The meaning of 'no' in Washington

by Michael Jansen

In January 2003, I interviewed for The Jordan Times and Al Rai an Iraqi nuclear scientist, Dr Imad Khadduri, who stated flatly that his country never produced nuclear weapons and no longer possessed other weapons of mass destruction.

Khadduri, whom I interviewed at length on the Internet, insisted that the weapons programmes had been rolled up after the 1991 war on Iraq. He said scientists involved had been assigned to rebuild electricity, water purification and sewage disposal facilities and repair bridges and roads bombed by the US and its allies. He was well placed to know about their new jobs because he was in charge of seeing that their seniority in the administration was preserved.

Last December I interviewed a second scientist reassigned from the nuclear programme, Dr Sabah Abdel Noor, an engineer who helped reconstruct the Dora power plant in south Baghdad. He reinforced what Khadduri told me and described how Dora was restored.

Following the publication of Khadduri's 2003 interview, I went to Baghdad where UN inspectors were carrying out a desperate search for banned weapons which the US and UK wrongly accused the Iraqi government of possessing, in violation of the Security Council resolution which ended the 1991 conflict.

The UN inspectorate was repeatedly told by the Iraqi spokesman on armaments, Dr Amer Al Saadi, that Iraq had no weapons of mass destruction and that the massive report presented by Baghdad to the UN in December 2002 had laid out in detail what happened to Iraq's weapons programmes. Saadi, who served as minister of military industry before the 1991 war and minister of industry afterwards, was precisely the man to make the case. He had been in charge of the weapons programmes before the war and of reconstruction afterwards. He stated that Saddam Hussein had ordered the destruction of the country's chemical and biological arsenal and the dismantlement of the nuclear programme during the summer of 1991. He did this to comply with the conditions set by the UN for lifting the punitive sanctions regime imposed on his country.

After his destruction order was carried out, however, Saddam maintained a posture of ambiguity on the issue of weaponry until the inspectors arrived on their final mission. He wanted to project a false notion that Iraq might still possess some nonconventional weapons to deter Iran (and probably the US) from attacking his country.

An impeccable source revealed to this correspondent recently that Saadi told UN inspectors there were no weapons as soon as they resumed their work in Iraq in November 2002. The source said he took this line without consulting Saddam who was, apparently, upset that Saadi had told the truth. Saadi replied through intermediaries (his last meeting with Saddam was in 1995) that it was no longer prudent or possible to maintain the fiction that Iraq might have banned weaponry. Saddam fumed for a while but relented and eventually told Western visitors that this was the case.

It is ironic that Saadi, who risked Saddam's displeasure to tell the truth, remains in the US prison for high value assets at Baghdad International Airport while those who lied about Iraq's arms remain in office in Washington and London.

The lies they fabricated were exposed last week when the second report of the US-run Iraq Survey Group was formally presented by Charles Duelfer, the second head of the mission, to the Bush administration. The report, which runs to 1,200-1,500 pages, states flatly that Saddam had no weapons of mass destruction on the eve of the US war on Iraq, that he had no ties with Al Qaeda, the group which mounted the 2001 attacks on New York and Washington, and that his armed forces did not pose a threat to Iraq's neighbours, the US and its interests in the region. These were the reasons the Bush administration gave for its onslaught on Iraq.

The report also describes the mistaken perceptions held by both sides on the issue of prohibited weaponry. The report says that Saddam believed the US Central Intelligence Agency knew that he had no weapons of mass destruction after 1991. He seemed to have thought that Washington refused to acknowledge this fact because it was determined to maintain the humiliating and damaging sanctions under its policy of "containment."

Duelfer argues that the CIA had no men on the ground in Iraq and did not have adequate intelligence on its weaponry. The CIA also listened to and believed exiles connected with Iraqi opposition movements who claimed that Saddam retained banned weaponry. Furthermore, Washington - both Bush and Clinton administrations - refused to accept the verdict of UN inspectors working in Iraq until 1998. They reported in 1997 that the bulk (90 per cent) of Iraq's banned weapons had been destroyed and its programmes had been discontinued.

Even in the run-up to the war, the US refused to accept the reports of UN teams that conducted 731 inspections and found nothing to indicate that Iraq either possessed banned weapons or had any intention of reconstituting its programmes. Instead, Washington continued to accuse Saddam of hiding these weapons.

Having dismissed the administration's main case for war, Duelfer, a CIA operative who served on UN teams before heading the Iraq Survey Group, then provided Washington with ammunition to argue that Baghdad still constituted a threat. Duelfer said that Saddam still had the intention of reviving his chemical and biological weapons programmes if sanctions were lifted, thereby justifying the harsh regime of embargo which over more than a decade had impoverished the Iraqi people and destroyed the infrastructure of the country.

However, Duelfer's detailed description of how Saddam managed to extract millions of dollars from contracts under the UN oil-for-food programme and to use this money to build palaces refutes the claim that the Iraqi leader intended to reconstitute his chemical and biological weapons programmes. If he had such an intention, he could have used this money to do just this. Old fashioned chemical weapons and some simple biological agents are not expensive to manufacture and do not require large facilities which can be detected by satellites or discovered by inspectors.

The Bush administration, deprived of its casus belli, has seized upon Duelfer's illogical claims about Saddam's "intent" or "intentions" to build a new case for waging war on Iraq. Thus, the problem remains the US mindset. A Pentagon official, quoted by Bob Drogin in The Los Angeles Times (Oct. 12), summed up the thinking in Washington - which applies to Duelfer as well as the neoconservatives who dictate the administration's agenda. The official stated: "I sometimes wonder, what part of the word `no' didn't we understand?" The `no' remains hanging in the air, but still there is no understanding of what it means in Washington.

This article was published in the Thursday, October 14, 2004 edition of the Jordan Times. It is used here with permission.