The New Republic

As the Bush administration crows over its military success in Iraq,
it still faces one nagging question: Why can't it find any weapons
of mass destruction (WMD)? After all, the Bushies' absolute
certainty that Saddam Hussein had a massive arsenal of illegal
weapons was the purported number-one reason for taking out the
Iraqi dictator in the first place. Iraq "possesses and produces
chemical and biological weapons," President Bush declared last
October. On February 5, in a presentation to the U.N. Security
Council, Secretary of State Colin Powell contended that Iraq had at
least seven mobile biological-agent factories and "a stockpile of
between one hundred and five hundred tons of chemical weapons
agent." As recently as April 10, White House Press Secretary Ari
Fleischer said, "We have high confidence that they have weapons of
mass destruction. That is what this war was about and is about."But, so far at least, American efforts to find those WMD have come
up empty. Which is why the Bush administration is now backpedaling
a bit on the WMD issue. Although the Bushies continue to insist
that Saddam had unconventional weapons, they no longer predict that
they will necessarily find them. That's because, they now argue,
Saddam may have destroyed or moved his illegal arsenal before the
war began. So, instead of hunting for the weapons themselves, the
administration is now hunting for Iraqis who can testify that those
weapons once existed. "The inspectors didn't find anything, and I
doubt that we will," Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld said on
April 17. "What we will do is find the people who will tell us."
The New York Times' Judith Miller, who is embedded with an American
military team hunting for unconventional weapons in Iraq, reported
last week that an Iraqi scientist told the team that Iraq destroyed
chemical and biological warfare equipment before the wara
revelation that has prompted the Americans to shift their "focus
from finding such weapons to locating key people who worked on the
programs."

The good news for the Bush administration is that weapons experts
outside government don't generally question the administration's
new WMD narrative. "It's entirely plausible that the Iraqis could
have moved their weapons or destroyed them," says Kelly Motz,
editor of the Wisconsin Project on Nuclear Arms Control's Iraq
Watch. The bad news is that simply finding a few Iraqi scientists
who'll vouch for the weapons' existence (and their subsequent
destruction or transfer) won't be enough to settle the WMD question.
Although Americans may not care a great deal about whether or not
the United States ever proves that Saddam had WMDa poll in
mid-April found that 57 percent of Americans will still think the
war was worthwhile even if WMD are never found in Iraqthe issue
matters a great deal to the rest of the world, which is suspicious
of America's motives for going to war. And it's doubtful that
people outside the United States will be convinced merely by the
testimony of Iraqi scientists. They'll need corroborating
evidence.

Fortunately, for almost every unconventional weapon, such evidence
can be found. The most important evidence is scientific. If one
good thing can be said about the chemical and biological weapons
Saddam was thought to possessweapons such as VX and sarin nerve
gases, mustard gas, anthrax, botulinum toxin, aflatoxin, and
ricinit's that they are, to varying degrees, detectable, even after
they are destroyed. So, if Iraqi scientists tell American officials
that under Saddam they produced VX nerve gas and subsequently
destroyed it before the war began, American officials can visit the
site where the VX was supposedly destroyed and conduct tests on
soil samples and pieces of equipment to determine whether traces of
VX are present at the site. What's more, they could send samples
for testing to labs around the worldin Sweden, in Switzerland, even
in Franceto back up the American analysis.

In addition to scientific testing, there's more run-of-the-mill
detective worksuch as finding documentation, following money
trails, locating equipment that might have been used to process
biological and chemical weaponsthat inspectors can undertake to
back up whatever testimony they gather from Iraqis. "They need to
have physical evidence to corroborate that testimony," says former
U.N. weapons inspector David Kay. "Where you may not be able to get
corroborating physical evidence is if people testify that they moved
weapons to Syria or if they sold them to Hamas or Hezbollah or Al
Qaeda. But even then, you ask, 'What did you get paid? Where's the
money? How did it get transferred?' You need as much detail as
possible."

Unfortunately, the Bush administration has so far failed to
demonstrate the commitment to the WMD hunt that would make this
detective work more possible. As Miller has reported in The New
York Times, the four American military teams originally assembled
to search for unconventional weapons in Iraq have been hobbled by a
lack of resources as basic as vehicles to take teams to suspect
sites and systems through which they can file encrypted reports from
the field. The teams also lack officers senior enough to command
attention. "The team Judy Miller is embedded with is led by a
warrant officer," says one weapons expert. "In the military pecking
order, I don't care if he found a nuke, a warrant officer's report
would have to go through seven layers of bureaucracy before it got
to someone who could do anything about it." What's more, two of the
military teams originally assigned to the WMD hunt were recently
taken off that task and reassigned to investigate war crimes and
gather intelligence on other matters.

Making matters worse, the Bush administration has been slow to
utilize several dozen civilian weapons inspectors, both Americans
and foreigners, who were supposed to follow the military teams'
initial work with more comprehensive searches. Indeed, many of the
would-be inspectors have still not been sent to Iraq. "The
[civilian] teams can't operate in a nonpermissive environment
without having a protective force around them, and the argument for
the last two weeks has been that we don't have enough forces to peel
off to provide physical protection," says one person familiar with
the civilian inspector program. "They didn't build into the plan
the resources to do this, so now their argument for not doing it is
that we don't have the resources." And resources, of course, are a
reflection of will.

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