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So far, U.N. weapons inspectors scouring Iraq for weapons of mass destruction have come up empty-handed. And despite their broad mandate and high-tech detection equipment, they may well fail to find any damning evidence, even if the search lasts for months.
That doesn't mean Iraq has no weapons. After all, Saddam Hussein had four years to hide them between the time inspectors quit Iraq in 1998 and last year, when they reentered the country. Indeed, President Bush is already starting to make that argument. Still, if the inspectors produce zip, the Administration will have a hard time justifying any military operation to disarm Baghdad and oust the Iraqi dictator.
This standoff is becoming a chess game on two levels. In the public-relations battle, Iraq could have an edge. It will argue that it can't prove a negative -- that is, that it has no weapons. The U.S., on the other hand, will be forced to make a more complex argument that gaps exist between what Baghdad is known to have had and what it claims to have destroyed. That argument has one big problem: "It's too abstract for policymakers and the general public," says David Kay, a senior fellow at the Potomac Institute for Policy Studies and a former weapons inspector. "An input-output analysis is not going to be compelling in the court of public opinion."
NEGATIVE PROOF. If the Administration isn't careful, the arguments of Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld and other military advisers will begin to sound like those of conspiracy theorists, the sort who insist that the absence of evidence is proof of a plot.
This is an elaborate game. On another level, the world has ample reason to believe Saddam has retained weapons and his willingness to use them. The betting is that he has developed, or could do so very quickly, sizeable chemical and biological arsenals, and that he could rapidly assemble a nuclear weapon if he were ever to get his hands on fissile material. He has ballistic missiles to deliver these weapons far beyond Iraq's borders.
Saddam's regime still has not adequately explained what happened to the weapons that defectors have claimed Iraq possessed. Measuring Iraq's accounting of its weaponry to the U.N. against information from those defectors indicates Saddam has destroyed less than a tenth of his missile-production capability. His claims about field trials of chemical and biological weapons involving R400 aerial bombs have certainly raised eyebrows. Taken at face value, they would mean Iraq destroyed more munitions in tests than it has admitted producing.
TANGLED TALE. According to an analysis by Anthony Cordesman of the Center for Strategic & International Studies, Iraq hasn't accounted for 200 metric tons each of deadly VX gas, sarin, and mustard gas. Nor has Baghdad accounted for a huge number of delivery systems: up to 70 Al-Husayns (modified Scud missiles), as many as 25,000 rockets, 2,000 aerial bombs, and 15,000 artillery shells.
Weapons inspectors discovered a document that showed Iraq did not use as many chemical munitions during the Iran-Iraq war as Baghdad had claimed, according to a CIA report. That raised the possibility of 6,000 hidden chemical weapons.
What about biological weapons? According to the Cordesman study, Iraq declared that it produced about 23,000 gallons of anthrax, but U.N. weapons inspectors believe the actual figure was three or four times that amount. Similarly, Iraq declared 100,000 gallons of botulinum toxin, but inspectors think the figure could be twice as much.
NUKE QUESTIONS. With Iraq unable to get its story straight about just how much aflatoxin it produced, those figures are suspect, too. Nearly 8,000 pounds of growth media for biological weapons also remain unaccounted for. British intelligence believes that personnel associated with Iraq's bioweapons program have started production in hard-to-find mobile labs.
Similarly, Saddam is known to have tried to acquire uranium from Africa, even though he has no nuclear reactors for civilian energy, according to British intelligence. He has attempted to buy everything from vacuum pumps to specialized aluminum tubes that are useful for making gas centrifuges, which can be used to process natural uranium into weapons-grade uranium. And Iraq never turned over its two completed designs for a nuclear bomb or components such as explosive lenses and neutron initiators, according to Steven D. Dolley, research director of the Nuclear Control Institute in Washington, D.C.
The British also say Iraq has started to deploy its al-Samoud liquid-propellant missile and to produce a solid-propellant Ababil-100 missile, both of which have a range of at least 200 kilometers, in violation of the 150-kilometer limit the U.N. imposed on Iraq. British intelligence also believes that Iraq illegally retained as many as 20 al-Hussein missiles, whose range is 650 kilometers. And Baghdad is also trying to develop missiles capable of reaching not just Israel, but Greece, Turkey, and the British base on Cyprus, the Brits believe.
CLOUDING THE ISSUE. Iraq came up with all sorts of explanations for its inability to provide adequate documentation to the U.N.: Papers were destroyed during allied bombing. They fell off trucks. They were burned in fires. Everything but the dog ate them.
Despite all this smoke, in the absence of uncovering the fire, the Bush team has a dilemma. At some point, the Iraqis may get caught in another lie. They could just cook up another explanation for the discrepancy. Or Saddam could say a subordinate did something without his knowledge or approval.
Even if the U.S. military buildup scares Saddam into fessing up, however, a problem remains. Iraq's scientific knowhow would remain intact. It doesn't take a lot of equipment to produce chemical or biological weapons, and the International Institute for Strategic Studies in London estimates that Iraq could have a nuclear weapon in months if it obtained fissile material.
THE REAL GOAL. Saddam has demonstrated on any number of occasions that he's willing to use such weapons against neighbors and his own people. It's far from clear, though, that this argument will persuade anybody except the British -- and even British officials say the odds of a conflict are dwindling.
All of this explains why, for the Bush Administration, the real issue isn't inspections. It isn't even disarmament. For them, the real issue always has been and will remain removing Saddam Hussein from power.
Crock covers national security and foreign affairs for BusinessWeek from Washington. Follow his views in Affairs of State twice a month, only on BusinessWeek Online Edited by Douglas Harbrecht
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