Cloud-cuckoo land, a Republican stronghold

The US House Armed Services Committee convened June 29th to question and consider the Recent Revelation Concerning Weapons of Mass Destruction Found in Iraq. I finally diverted some of my attention to this over the weekend, and would have posted sooner, if I weren't driven to drink by the depressing nature of it all.

The committee heard from two panels of witnesses in open session over a period of some four and a half hours. A summary press release is available here, but more reliably, an audio recording of the hearing can be played back by clicking here. The written summary is misleading because one would expect it to present all the main points in a concise form. Not so. Surprisingly, or perhaps not so surprisingly, House Republicans framed their questions throughout to ensure they got enough right answers. Taken as a whole, however, it soon becomes evident that not a single, viable weapon of mass destruction has been found in Iraq to date.

Here are a just a few of the interesting facts that didn't make it into the press release:

• These weapons were produced in the 1980s (00:14) and are of the type used during the Iran-Iraq war (01:52)
• Projectiles are badly corroded in most cases and can no longer be discharged as designed (01:27)
• They were found in a variety of locations (00:22): some had been improperly dismantled and/or destroyed (01:27), others were found abandoned on the battlefield and other unmarked munitions had been misplaced in conventional storage bunkers (03:22)
• They cannot be reconditioned (01:27)
• An unspecified number are completely empty (00:47)
• It is extraordinarily difficult, but not impossible, to drain any existing agent (03:54)

Congressman Curt Weldon argued that because Saddam Hussein failed to declare these chemical munitions, he was in breach of UN resolution 687, and others like it, and therefore the decision to attack Iraq can be entirely justified - this despite Iraqi military personnel stating convincingly that they did not know the location of these rounds, nor Saddam who himself believed, and told his cabinet members prior to the invasion, that all such weapons had been destroyed.

As such awkward facts begin to impose, Republicans on the committee appeal to some hypothetical scenario in which pre-2003 reality does not readily fit. What-if a terrorist were to acquire scores of these badly corroded munitions; what-if some terrorist had the expertise and capability to extract, without immobilising him or herself, the degraded chemical agent from within each shell; and what-if a terrorist later released the accumulated agent in a confined space, say, somewhere in the United States. Might Americans die? The answer they wanted to hear and the one they received was, "potentially . . . . yes!" However, a string of what-ifs conveniently spared Weldon and friends the impossible task of having to rationally explain why Saddam would give away inert weapons he no longer knew existed.

New American Century signatory Frank Gaffney was invited along to blather on, quite unfittingly, when the appearance of a third arms control specialist would have been more appropriate. Saddam's total control over Iraq's "immense oil resources" (a serious crime), the safe-haven that he provided for terrorists and his regime's incontestable "mastery" of chemical and biological weaponry all combined to constitute an unacceptable threat, he said, while ignoring the mountain of first-hand testimony from scientists who say few, if any, unconventional weapons programmes proceeded without some Keystone Kop type incident, or reached anything near the stage of perfect completion.

Gaffney also regurgitated the risible claim, based on a single-source, that Saddam had planned to fill aerosol perfume cans with biological agents and smuggle them onto department store shelves in the United States. He mumbled something about Osama bin Laden wanting to destroy America using magnetic pulse weapons, and said there is sound evidence that Saddam carted off his WMD to Syria and Lebanon (the Russkies also had a hand in disposing of them, obviously). No trace yet of Saddam's secret robot army, of which he made no mention.

One or two committee members were uncritically receptive to the Saddam-disappeared-his-WMD-when-he-needed-them-most theory. As noted by The New Republic, at one point during proceedings, Thelma Blake alerted all those assembled to a breaking news item, received via her BlackBerry, that suggested "Saddam's WMD might have been detonated just that morning in Israel by Palestinian terrorists."

