Laurie Mylroie has taught at Harvard University and the U.S. Naval War College. Presently, she is the publisher of Iraq News and the Vice-President of "Information for Democracy." She is the co-author of the New York Times best-selling, Saddam Hussein and the Crisis in the Gulf, and author of Study of Revenge: Saddam Hussein's Unfinished War Against America, forthcoming in September, which can be ordered online from the American Enterprise Institute Press.

“Without a strong inspection system, Iraq would be free to regain and again to rebuild its chemical, biological and nuclear weapons programs . . . Mark my words, [Saddam] will develop weapons of mass destruction. He will deploy them and he will use them."¹ So Bill Clinton proclaimed in December 1998, when he launched "Operation Desert Fox," the four-night bombing campaign against Iraq. The president's very strong statement suggested that the strike would be meaningful and that it would be followed by a serious effort to restore an effective and viable international weapons inspection regime in Iraq. But the attack occurred on the eve of the House impeachment vote, even as the Islamic holy month of Ramadan was shortly to begin. And that suggested the strike would not last very long or be very effective. Those familiar with Clinton's desultory handling of national security affairs, like New York Times columnist A.M. Rosenthal, anticipated that little would come of the strike and little would follow it. Rosenthal warned, "The victims of a war that fails to eliminate Saddam will be not only Iraqis and Americans, but all who will be slaughtered one day by Iraq's chemical, nuclear and biological weapons."²

     Indeed, eighteen months later, there are no weapons inspectors in Iraq and little prospect of their return. A new disarmament commission, UNMOVIC, led by the Swedish diplomat, Hans Blix, a former head of the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA), has been created to replace the original UN Special Commission (UNSCOM). But Blix has signaled that he will adopt a less confrontational approach toward Iraq than his predecessors. Blix is proceeding at a relaxed pace and knowledgeable individuals are pronouncing the acronym for his organization "UNMOVING."³ Indeed, UNMOVIC has yet to even attempt to carry out any activities in Iraq. Only in August are UNMOVIC teams finally scheduled to begin work there. Most likely, Baghdad will continue its avowed refusal to cooperate with UNMOVIC and it remains to be seen whether the Clinton administration will do more about Iraq's obstructionism than it has so far.

     Almost certainly, Saddam is using the absence of international weapons inspectors to reconstitute and advance Iraq's proscribed unconventional weapons programs. As Israel's Deputy Defense Minister, Ephraim Sneh, cautioned,

A grave development has taken place in Iraq in the last two years. . . Until two years ago Iraq was under international inspection which prevented a renewal in developing and producing long range missiles for nuclear arms. Since the inspections have stopped, Saddam Hussein has resumed the production of these missiles. The significance of this is that one morning, not far off, we will wake up and discover that Saddam also has nuclear arms and the ability to fire them great distances.⁴

     But, otherwise, senior officials, whether in the U.S., U.K., Israel, or the Arab states directly threatened by Iraq, have said very little publicly about the Iraqi danger. They do not seem prepared to address it, so they are silent about it. The leaders of the Western democracies have not dealt with a serious danger in this fashion since the 1930's. They may have made mistakes in their handling of national security affairs, but they did not recognize that a major problem existed and then say and do virtually nothing about it. Consequently, there is a general lack of public awareness of the threat posed by Saddam.

THE THREAT FROM IRAQ

     Until August 1995, when Saddam's son-in-law, Hussein Kamil, who had been in charge of Iraq's unconventional weapons programs, defected, it was generally believed that Iraq was not then a threat. It was thought that Iraq would be a threat in the future, if and when sanctions were lifted. But Iraq's unconventional weapons programs were thought to have been largely destroyed during the Gulf war bombing campaign and UNSCOM--responsible for destroying Iraq's chemical, biological, and missile programs--and the IAEA--responsible for Iraq's nuclear program--were slowly mopping up what remained. Indeed, in the first half of 1995, the IAEA believed it had taken care of Iraq's nuclear program, while UNSCOM was close to clearing Iraq on its chemical and missile programs and thought it had only one more issue, Iraq's biological program, to address. But all that changed radically following Kamil's defection. As a result of his defection, it was learned that Iraq had secretly retained its most dangerous unconventional capabilities, while turning over the least important material to the international weapons inspectors.

     That information, however, never received the attention it warranted. The core of the formal cease-fire to the Gulf war, UN Security Council Resolution (UNSCR) 687, is the destruction of Iraq's unconventional weapons programs. Saddam was suddenly found to be in flagrant violation of the cease-fire and the information revealed in the period following Kamil's defection was tantamount to the news that the Gulf war was not over for Saddam.

