Hitchens and Weapons (again)
In May, as mentioned before, Christopher Hitchens argued in Slate that the presence of U.S. troops just outside Iraq, before the March invasion, may have caused Saddam to destroy any weapons of mass destruction that he had, in such a way that virtually no trace could be found later. Now Hitchens argues that the presence of those same troops, just before the invasion, may actually have caused the North Korean government to call off an arms deal with Saddam.
Perhaps Hitchens is conceding that Saddam had no WMDs at all, say, at the end of 2002. But the argument is that Saddam wanted to acquire a formidable arsenal, and North Korea was just the regime to supply him with one. Only the presence of U.S. troops, it seems, saved the situation.
But this presents us with a different Saddam than the scenario in May. Before we had a Saddam who kept on acquiring weapons, right up to 2002 or 2003, just as the Bush defenders keep saying, but who then destroyed them (somehow) at the last minute. Now we have a Saddam who was actually trying desperately to acquire WMDs, perhaps for the first time in many years, also at the last minute.
Does this make any sense? Assuming Saddam was the kind of guy who wanted to acquire WMDs, why was he so singularly unsuccessful? Perhaps one deal was scuttled early in 2003; was this the only potential deal? Were others scuttled in other ways?
I'm still struck by the possibility that Saddam's underlings, perhaps nervous at the difficulty in handling some of this stuff, had dismantled it in 1993 or shortly after. Saddam himself may not have known just how poorly armed he was.
I know this is weird, but is anybody else coming up with a more plausible narrative? It also fits with the idea that practically every household in Iraq has long had an AK-47, a pellet gun or .22, and maybe a handgun or two. Not exactly Stalinism.
How many governments in the world today have some WMDs? Was Saddam one of the very few with, so to speak, absolutely none?
Hitchens' source is David Kay. Kay's assignment was clearly to make the WMD issue look as good as possible for Bush. He hasn't been...er...remarkably successful. Kay still seems to be saying: OK, there were no actual weapons, but there was a program, precursors, and dual-use facilities. Timothy McVeigh blew up a federal building in Oklahoma using fertilizer. Is fertilizer a precursor? Does every home or farm where fertilizer is stored have a WMD program? Is every fertilizer plant, everywhere in the world, a dual-use facility?
Given the amount of fertilizer in the world, is it possible that Saddam was not only one of the very few heads of state with no control over any WMDs, but one of a minority of individuals in the world with no effective control of precursors? OK, I'm joking.
I saw a documentary on TV on the chemical weapons programs in the U.S. and the USSR during the Cold War, how the USSR kept developing weapons in violation of treaties, and what has happened to the stuff since the end of the Cold War. One comment was: to some extent we are talking about products that anyone can make in a bathtub. In other words, it is misleading to speak as if only governments are likely to have WMDs, and if we find the right governments to take out, we will have solved the problem. The Bush administration has not spoken very honestly about this; nor, of course, about the way they continue to subsidize some governments that have, in the recent past, directly supported international terrorism in general, and Al Qaeda in particular: Saudi Arabia, Egypt, and Pakistan.
Of course, senior officials in the U.S. government believed in good faith that there were strategic reasons to take out Saddam. These reasons would have concerned benefits for the U.S. and its allies. There was always a "big picture" view about establishing a democracy in the Gulf, but in practice, security for the U.S., Israel and the West must have taken priority over liberating the people there. But insofar as the strategic reasons don't seem to be panning out, the sole defensible rationale that remains is liberation: the U.S. seen as nobly struggling for the underdog, and anyone who doesn't join them, practically a lap-dog to Hitler.
But no sane government would have intervened primarily or solely to liberate the Iraqi people. Hitchens has been reduced to brief suggestions that removal of Saddam was "long overdue," that we all owe Bush and Blair a debt of gratitude for doing this job, and that Saddam somehow would have been unusually nasty if he had somehow got his hands on WMDs. Or if not Saddam, then his sons.
Update Dec. 6: one "investigator" who is not working for Kay comments on the "shopping list" that Saddam's officials used in negotiating with North Korea: "What is also interesting about the shopping list, however, is 'what's not on it,' said one investigator. 'Nothing nuclear, no dual-use items, nothing about weapons of mass destruction.'"
Hitchens doesn't actually say Saddam was trying to acquire WMDs from North Korea. He emphasizes the "Rodong missile," which "has a range much greater than that prohibited to Iraq by the U.N. resolutions."
And another thing, according to Hitchens: "Incidentally, if the Iraqis destroyed the stocks they had once declared, they were in serious breach of the U.N. resolutions, which stipulated that they be handed over and accounted for."
Destroying weapons without permission? Very bad. Send in the Marines, for God's sake. Less sarcastically: is this what the war was all about?
Update: Here's a version of the new Korea-Saddam story, which opens with this gem: "Iraqi scientists never revived their nuclear bomb programme, and in fact lied to Saddam Hussein about how much progress they were making before US-led attacks shut the operation down for good in 1991, Iraqi physicists say."
|
