Commentary No. 116, July 1, 2003
"Common Sense About the Missing Weapons"
The inability of the United States to find Iraq's famous stock of "Weapons of Mass Destruction" (or WMD as the newspaper headlines call them) has gotten embarrassing for the Bush regime, and even more so for Tony Blair (as well as the Spanish government). In the rush to justify war, it seems clear that the very least that can be said is that the U.S. and U.K. governments overstated their case, perhaps lied outright.
How important is this? And what does this mean? There are a number of questions intertwined in this discussion. One is how many, if any, weapons did Saddam Hussein really have, and when did he have them? A second is, if there were weapons, why didn't he use them? A third is, if there were weapons, where are they now? A fourth is how important the issue of the weapons really ever was for Bush and Blair? A fifth is whether or not the world is now safer from whatever menace these weapons were supposed to have posed, now that U.S. troops are in Baghdad. This is a tangled skein of questions, and it is in the interest of many people to keep it tangled, and thus resistant to analytic criticism.
How many weapons did Hussein have? Rumsfeld is now saying that before the war no one (not even the critics of U.S. policy) doubted that he had some, so why all the gloating now about the absence of discoveries? The weapons were there, they are there, and they will be found, says he. He's of course partially right. Very few persons did ever doubt the existence of some weapons. I myself did not doubt it. The question is whether the weapons represented a significant and imminent threat to the world. The U.S. insisted that they did, and most of the rest of the world disagreed about this assessment rather strongly.
Now it seems Saddam may really have liquidated most, if not all, of such weapons as he did have in the months before the war started. No doubt he was under pressure to do so. But then this was just what Hans Blix and the French government had been arguing, when they said that the U.N. inspections were "working." It seems the U.S. has now been able to uncover one Iraqi scientist who admits that detailed documents concerning the construction of nuclear weapons were buried in his garden - over a decade ago. And it seems he says that Saddam ordered this because he was planning to put the plans in operation once sanctions were lifted. That sounds possible to me. But so what? We'll come back to that question.
Did Saddam indeed have operational weapons? Remember Tony Blair told Parliament that he could put them into the field in 45 minutes. If so, why then didn't he use these weapons? Surely, using them would have had at least some military impact. There is no good answer to this question if we assume the scenarios of which the U.S. had been warning. Maybe, Saddam was cleverer than that. Maybe he figured that he would lose the immediate military battle whatever he did, and the important thing was not to lose all his strongest supporters in the process. In this case, maybe he told them all to melt away, after which they could launch or encourage a looting operation with the double purpose of sowing disorder and of destroying infrastructure and records. This might then create a major mess with which the U.S. was politically incapable of dealing (given the complexity of Iraq's social tensions). And then he could start a draining guerilla war. Too clever, you say? Perhaps. Maybe the U.S. just ended up with the same results without any planning on Saddam's part.
If he had these weapons, where are they now? A batch of plans in a garden and two trucks that might possibly have been used to make biological weapons in the future (and which in any case had been sold to Saddam by the British) is not very much to show for two months of search. I know Iraq is a big country, but presumably the U.S. armed forces are capable of making searches, especially if the U.S. had in its possessions before the war started, as they claimed they had, intelligence on where these weapons were. Are these arms in Syria? Unlikely. If they really were, we'd probably have seen the U.S. army go in there by now. Will they turn up in a desert underground site? Perhaps. Why then is the U.S. unwilling to let the U.N. inspectors look for them? It doesn't smell very good.
But was the U.S. ever really interested in whether Iraq had such weapons? The answer is both no, and yes. No, in one very important sense. The U.S. hawks wanted to invade Iraq in order to invade Iraq, that is, in order to show the world that the U.S. could and would invade Iraq, just for being a nasty, anti-American focal point in the Middle East. Even if every member of the Bush regime knew for absolute certain that there were not and never had been any weapons of mass destruction, the U.S. would still have invaded Iraq. After all, Wolfowitz did say that the emphasis on these weapons was just a bureaucratic convenience, meaning it was the kind of argument that might persuade hesitant persons in the U.S. Congress and among the public to support the action, but was never the real reason.
But yes, the U.S. was concerned about weapons of mass destruction, in the sense that the U.S. is determined that no other country or force in the world be in a position to constrain it in any significant way, and certainly not militarily. This means, as I have been repeatedly saying, that the U.S. cannot tolerate any form of European Union that would be politically independent of the U.S. And the U.S. cannot tolerate that any other country have nuclear weapons.
Of course, some other countries - the U.K., Russia, France, China, India, Pakistan, and Israel - already do. And the U.S. knows there is just so much they can do to turn back the clock. But the U.S. policy is to stop any other countries who are conceivably in a position to develop such weapons over the next decade from doing so. This is not merely North Korea and Iran, nor even only Libya, Egypt, and Algeria. It is also Japan, South Korea, Kazakhstan, Ukraine, Belarus, Germany, South Africa, Brazil, and Argentina. This is a long list, but there are quite possibly dozens more.
The reasoning of the U.S. is really quite simple. The damage that can be done by even one small atomic bomb dropped in the course of warfare is sufficient to make the price of U.S. military action very high, perhaps too high. There is much talk these days of asymmetrical warfare, meaning that the U.S. is so far ahead of any other country in terms of military weaponry that it necessarily must win any encounter. But the so-called WMD can undo that asymmetry, especially given the political impact the use of such weapons by others against the U.S. would have on U.S. public opinion and its willingness to sanction warfare.
So, it is understandable that the U.S. tries so hard to stem proliferation. Nonetheless, one has to say that this attempt is a quixotic quest if there ever was one. For one thing, changing governments (regime change) does not solve the problem in the least. We need to remember today that Iran's nuclear program was started not by the ayatollahs but by the Shah whom the U.S. put into power, and was abetted by the Israelis, who saw Iran as a constraint on Iraq. We have to remember that Iraq's biological warfare program was aided and abetted by the British and the Americans when they saw Iraq as a constraint on Iran. And so on.
The U.S. invasion of Iraq has not slowed down but speeded up the programs to create WMD capacity everywhere. Meanwhile, the U.S. is now caught up in a long, draining occupation of Iraq, with lessened, not increased, ability to protect its interests across the world. On June 30, the Financial Times was querying whether Iraq had become Bush's Chechnya. And Bush's cynical use of the WMD issue vis-a-vis Hussein will catch up with him, as U.S. soldiers come under increasing fire in the guerilla war that has started.
George W. Bush will learn the lesson of every ruler. There are limits to power, especially if it is not used prudently and intelligently. Seldom, in recent history, has it been used so extravagantly and so recklessly.
Immanuel Wallerstein
[Copyright by Immanuel Wallerstein. All rights reserved. Permission is granted to download, forward electronically or e-mail to others and to post this text on non-commercial community Internet sites, provided the essay remains intact and the copyright note is displayed. To translate this text, publish it in printed and/or other forms, including commercial Internet sites and excerpts, contact the author at iwaller@binghamton.edu; fax: 1-607-777-4315.
These commentaries, published twice monthly, are intended to be reflections on the contemporary world scene, as seen
from the perspective not of the immediate headlines but of the long term.]
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