Dispatches: In Iraq, weapons of mass distortion

DISPATCHES by Hank Kalet: America is coming up empty handed in its search for Saddam’s nukes.

By: Hank Kalet
   The military task force assigned to seek out Saddam Hussein’s stockpile of nuclear, chemical and biological weapons appears ready to leave Iraq empty-handed.
   According to The Washington Post, the 75th Exploitation Task Force will leave Iraq next month without evidence that the Iraqi dictator was hiding the illegal weapons.

   That does not mean the weapons did not — or do not — exist. But it raises questions about the Bush administration’s rush to war and its primary contention, that force was necessary to disarm Saddam Hussein. While the Bush administration has moved to recast this as a war of liberation, it was Saddam’s weapons that drove the international debate and upon which this administration was betting its credibility.
   The lead in to the war featured Secretary of State Colin Powell showing video and offering proof of the Iraqi dictator’s weapons program — proof that later turned out to be a mishmash of questionable analysis and old information — and the president and others making their own unverifiable statements.
   So here we are, more than a month after the fall of Baghdad and we have yet to find any nuclear weapons or any real evidence that Saddam Hussein had chemical weapons and was prepared to use them. Yes, there have been the occasional "labs" found, but nothing verifiable and nothing that the administration has been willing even to hold up as a smoking gun.
   Instead, we’ve heard from Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld and Presidential Press Secretary Ari Fleischer that we should have patience, that it will take time to uncover the caches of nuclear, chemical and biological weapons they know exist.
   It takes time — now, where have I heard that phrase before? I know. It was the phrase used by both United Nations weapons chief Hans Blix and Mohammed ElBaradei, director-general of the International Atomic Energy Agency, in pleading to allow U.N. weapons inspectors to finish their investigation.
   Their request was dismissed by the Bush administration, however, who said they were being duped by the Iraqis, that U.S. intelligence had found an extensive program and so on.
   So, what should we make of that earlier intelligence? The Post reports that "U.S. Central Command began the war with a list of 19 top weapons sites. Only two remain to be searched. Another list enumerated 68 top ‘non-WMD sites,’ without known links to special weapons but judged to have the potential to offer clues. Of those, the tally at midweek showed 45 surveyed without success."
   David Corn, Washington correspondent for The Nation magazine, raised questions last week in his weblog about the pace of inspections. He said that Stephen Cambone, under secretary of defense for intelligence, said at a May 7 press conference that there were about 600 weapons sites identified by the Pentagon before the war and that 70 of those had been visited by the military. Another 40 not on the original list have been visited, as well, he reports.
   "This hardly seems like an anti-WMD blitzkrieg," Mr. Corn writes.
   He then adds that the Pentagon is creating what it is calling the Iraq Survey Group to seek out evidence of weapons and any connection the Hussein regime may have had with terrorist groups. The unit will not arrive in Iraq until the end of May.
   As Mr. Corn asks, why the delay? Why wasn’t the team ready to enter Iraq the minute American forces took control of Baghdad?
   This, after all, was the primary justification for the invasion.
   Which brings me to a question that has been bothering me for sometime: Should Americans feel safer now than they did before the war?
   Before you answer, however, you should read this paragraph from The Washington Post:
   "A specially trained Defense Department team, dispatched after a month of official indecision to survey a major Iraqi radioactive waste repository, today found the site heavily looted and said it was impossible to tell whether nuclear materials were missing."
   The story goes on to explain that the waste repository near the city of Kut was one of two to have been plundered since Saddam Hussein’s regime was chased from power last month.
   According to the paper, another Defense Department team recommended on April 10 that there be an increase in security at the Kut facility, which was followed a day later by a similar recommendation from the International Atomic Energy Agency, which also said a waste facility at Tuwaitha required protection. A U.S. Army division was dispatched to control the gate, according to the paper, but that did not prevent the looting.
   "Employees of the (Kut) research center — or Iraqis who said they were employees — had been coming in by the score for more than two weeks," the paper said in a May 3 story. "The 3rd Infantry’s security detail had no Arabic speaker and could not verify their stories. In addition, looters had been scavenging inside continuously since U.S. forces took control. At the peak, there were 400 a day. On Friday, the U.S. soldiers detained 62 of them, but many more got away."
   Joe Conason, in his column in the New York Observer, said the missing materials might not be useful to build a nuclear devise, but "they would be more than adequate for a so-called dirty bomb. In theory, such a primitive weapon could be detonated in a major American city, spreading deadly isotopes over dozens of blocks."
   It is a troubling scenario, to be sure, one raised by the administration itself when it arrested Jose Padilla last year. The FBI arrested Mr. Padilla — a convert to Islam also known as Abdullah al Muhajir — last year, accusing him of plotting with al-Qaida to steal radioactive material to detonate a "dirty bomb," possibly in Washington, D.C.
   More than anything else, it raises questions about the administration’s goals in Iraq. If weapons were its main concern, then why the foot-dragging and why leave nuclear waste sites unsecured and accessible to looters? After all, we made sure the country’s oil fields were secure.
   Don’t expect answers from the administration.
   What we are likely to get, instead, are more photo-ops like the one that opened the president’s May 1 speech announcing the end of major fighting in Iraq. (President emerges from a fighter jet in full military regalia after its landing on an aircraft carrier moored just a few miles off the California coast to create the mother of all photo-ops.)
   As I asked before: Do you feel safer now than you did before the war?
Hank Kalet is managing editor of the South Brunswick Post and the
Cranbury Press. He can be reached via e-mail at
href="mailto:hkalet@pacpub.com">hkalet@pacpub.com.