Weldon invoked the Cooperative Threat Reduction programme, an important project which the US provides annual monetary support for, and pursued a line of argument that says if Russia's aging stockpile of sarin nerve agent is still to be considered lethal today, not having lost any of its potency, then the same must also be true of the chemical rounds recently recovered in Iraq. (02:54) When his time finally came to speak, David Kay disagreed, explaining that Iraqi sarin has been analysed many times in laboratories all around the world

[and] that sarin was of such poor quality, it lacked any stabilization agent, and quite frankly, if I can respond to an earlier question you had, Congressman Weldon, it does not in any way look like Russian sarin. The Russians, as a matter of fact, as you know, the Russians produced most of their sarin with a stolen German process and then quickly moved on to more advanced nerve agents, some of which are truly frightening and very stable. While [Iraqi sarin is] not something I would like to rub up next to, it was not going to be a major concern. (03:25)

Not bothering to fully consider his answer, Weldon tried again, asking Kay to consider how many Iranians died as a result of being struck by this "less-than-effective" nerve agent (as if he cared). The general consensus was that undoubtedly many thousands of infantrymen died, however Kay stressed for a second time that in terms of persistence, "the Iraqi stuff went bad very quickly." (03:58)

Congressman Duncan Hunter was next to make a fool of himself, asking David Kay if he knew what chemical weapon killed the Iraqi Kurds, moments before holding up a picture of the Halabja poison gas attack. He was informed that multiple chemical agents were deployed. The Congressman shares his observation that the moment this town was hit, hundreds of its inhabitants appear to have dropped down dead, mid-stride. He then wonders why, when Kay concurs, the weapon inspector would still choose to minimise the effectiveness of Saddam's chemical arsenal. Kay, clearly exasperated at this point, responds again: "The Iraqi chemical weapons were very effective if it was fresh agent. And that's why they devised this system of rapid fill, because they had to produce it and had to use it relatively quickly or it became bad. The Russians have chemical agents that are stable over generations."

Although he didn't appear before the committee, Charles Duelfer agrees, speaking here on NPR's Talk of the Nation:

Neal Conan: The report says hundreds of WMDs were found in Iraq. Does this change any of the findings in your report?

Charles Deulfer: No, the report – the findings of the report were basically to describe the relationship of the regime with weapons of mass destruction generally. You know, at two different times, Saddam elected to have and then not to have weapons of mass destruction. We found, when we were investigating, some residual chemical munitions. And we said in the report that such chemical munitions would probably still be found. But the ones which have been found are left over from the Iran-Iraq war. They are almost 20 years old, and they are in a decayed fashion. It is very interesting that there are so many that were unaccounted for, but they do not constitute a weapon of mass destruction, although they could be a local hazard.

Conan: So these – were these the weapons of mass destruction that the Bush administration said that it was going into Iraq to find before the war?

Deulfer: No, these do not indicate an ongoing weapons of mass destruction program as had been thought to exist before the war. These are leftover rounds, which Iraq probably did not even know that it had. Certainly, the leadership was unaware of their existence, because they made very clear that they had gotten rid of their programs as a prelude to getting out of sanctions.

...

Deulfer: Sarin agent decays, you know, at a certain rate, as does mustard agent. What we found, both as UN and later when I was with the Iraq Survey Group, is that some of these rounds would have highly degraded agent, but it is still dangerous. You know, it can be a local hazard. If an insurgent got it and wanted to create a local hazard, it could be exploded. When I was running the ISG – the Iraq Survey Group – we had a couple of them that had been turned in to these IEDs, the improvised explosive devices. But they are local hazards. They are not a major, you know, weapon of mass destruction.

Both Kay and Terrance Taylor, also formerly of UNSCOM, agreed that such weapons continue to turn up in Europe and other parts of the world today – either as remnants from WW2 or other conflicts – and they don't expect Iraq to be any different. Unexploded munitions of all types should be in evidence along old Iran-Iraq battle lines, which often shifted rapidly, but you may have to look hard for them.

And so there you have it, from two of Bush's hand-picked weapons inspectors. These aren't viable weapons of mass destruction. Three years later and still no hidden stockpiles. Only remnants, many years old, improperly destroyed, misplaced, unexploded and abandoned. Yet some munitions remain hazardous and potentially lethal, and one might die if exposed to a sufficient quantity of degraded agent in a confined space over a prolonged period of time (so I suggest you don't try extracting the agent using an ordinary household drill.) Otherwise, people just aren't going to stick around.