March 14, 2005

The Implications of the Systematic Looting of Iraq's Weapons Plants

By Walter C. Uhler

According to a New York Times report on March 13, 2005, a senior official in Iraq's current government claims that, "in the weeks after Baghdad fell in April 2003, looters systematically dismantled and removed tons of machinery from Saddam Hussein's most important weapons installations, including some with high-precision equipment capable of making parts fro nuclear arms." [New York Times, Mar. 13, 2005]

That same official, Dr. Sami al-Araji, also claims that "it appeared that a highly organized operation had pinpointed specific plants looking for valuable equipment, some of which could be used for both military and civilian applications, and carted the machinery away." [Ibid]

Obviously, Dr. Araji's information provides no support for the pre-invasion allegations made by President Bush, Vice-President Cheney, National Security Adviser Rice, Secretary of State Powell, Secretary of Defense Rumsfeld and his Deputy, Paul Wolfowitz about Iraq's WMD (or the now obligatory fallback assertion, "weapons program"). After all, one must keep in mind that "occupation forces found no unconventional arms and C.I.A. inspectors concluded that the effort had been largely abandoned after the 1991 Persian Gulf War." [Ibid]

Instead, Dr. Araji's information supports one of two indictments of the Bush administration, if not both. Either it was negligent in its planning and conduct of the war or it lied to America and the world when attempting to justify its invasion.

First, let us assume that the Bush administration genuinely believed that Iraq possessed threatening WMD (and that Defense Secretary Rumsfeld wasn't lying when he publicly claimed to know where such weapons were located). One must then ask why these weapons installations were not secured before they could be looted, even as the search for actual weapons commenced. The standard answer—"there were not enough military personnel to guard all of them during and after the invasion" [Ibid]—indicts Rumsfeld and his war planners for incompetence—for sending too few troops to Iraq to win both the war and the peace. Potential WMD proliferation is just one baleful consequence of such incompetence.

Nevertheless, it seems equally probable that the looted weapons plants indicate that the Bush administration lied about Iraq's WMD in order to justify an otherwise unjustifiable invasion.

Consider the pre-invasion circumstantial evidence indicating that the Bush administration lied about Iraq's WMD: (1) In 1998, the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) reported that 'there is no indication that Iraq possesses nuclear weapons or any meaningful amounts of nuclear-useable material."

(2) Yet, according to Houston Chronicle sportswriter Mickey Herskowitz (a friend of the Bush family, a biographer of Prescott Bush and George W. Bush's former ghostwriter), George W. Bush "was thinking about invading Iraq in 1999." (www.russbaker.com Oct. 27, 2004). (3) Moreover, publisher and editor Osama Siblani met Mr. Bush in Michigan in May 2000 and heard him claim that he was "going to take him [Saddam] out," after he became president [Democracy Now, March 11, 2005]

(4) Then consider Condoleezza Rice. Before she became President Bush's national security adviser, Rice wrote an article for the Jan/Feb. 2000 issue of Foreign Affairs in which she asserted that regimes like Iraq "were living on borrowed time, so there need be no sense of panic about them…if they do acquire WMD, their weapons will be unusable because any attempt to use them will bring national obliteration."

(5) Moreover, Iraq should not have been President Bush's primary foreign policy concern, if only because, in January 2001, CIA director George Tenet gave President-elect Bush, Cheney and Rice his "secrets brief" during which he informed them that the greatest threat facing America was the possibility of a terrorist attack by Osama bin Laden and al-Qaeda. The threat was "tremendous" and "immediate."

That January was also the month when counterterrorism expert Richard Clarke urged Rice to arrange a cabinet level ("principals") meeting to discuss the urgent threat posed by al Qaeda. But, notwithstanding such warnings, when the principals of Bush's National Security Council (NSC) met for the first time, Iraq was the main topic of discussion. Al Qaeda wasn't mentioned.

(6) Setting a Bush administration baseline (from which to gauge its alarmist rhetoric commencing in August 2002), on February 24, 2001, Colin Powell denied that Saddam Hussein's WMD posed a threat to anyone. At a press conference in Cairo, Powell claimed that sanctions "have worked. He [Saddam] has not developed any significant capability with respect to weapons of mass destruction. He is unable to project conventional power against his neighbors.

Nevertheless, many of the NSC principals meetings held prior to al Qaeda's attacks on September 11th were devoted to Iraq. If one adds an obsession with national missile defense to the Bush administration's obsession with Iraq, it probably is not too much of a stretch to conclude that Bush's inattention to al Qaeda permitted it to strike America before America struck Iraq.

(7) On the day of al Qaeda's attack, Secretary Rumsfeld ordered underlings to look for evidence "related or not" implicating Iraq. And although, a day later, Clarke advised Bush that Iraq wasn't involved, an irritated president ordered him to look at the evidence again.

(8) At an extraordinary meeting of the principals (and some deputies) on September 15th, Rice asked whether the U.S. should plan to attack elsewhere "as an insurance policy in case things in Afghanistan went bad." [Woodward, Bush at War, p. 83.] Wolfowitz recommended attacking Iraq. It "was a brittle, oppressive regime that might break easily." Powell subsequently noted: "Nobody could look at Iraq and say it was responsible for September 11." But he also objected for tactical reasons: "Don't go with the Iraq option right away, or we'll lose the coalition we've been signing up. They'll view it as a bait-and-switch." [Bush at War, p. 87.]

Two days later, Bush told the principals: "I believe Iraq was involved [in September 11th], but I'm not going to strike them now. I don't have the evidence at this point." [Ibid. p. 99] He never would obtain such evidence. But, significantly, no mention was made of Iraq's WMD.

