|
|
.
Some U.S. officials have even begun to suggest that finding scientists who will testify to Saddam's arms ambitions could be enough to fulfill America's justification for the Iraq war -- even if the weapons themselves are never located.
WASHINGTON (Reuters) - Having failed to find Saddam Hussein's vaunted arsenal of nuclear, chemical and biological arms, the United States is now focusing more on the scientists who hold Iraq's weapons secrets in their heads. Some U.S. officials have even begun to suggest that finding scientists who will testify to Saddam's arms ambitions could be enough to fulfill America's justification for the Iraq war -- even if the weapons themselves are never located. But even that presents a problem. In Washington, there is concern that despite the capture of several high-profile Iraqi weapons scientists in recent days, hundreds or even thousands more may escape, only to be pressed into the service of other unsavory states or terrorist groups. "We talked about this expressly before the war and said, so what are we going to do about it? And the answer is there isn't anything we can do about it," one senior U.S. official said. "Until you get control of the country, the risk of scientists escaping -- to Syria, to Libya -- burning documents, taking documents with them, taking sensitive material with them, is a real problem," he told Reuters. President Bush, in undertaking the controversial invasion of Iraq, argued that Saddam's regime posed a security threat because it had significant stocks of chemical and biological agents, and was also pursuing nuclear arms, which could be made available to terrorist groups. But a month after U.S. forces entered the country, Iraq's alleged 500 tons of chemical warfare agents and tens of thousands of liters of anthrax and botulism toxins have not shown up, creating a political problem for the White House. HIGH EXPECTATIONS "Because the Bush administration set the bar so high, the international legitimacy of the U.S. war on Iraq now depends on the discovery of significant caches of banned weapons," said Jonathan Tucker, a former U.N. arms inspector. Although some stocks may eventually turn up, "it may not satisfy the high expectations created by the administration before the war," he said at a program last week at the United States Institute of Peace where he is now a senior fellow. The senior administration official, speaking on condition of anonymity, insisted "the issue is not how much you find." Rather, it is the fact that Saddam repeatedly refused to prove he abandoned his weapons programs and that meant "it was his intention to have a WMD capability and use it when necessary," the official said. While predicting inspectors would eventually find biological and chemical weapons in Iraq, he stopped short of expressing confidence that U.S. prewar claims would be met. Iraq had 12 years to perfect its deception tactics and may have mixed biological and chemical agents with bleach, dumped them in a river or buried them in the desert, officials say. The New York Times on Monday reported an Iraqi scientist told a U.S. military team Iraq destroyed chemical arms and biological warfare equipment only days before the war began. The scientist, who was not identified but said he had worked in Iraq's chemical weapons program for more than a decade, led the U.S. team to a supply of materials used in the production of illegal arms, which he said he had buried. BRAIN DRAIN FEARED As for Saddam's nuclear program, U.S. officials said it is unclear whether nuclear materials will be discovered. "But what we do know is that Saddam kept his thousands of scientists, engineers and technicians together -- the so-called nuclear mujahideen -- and my guess is their files are going to show how you construct nuclear weapons," one official said. If these scientists report they did not build weapons but were ready to go as soon as the U.N. Security Council declared the country nuclear-free "that to me would be convincing proof that even if he didn't have six nuclear bombs in a bunker somewhere, Saddam fully intended to get back to it," he added. An estimated 3,000 scientists, engineers and technicians were part of Iraq's WMD program, of whom 100 were key figures. In recent days, U.S.-led forces have captured Amer Hammoudi Al-Saadi, Saddam's top scientific adviser; Jaffar al-Jaffer, a British-educated physicist dubbed "the father of Iraq's nuclear weapons program"; Emad Ani, a top chemical scientist. Tucker said not stopping a "brain drain" among unemployed scientists, who are susceptible to job offers from neighboring countries and terror groups, is a major gap in U.S. policy. "It would be a terrible irony if a war to prevent the proliferation of chemical and biological weapons to terrorists inadvertently brought about that very result," he said. The U.S. created research programs in Moscow and Kiev to employ nuclear scientists in peaceful pursuits when the Soviet Union collapsed and is considering a similar program for Iraq.
Join our Daily News Headlines Email Digest
|
|||||||