     Indeed, the Iraqis were bald about that in their dealings with Rolf Ekeus, UNSCOM's first chairman. In October 1995, Ekeus advised General Amir Saadi, in charge of Iraq's missile program, that it was in Iraq's interest to turn over its prohibited weapons quickly, so sanctions could be lifted quickly. Saadi replied, "But Iraq needs its military equipment. It's only a cease-fire." As Ekeus then explained to the U.S. Senate, "The Iraqi government does not consider the Gulf war was a war with an ending. The struggle is still going on. It was a battle of Kuwait, not a war of Kuwait."⁵

Nuclear Program

Ekeus: "Saddam will get a bomb, because these materials are floating in. Every day, they are more advanced."[photo/Sean Kidder]

     Following Kamil's defection, it was learned that after invading Kuwait, Iraq had launched a crash program to develop a nuclear bomb that could be delivered by missile. Significantly, Saddam was not interested in having a nuclear device, which he could explode in the desert and use to frighten people. He wanted a bomb that he could use. Iraq intended to take the fissile material for the bomb from its French and Russian research reactors. But Iraqi scientists could not get the bomb design small enough to allow it to be carried by a missile, before the Gulf war began.

     Yet as it turned out, Iraq's nuclear program continued after the war. And in the following four years, Iraqi scientists solved their problem. They developed a design for a bomb small enough to fit on a SCUD missile. It was some 35 inches in diameter and weighed one ton. As of August 1995, all that Iraq lacked to build a bomb was 35 pounds of highly enriched uranium.⁶ As long as UNSCOM was in Iraq, it provided some check on Iraqi activity. If Iraq were to succeed in acquiring the HEU, it would need to shape the material into a bomb core. That requires high precision machinery. UNSCOM regularly tagged and checked such equipment to ensure it was not diverted for proscribed purposes. But once UNSCOM left Iraq that was no longer possible. As Ekeus warned, "Saddam will get a bomb, because these materials are floating in. Every day, they are more advanced."⁷

Chemical and Missile Programs

     Prior to Kamil's defection, UNSCOM believed that it had pretty much taken care of Iraq's proscribed chemical weapons program. But after Kamil's defection, Iraq acknowledged that it had succeeded in producing the relatively sophisticated and highly lethal chemical agent, VX. It admitted having produced 3.3 tons of VX, but it claimed to have destroyed the material.⁸ But Iraq could provide no credible evidence that it had done so and UNSCOM did not credit the claim.

     VX is fatal not only when inhaled, but also when absorbed through the skin. Unlike most chemical agents, VX does not dissipate quickly. It is sticky and viscous. And 1/100th of a gram is fatal. A person has only to touch a surface that has been struck with VX and he will die. VX is particularly useful as a way to deny equipment and territory to an enemy. For example, if Iraq were to attack U.S. military equipment pre-positioned in Kuwait with VX, U.S. forces would not be able to use that equipment until after it had been very carefully scrubbed down--that is, after Iraqi forces had overrun their target.

     It also turned out that Iraq had succeeded in indigenously producing SCUD missiles. That threw into doubt UNSCOM's belief that Iraq's SCUD missiles had been destroyed, a belief based on the assumption that the only SCUDs Iraq had ever possessed had been imported from the Soviet Union. Russia provided UNSCOM with a detailed accounting of Soviet SCUD exports to Iraq. So it seemed that all UNSCOM had to do was to count the number of missiles destroyed in Iraq after the Gulf war, along with those Iraq had used during the Iran-Iraq war, and when that figure matched the number of SCUD missiles Moscow had sold to Baghdad, then UNSCOM would have destroyed all of Iraq's proscribed missiles.

     But the postwar destruction of Iraq's missiles was more complicated than it was supposed to have been. According to UNSCR 687, the weapons inspectors were to supervise the destruction of all Iraq's prohibited weapons. UNSCOM destroyed some Iraqi SCUDs. But Iraq unilaterally destroyed others, in violation of UNSCR 687. To substantiate its claim that it had really destroyed the missiles it said it had, Iraq invited UNSCOM to count the missile engines at the sites where the destruction was said to have occurred. But once it was learned that Iraq had itself produced missile engines, the exercise became useless. Who could tell whether the wreckage from the missiles Iraq claimed to have destroyed came from Soviet SCUDs or indigenously produced ones? General Wafiq Samarrai headed Iraqi military intelligence during the Gulf War. He defected in late 1994, claiming that Iraq still had at least eighty SCUD and al-Hussein missiles--modified SCUDs with a longer range.⁹ Samarrai was not believed then. But he gained new credibility after Kamil defected.