(9) Nevertheless, in November Bush ordered Rumsfeld to plan for an invasion of Iraq. Thus, General Tommy Franks spent much of 2002 doing precisely that. Meanwhile, the Bush administration spent 2002 manufacturing the consent of terrorized, know-nothing Americans for war.

Thus, without even so much as a formal National Intelligence Estimate to support his claims, President Bush lumped Iraq with Iran and North Korea in his "axis of evil" speech in January, advocated regime change in April and gave a speech devoted to preemptive war in June. In September, Bush unveiled Rice's National Security Strategy that advocated preemptive war.

On August 26th, three days before Bush signed a top secret National Security Presidential Directive (NSPD) that formally committed America to the invasion of Iraq, Vice President Cheney falsely asserted: "We now know that Saddam has resumed his efforts to acquire nuclear weapons." As proof, Cheney cited the evidence provided by an Iraqi defector, Saddam Hussein's son-in law, Hussein Kamal Hassan, who admitted his role in building Iraq's WMD.

What Cheney failed to mention (and what appears to be deliberate deceit) is Kamal's assertion that he ordered the destruction of all WMD, an assertion that now rings true to the team members who conducted the futile post-invasion search for Saddam's weapons.

In September, Rice falsely claimed that aluminum tubes sought by Iraq could "only" be used in uranium centrifuges. Actually, Rice was quite aware that experts at the Department of Energy were convinced that the tubes were intended for missiles, not centrifuges—and before she employed the word 'only." But she expanded on her lie by warning stupefied, terrorized Americans that the Bush administration could not wait for smoking gun proof of Iraq's WMD to come in the form of a mushroom cloud.

Rice's decision to conflate the huge threat posed by Iraq's improbable nuclear weapons with the lower threat posed by Iraq's more probable stockpiles of chemical and biological weapons was one of her most despicable acts as national security adviser. But Bush repeated that base scare tactic one month later.

(10) Nevertheless, anyone who has read Bob Woodward's account of George Tenet's WMD briefing of President Bush in December 2002 has solid grounds for suspecting that the Bush administration's prattle about Iraq's WMD was intended solely for public consumption.

Perhaps he required no convincing, but after he received the Iraq WMD briefing presented by Tenet's deputy, John McLaughlin, Bush said: "Nice try, I don't think this is quite—it's not something that Joe Public would understand or would gain a lot of confidence from." [Woodward, Plan of Attack, p. 248] He then looked at Tenet and said: "I've been told all this intelligence about having WMD and this is the best we've got?" To which Tenet made his infamous reply: "It's a slam dunk case!"

Even Bush acknowledged that the CIA's case for Iraq's WMD "needs a lot more work." Nevertheless, he turned to Colin Powell, the only individual in the Bush administration possessing any international credibility, to present the weak WMD case to the world. (But recall that Bush formally committed America to an invasion of Iraq, before he sought UN approval.)

Powell's infamous presentation to the UN on February 5, 2003 persuaded many Americans and much of the country's gullible press that Iraq constituted an immediate threat to the U.S. that justified war. But it failed to persuade the international community, especially after it learned of the conclusions reached in the IAEA's report of February 14, 2003: "We have to date found no evidence of ongoing prohibited nuclear or nuclear related activities in Iraq."

Thus, the pre-invasion circumstantial evidence indicates that, even before he became president, George W. Bush intended to "take out" Saddam Hussein. After he became president, Bush's NSC principals meetings unduly focused on Iraq, again long before it possessed any evidence about Iraq's WMD. Attacked by al Qaeda before he could attack Iraq, Bush used the war on terrorism as the excuse to plan the long sought invasion. Yet, months after Cheney and Rice spread falsehoods about Iraq's WMD, Bush found himself asking Tenet: "This is the best we got?" Finally, the IAEA's report on February 14th did nothing to slow Bush's push for war.

It's in this context that America's failure to protect Iraq's weapons installations from looters takes on special significance. For if the Bush administration was genuinely concerned about Iraq's WMD or potential to manufacture WMD, one of its highest priorities would have been to secure the weapons plants before any equipment fell into the hands of terrorists. Such negligence is an important piece of behavioral evidence demonstrating that WMD was simply a pretext for "taking out" Saddam.

But it was a necessary pretext, given the constraints imposed by international law. Under international law, no state is permitted to attack another except under three specific conditions: (1) after it has suffered an attack, (2) to preempt an imminent attack and (3) when authorized by the United Nations.

Obviously, Saddam did not attack the U.S., which rules out condition number one. . Equally obvious, the United Nations would not have approved an invasion of Iraq simply to bring liberty to its oppressed people—Mr. Bush's most recent post-invasion justification for the invasion. Thus condition number three number three is ruled out. Consequently, the Bush administration had only one barely plausible reason under condition two of international law for invading Iraq, namely that Iraq's WMD constituted an immediate threat to U.S. security.

Although the evidence presented above clearly demonstrates the WMD allegation to be a ruse, it was the only fig leaf available to a president obsessed with regime change who also sought to avoid looking like a war criminal under post-Nuremberg international law.

Unfortunately, as a consequence, when Americans now ask, "Why do they hate us?" they must expand the "they" beyond Islamic fundamentalists to include much of the rest of the world.


Walter C. Uhler is an independent scholar and freelance writer whose work has appeared in The Nation, the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, The San Francisco Chronicle and Philadelphia Inquirer, among numerous other periodicals. His article, "Democracy or dominion?" will be republished in Annual Editions: World Politics 05/06 (McGraw Hill) scheduled for publication in April. He is President of the Russian-American International Studies Association.

waltuhler@aol.com