuclear Arms Control, whose Iraq Watch project monitors Saddam’s weapons capabilities, inspectors could not account for a great deal of weaponry believed to be in Iraq’s possession, including almost four tons of the nerve agent VX; six hundred tons of ingredients for VX; as much as three thousand tons of other poison-gas agents; and at least five hundred and fifty artillery shells filled with mustard gas. Nor did the inspectors find any stores of aflatoxin.
Saddam’s motives are unclear, too. For the past decade, the development of these weapons has caused nothing but trouble for him; his international isolation grows not from his past crimes but from his refusal to let weapons inspectors dismantle his nonconventional-weapons programs. When I asked the Iraqi dissident Kanan Makiya why Saddam is so committed to these programs, he said, “I think this regime developed a very specific ideology associated with power, and how to extend that power, and these weapons play a very important psychological and political part.” Makiya added, “They are seen as essential to the security and longevity of the regime.”
Certainly, the threat of another Halabja has kept Iraq’s citizens terrorized and compliant. Amatzia Baram, the Iraq expert at the University of Haifa, told me that in 1999 Iraqi troops in white biohazard suits suddenly surrounded the Shiite holy city of Karbala, in southern Iraq, which has been the scene of frequent uprisings against Saddam. (The Shiites make up about sixty per cent of Iraq’s population, and the regime is preoccupied with the threat of another rebellion.) The men in the white suits did nothing; they just stood there. “But the message was clear,” Baram said. “ ‘What we did to the Kurds in Halabja we can do to you.’ It’s a very effective psychological weapon. From the information I saw, people were really panicky. They ran into their homes and shut their windows. It worked extremely well.”
Saddam’s weapons of mass destruction clearly are not meant solely for domestic use. Several years ago in Baghdad, Richard Butler, who was then the chairman of UNSCOM, fell into conversation with Tariq Aziz, Saddam’s confidant and Iraq’s deputy Prime Minister. Butler asked Aziz to explain the rationale for Iraq’s biological-weapons project, and he recalled Aziz’s answer: “He said, ‘We made bioweapons in order to deal with the Persians and the Jews.’ “
Iraqi dissidents agree that Iraq’s programs to build weapons of mass destruction are focussed on Israel. “Israel is the whole game,” Ahmad Chalabi, the leader of the Iraqi National Congress, told me. “Saddam is always saying publicly, ‘Who is going to fire the fortieth missile?’ “—a reference to the thirty-nine Scud missiles he fired at Israel during the Gulf War. “He thinks he can kill one hundred thousand Israelis in a day with biological weapons.” Chalabi added, “This is the only way he can be Saladin”—the Muslim hero who defeated the Crusaders. Students of Iraq and its government generally agree that Saddam would like to project himself as a leader of all the Arabs, and that the one sure way to do that is by confronting Israel.
In the Gulf War, when Saddam attacked Israel, he was hoping to provoke an Israeli response, which would drive America’s Arab friends out of the allied coalition. Today, the experts say, Saddam’s desire is to expel the Jews from history. In October of 2000, at an Arab summit in Cairo, I heard the vice-chairman of Iraq’s Revolutionary Command Council, a man named Izzat Ibrahim al-Douri, deliver a speech on Saddam’s behalf, saying, “Jihad alone is capable of liberating Palestine and the rest of the Arab territories occupied by dirty Jews in their distorted Zionist entity.”
Amatzia Baram said, “Saddam can absolve himself of all sins in the eyes of the Arab and Muslim worlds by bringing Israel to its knees. He not only wants to be a hero in his own press, which already recognizes him as a Saladin, but wants to make sure that a thousand years from now children in the fourth grade will know that he is the one who destroyed Israel.”
It is no comfort to the Kurds that the Jews are now Saddam’s main preoccupation. The Kurds I spoke with, even those who agree that Saddam is aiming his remaining Scuds at Israel, believe that he is saving some of his “special weapons”—a popular euphemism inside the Iraqi regime—for a return visit to Halabja. The day I visited the Kalak Bridge, which divides the Kurds from the Iraqi Army’s Jerusalem brigade, I asked Muhammad Najar, the local official, why the brigade was not facing west, toward its target. “The road to Jerusalem,” he replied, “goes through Kurdistan.”
A few weeks ago, after my return from Iraq, I stopped by the Israeli Embassy in Washington to see the Ambassador, David Ivry. In 1981, Ivry, who then led Israel’s Air Force, commanded Operation Opera, the strike against the Osirak nuclear reactor near Baghdad. The action was ordered by Prime Minister Menachem Begin, who believed that by hitting the reactor shortly before it went online he could stop Iraq from building an atomic bomb. After the attack, Israel was condemned for what the Times called “inexcusable and short-sighted aggression.” Today, though, Israel’s action is widely regarded as an act of muscular arms control. “In retrospect, the Israeli strike bought us a decade,” Gary Milhollin, of the Wisconsin Project, said. “I think if the Israelis had not hit the reactor the Iraqis would have had bombs by 1990”—the year Iraq invaded Kuwait.
Today, a satellite photograph of the Osirak site hangs on a wall in Ivry’s office. The inscription reads, “For General David Ivry—With thanks and appreciation for the outstanding job he did on the Iraqi nuclear program in 1981, which made our job much easier in Desert Storm.” It is signed “Dick Cheney.”
”Preëmption is always a positive,” Ivry said.
Saddam Hussein never gave up his hope of turning Iraq into a nuclear power. After the Osirak attack, he rebuilt, redoubled his efforts, and dispersed his facilities. Those who have followed Saddam’s progress believe that no single strike today would eradicate his nuclear program. I talked about this prospect last fall with August Hanning, the chief of the B.N.D., the German intelligence agency, in Berlin. We met in the new glass-and-steel Chancellery, overlooking the renovated Reichstag.
The Germans have a special interest in Saddam’s intentions. German industry is well represented in the ranks of foreign companies that have aided Saddam’s nonconventional-weapons programs, and the German government has been publicly regretful. Hanning told me that his agency had taken the lead in exposing the companies that helped Iraq build a poison-gas factory at Samarra. The Germans also feel, for the most obvious reasons, a special responsibility to Israel’s security, and this, too, motivates their desire to expose Iraq’s weapons-of-mass-destruction programs. Hanning is tall, thin, and almost translucently white. He is sparing with words, but he does not equivocate. “It is our estimate that Iraq will have an atomic bomb in three years,” he said.
There is some debate among arms-control experts about exactly when Saddam will have nuclear capabilities. But there is no disagreement that Iraq, if unchecked, will have them soon, and a nuclear-armed Iraq would alter forever the balance of power in the Middle East. “The first thing that occurs to any military planner is force protection,” Charles Duelfer told me. “If your assessment of the threat is chemical or biological, you can get individual protective equipment and warning systems. If you think he’s going to use a nuclear weapon, where are you going to concentrate your forces?”
There is little doubt what Saddam might do with an atomic bomb or with his stocks of biological and chemical weapons. When I talked about Saddam’s past with the medical geneticist Christine Gosden, she said, “Please understand, the Kurds were for practice.” ♦
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