     Iraq had long denied to UNSCOM that it had a biological weapons [BW] program and UNSCOM long lacked the evidence to claim that it did. But in early 1995, UNSCOM received detailed intelligence about Baghdad's import of large quantities of biological growth material from Europe. The amount involved was described by a former UNSCOM spokesman, as "mind-boggling."¹⁰ And in its next report, issued on April 10, 1995, UNSCOM stated for the first time that Iraq had an undeclared BW program.

     On July 1, Ekeus led an UNSCOM team to Baghdad and for the first time, Iraqi officials acknowledged that Iraq had had such a program. They said that Iraq had produced more than 5,000 gallons of the BW agent botulinum and 160 gallons of anthrax. But they claimed that Iraq had never put those agents into weapons. Rather, they maintained that the material was destroyed in October 1990, as war loomed, to prevent an accidental release in case the United States attacked BW storage and production sites.

     But after Kamil's defection, it was learned that Iraq had produced much larger amounts of anthrax and botulinum that it had acknowledged only the month before. Iraq also acknowledged having produced a number of other biological agents, including ricin, a highly lethal toxin extracted from castor beans; clostridium perfingens, which causes gangrene; and aflatoxin, which causes liver cancer. Iraq also acknowledged having experimented with exotic and deadly viruses related to ebola, as well as camel pox, which many in UNSCOM suspected was a cover for small-pox related work.

     It also emerged that Iraq had continued to produce biological agents after the Gulf war. In May 1996, UNSCOM destroyed Iraq's biological production facilities, as they had been revealed after Kamil's defection. Yet none of the stockpiles of biological agents that Iraq acknowledged producing was ever turned over to UNSCOM for destruction. Again, Iraq claimed that it had destroyed the material unilaterally.

     It also turned out that Iraq had developed spray tanks that could be attached to manned aircraft or drones to disseminate biological agents. UNSCOM considered them "the most efficient means for the delivery of biological warfare agents produced by Iraq."¹¹ . They were targeted during "Operation Desert Fox," when British defense secretary George Robertson described the project, underscoring that the development of Iraq's unconventional weapons programs never stopped--not with the Gulf War, and not even with Kamil's defection. As Robertson explained,

In 1990, Saddam ordered the production of unmanned aircraft to spray chemical and biological agents on civilians and ground troops that he might wish to attack. Early efforts to convert combat aircraft were not successful, but spraying equipment was successfully tested using an anthrax-like substance. In 1995, Saddam launched a new programme using a converted training aircraft code-named L29. The first flights were started in 1997 and the testing programme is still continuing. This aircraft has been fitted with two under-wing weapon stores capable of carrying 300 litres of anthrax or other nerve agents. If this were to be sprayed over a built-up area such as Kuwait City, it could kill millions of people. Once perfected, we suspect that Saddam had intended to deploy these drones of death in Southern Iraq, as a direct threat to his neighbors, and it was this development programme that we hit.¹²

     Also, in the period following Kamil's defection, UNSCOM came to believe that Iraq had tested biological agents on humans. UNSCOM found two human-size inhalation chambers for testing the lethality of biological and chemical agents. Iraq said it had used animals, such as donkeys, in the chambers, "but inspectors note that they are primate-shaped and that Iraq did not use monkeys to test germ or nerve weapons."¹³ Scott Ritter explained UNSCOM's view in some detail:

Iraq undertook a program, run by the office of the president and involving a special MIC (Military Industrial Commission) Unit 2001, either to produce new agent, or test agent that was retained from pre-Gulf War stocks. In 1995, Unit 2001 conducted tests on live human subjects taken from Abu Ghaib prison, using BW and binary CW agent. Around fifty prisoners were chosen for these experiments, which took place at a remote testing ground in western Iraq. The purpose of those experiments was to text the toxicity of available agent to ensure that the biological arsenal remained viable. As a result, all the prisoners died.¹⁴

     Finally, after Kamil's defection, it was learned that Saddam had a doomsday scenario, based on Iraq's biological weapons. Baghdad 's response to the November 29, 1990, Security Council vote authorizing the use of force against Iraq if it did not withdraw from Kuwait was to fill 25 SCUD missile warheads with the biological agents, anthrax and botulinum. The missiles were taken out to distant airfields, where they were to be fired at targets in Israel and Saudi Arabia, if during the war, the coalition marched on Baghdad and the regime fell.¹⁵ That, perhaps, was the most distressing news of all. It suggested that there were circumstances under which Saddam was not deterrable--namely, if the regime fell. In that case, Saddam would seek to bring as many of his enemies down as possible.

