Volume 2, Issue 5
September-October 2003

We Still Need to Disarm Iraq

By Valerie Lincy

On October 2, David Kay's interim findings on the search for banned weapons in Iraq were released and quickly subsumed into the political debate about whether the Bush administration lied in making its case for war. The findings were brandished by administration officials as proof that they had gotten it right on the Iraqi regime, and by administration critics as proof that the threat posed by Iraq's unconventional weapons was exaggerated. That Kay's findings would feed ongoing political bickering was inevitable. But the bickering should not be allowed to obscure the very real threat that still exists: Iraq's arms potential could spread to other countries.

First, there is the risk that dual-use equipment, weapon expertise and even unconventional weapons (if they exist) will be exported to interested customers in the region and beyond. U.N. inspectors estimated that Iraq could still have chemical and biological weapons, tons of bulk agent, and agent precursors. And we know that Iraq still had dual-use equipment and weapon know-how, which was cataloged by the United Nations as recently as March.

Second, there is the danger that Iraq's illicit procurement networks, which appear to have operated until just before the war, will be used by other countries unless they are permanently shut down.

Kay has disclosed a number of new details about Iraq's weapon intentions. According to Kay, Iraq pursued new research on biological agents - Brucella and Congo Crimean Hemorrhagic Fever - and continued research on previously known agents like ricin and aflatoxin. In addition, Iraqi scientists claim that Iraq continued a practice of masking work on pathogenic organisms, like anthrax, by pairing it with work on harmless organisms that function in much the same way. Inspectors found strains of biological organisms in a scientist's home, including a vial of live botulinum, that could be used to produce biological weapons; the same scientist had been asked to hide a larger cache of agents, but refused. According to Kay, biological weapon research was compartmentalized as of 1996, in order to create "smaller, covert capabilities that could be activated quickly to surge the production of BW agents." Indeed, what is noteworthy about the biological weapon network uncovered so far is not its size or scope, but its ability to operate at a low level, undetected by inspectors.

Iraq also continued to develop missiles with ranges exceeding 150 km, in defiance of limits imposed by U.N. resolutions and despite the return of U.N. inspectors in 2002. Kay cites evidence that studies for solid-fueled missiles with ranges between 400 km and 1,000 km were "initiated, or already underway," and that Iraq had restarted work on converting its surface-to-air missiles into ballistic missiles with a range of about 250 km. In addition, he mentions evidence of a dialogue between Iraq and North Korea beginning in December 1999 on the transfer of missile technology, including North Korea's No Dong missile with a range of 1,300 km. Foreign assistance also helped Iraq with the Al Samoud 2 design, helped with guidance and control systems for the solid-fueled Al Fatah missile and helped with the development of Iraq's missile production infrastructure.

In the chemical field, Kay recounts the difficulty in searching for possible stocks of chemical-filled munitions, which are often unmarked and stored alongside vast stocks of conventional weapons. The size of Iraq's conventional weapon stores - which Kay estimates at 600,000 tons distributed among 130 storage points - means that combing through them in search of chemical munitions will take time. Inspectors have visited only ten so far. Meanwhile, admits Gen. John Abizaid, head of U.S. Central Command, not all of these sites can be secured, and previously unknown ammunition sites continue to be discovered by U.S. forces.

In the nuclear realm, Kay reports that Saddam Hussein kept key technical groups from his pre-1991 nuclear weapon program together, with an eye towards reconstituting the program at a later date. There is also some evidence that in 2002, Iraq showed interest in restarting its centrifuge enrichment program. Yet overall, Kay reinforces the conclusions of International Atomic Energy Agency director Mohamed ElBaradei that Iraq had not "retained any physical capability for the indigenous production of weapon-usable nuclear material ... [or] achieved its programme goal of producing nuclear weapons."

Kay's progress report does not portray Iraq as a posing an imminent threat to the United States and it in no way buttresses prewar claims made by the Bush administration that Iraq was busily developing and producing chemical, biological and nuclear weapons. His findings do portray Saddam Hussein's Iraq as actively concealing proscribed activity from U.N. inspectors, as intent on developing mass destruction weapons, and as maintaining a "break-out" capacity to do so.

The result is a compelling argument in favor of giving the Iraq Survey Group the time and resources necessary to achieve closure on Iraq's unconventional weapon programs - to the extent that is still possible, given the looting and targeted destruction at many key sites. The Bush administration has reportedly requested an additional $600 million to continue the search, which Kay estimates will take another six to nine months. The effort may never yield the smoking gun many were expecting, but that possibility in no way detracts from the importance of what remains to be done in Iraq: ensuring that it does not become a ready source of mass destruction exports.