CONCLUSION

     It looks very much like Saddam has one more war in mind and to leave Iraq without weapons inspectors is to take an enormous risk. But even weapons inspectors do not really solve the problem, given Saddam's fixed determination to retain unconventional capabilities. It really is necessary to get rid of him.¹⁶ Indeed that is now the position, at least rhetorically, of both George W. Bush and Al Gore, one of whom will be America's next president.¹⁷ Overthrowing Saddam should have been energetically pursued following Kamil's defection, when the danger posed by Iraq's retained unconventional capabilities became known. There was then general outrage at the Security Council and Saddam was weak and shaken. But there were always excuses for not vigorously undertaking Saddam's overthrow and other matters crowded the agenda.

     Above all, since the Gulf war America's efforts in the Middle East have been dominated by the "peace process" between Israel and the Arabs. Yet there can be no peace in the region with Saddam in possession of the unconventional weapons capabilities he has or can produce. History may teach us a very harsh lesson, if it should turn out that the considerable time, energy, and other resources that have gone into the peace process over the past decade were rendered moot by the consequences of Saddam's next war. In that case, we will have no one but ourselves to blame.

  ¹ Press briefing by the President on Iraq, White House, 16 December 1998.
  ² A.M. Rosenthal, "What Clinton Can Do," New York Times, 18 December 1998.
  ³ "Sanctions could keep Inspectors out of Baghdad," The Independent, 23 June 2000.
  ⁴ Maariv, 17 April 2000.
  ⁵ Ekeus to author; Ekeus testimony before Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations, Committee on Governmental Affairs, 20 March 1996.
  ⁶ Gary Millholin, "Could Iraq Have the Atomic Bomb"? New York Times, 19 November 1997.
  ⁷ The New Yorker, 5 April 1999.   ⁸ UNSCOM Report, S/1995/1038, 17 December 1995, paragraph 52.
  ⁹ Sunday Times (London), 19 February 1995.
  ¹⁰ Tim Trevan, Saddam's Secrets: The Hunt for Iraq's Hidden Weapons (London: HarperCollins, 1999), p. 287.
  ¹¹ UNSCOM presentation to UN Security Council, 3 June 1998.
  ¹² George Robertson, press conference, 19 December 1998.
  ¹³ Chicago Tribune, 31 January 1999.
  ¹⁴ Scott Ritter, Endgame: Solving the Iraq Problem--Once and For All (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1999) p. 105. Notably, Ritter's book is at dramatic odds with the position that he took subsequently--namely that Iraq was essentially disarmed, and UNSCOM had really been searching for inconsequential material.
  ¹⁵ Interview with Rolf Ekeus, "World Chronicle", produced by Department of Public Information, United Nations, September 21, 1995; UNSCOM Report (S/1995/864), October 11, 1995.
  ¹⁶ The extensive discussion of Iraq's unconventional capabilities in this article, which forms the basis of the conclusion that it is necessary to overthrow Saddam, differs significantly from the way most Middle East analysts deal with Iraq. Typically, they do not mention the dangers posed by Iraq, or do so only in passing, and conclude that the status quo, while not perfect, is basically satisfactory. For example, Iraq Strategy Review (Patrick L. Clawson, ed., Washington DC: Washington Institute for Near East Policy, 1998) presented five options for U.S. policy. Yet as the introduction explains, "This study is not the place to analyze how great is the Saddam threat." Not surprisingly, that volume takes an extremely dim view of the notion that it is necessary to overthrow Saddam. Similarly, and most recently, Ofra Bengio, "Saddam's Family Values," Foreign Affairs July/August 2000, fails to mention any details about Iraq's unconventional weapons capabilities, including their size or the threat they pose. Therefore, there is no urgency to overthrowing Saddam. Bengio mocks the idea of U.S. support for an armed insurgency against the regime, asserting that "the sort of rhetorical posturing heard so often on Capital Hill is just so much wind."
  ¹⁷ Wall Street Journal, 28 June 2000.