While I was in the US last week, the final report by the Iraq Survey Group was published. Its claim that Saddam had destroyed his WMD stockpiles in 1991 enabled the anti-war crowd to crow predictably that there were no WMD in Iraq prior to the 2003 war. From Senator Kerry to the British Labour party, the clamour has redoubled that President Bush and Tony Blair took us to war on false pretences and should be tarred and feathered as a result. But as has been the case with every single development in this war, the media accounts of the ISG report do not square with what the report actually says. If you read the thing itself, you find that it contains ample justification for the war, while at the same time raising many more questions than it answers.

The first point is that it says over and over again that Saddam intended to restart his WMD programmes, particularly to manufacture nuclear weapons, as soon as sanctions were lifted:

‘There is an extensive, yet fragmentary and circumstantial, body of evidence suggesting that Saddam pursued a strategy to maintain a capability to return to WMD after sanctions were lifted by preserving assets and expertise. In addition to preserved capability, we have clear evidence of his intent to resume WMD as soon as sanctions were lifted…Saddam’s primary concern was retaining a cadre of skilled scientists to facilitate reconstitution of WMD programs after sanctions were lifted, according to former science advisor Ja’far Diya’ Ja’far Hashim… According to two senior Iraqi scientists, in 1993 Husayn Kamil, then the Minister of Military Industrialization, announced in a speech to a large audience of WMD scientists at the Space Research Center in Baghdad that WMD programs would resume and be expanded, when UNSCOM inspectors left Iraq.’

Aha, say the appeaseniks, that shows sanctions were working and had kept Saddam in his box. Not so. The report makes plain that sanctions were not working and that it was only a matter of time before they collapsed. By 2001, it says: ‘Prohibited goods and weapons were being shipped into Iraq with virtually no problem’.

Indeed, as it spells out in detail, the oil-for-fraud scam was enabling Saddam not only to trouser huge amounts of UN money but to use it to buy material for WMD programmes:

‘Another element of this strategy involved circumventing UN sanctions and the OFF program by means of “Protocols” or government-to-government economic trade agreements. Protocols allowed Saddam to generate a large amount of revenue outside the purview of the UN. The successful implementation of the Protocols, continued oil smuggling efforts, and the manipulation of UN OFF contracts emboldened Saddam to pursue his military reconstitution efforts starting in 1997 and peaking in 2001. These efforts covered conventional arms, dual-use goods acquisition, and some WMD-related programs.’

In other words, far from being put back in his box Saddam was enabled, by a corrupted UN effort and the additional connivance of France and Russia, to continue to menace the world. This huge oil-for-fraud scandal has received almost no attention in the British media - which has also failed to acknowledge the evidence it furnishes that Saddam was still actively in the WMD business. In addition, the report states that he had re-started production of banned ballistic missiles:

‘In 2002, Iraq began serial production of the Al-Samud II, a short-range ballistic missile that violated UN range limits-text firings had reached 183 km-and exceeded UN prescribed diameter limitations of 600mm.’

All this alone is more than enough to justify the war as a clear breach of the UN resolutions which required Saddam to show he had got rid of his WMD and other prohibited weapons and ended his WMD programmes - the actual casus belli.

But beyond these important details, the ISG report itself merits far more sceptical treatment than the uncritical and selective cherry-picking that passes for reporting by the anti-war media. For in several important ways, the report is demonstrably inadequate, incoherent and inconsistent.

To begin with, it is highly impressionistic and subjective. Indeed, it itself acknowledges that the approach it has taken is unusual. What original material it contains appears to depend very largely on what Saddam and his underlings have told US debriefers. This tends to obscure the glaring fact that the ISG actually failed in its central task - to discover what actually happened to the WMD that teams of weapons inspectors during the 1990s said remained unaccounted for. The fate of these WMD still remains a mystery after this report. What it provides us with instead is a highly subjective interpretation of what proven liars have told their captors. Indeed, it spells out the limitations of the exercise:

‘Detainees were very concerned about their fate and therefore would not be willing to implicate themselves in sensitive matters of interest such as WMD, in light of looming prosecutions. Debriefers noted the use of passive interrogation resistance techniques collectively by a large number of detainees to avoid their involvement or knowledge of sensitive issues; place blame or knowledge with individuals who were not in a position to contradict the detainee’s statements, such as deceased individuals or individuals who were not in custody or who had fled the country; and provide debriefers with previously known information. However, the reader should keep in mind the Arab proverb: “Even a liar tells many truths”… Some former Regime officials, such as ‘Ali Hasan Al Majid Al Tikriti (Chemical ‘Ali), never gave substantial information, despite speaking colorfully and at length. He never discussed actions, which would implicate him in a crime. Moreover, for some aspects of the Regime’s WMD strategy, like the role of the Military Industrialization Commission (MIC), analysts could only speak with a few senior-level officials, which limited ISG’s assessment to the perspectives of these individuals.’

In any event, very few would have had any idea what was going on:

‘The infrequent and uninformed questions ascribed to him [Saddam] by former senior Iraqis may betray a lack of deep background knowledge and suggest that he had not been following the efforts closely. Alternatively, Saddam may not have fully trusted those with whom he was discussing these programs. Both factors were probably at play. All sources, however, suggest that Saddam encouraged compartmentalization and would have discussed something as sensitive as WMD with as few people as possible.’

Nor were the manifold inadequacies of these witnesses the only limitation. Much, if not most, of the incriminating evidence had been destroyed - thanks to the culpable laxity of the coalition forces immediately after the fall of Baghdad:

‘First, many sites had been reduced to rubble either by the war or subsequent looting. The coalition did not have the man-power to secure the various sites thought to be associated with WMD. Hence, as a military unit moved through an area, possible WMD sites might have been examined, but they were left soon after. Looters often destroyed the sites once they were abandoned. A second difficulty was the lack of incentive for WMD program participants to speak with ISG investigators. On the one hand, those who co-operated risked retribution from former Regime supporters for appearing to assist the occupying power. On the other hand, there was substantial risk that the Coalition would incarcerate these individuals. Hence, for the most part, individuals related to Iraqi WMD tried to avoid being found. Even long after the war, many Iraqi scientists and engineers find little incentive to speak candidly about the WMD efforts of the previous Regime. This is exacerbated by their life-long experience of living with the threat of horrible punishment for speaking candidly… the sites that filled the database of monitored locations are radically different postwar. Equipment and material in the majority of locations have been removed or ruined. Often there is nothing but a concrete slab at locations where once stood plants or laboratories.’

Notwithstanding these signal difficulties, the report presents us with an explanation of what it thinks actually happened to the WMD. But its central argument is fundamentally incoherent and inconsistent. Its proposition is that Saddam was attempting unsuccessfully to pursue a course of strategic ambiguity: to satisfy the UN in order to get sanctions lifted, while at the same time bluffing the world that he still had WMD in order to maintain its deterrence value, even though he had in fact destroyed it all in 1991:

‘It now appears clear that Saddam, despite internal reluctance, particularly on the part of the head of Iraq’s military industries, Husayn Kamil, resolved to eliminate the existing stocks of WMD weapons during the course of the summer of 1991 in support of the prime objective of getting rid of sanctions. The goal was to do enough to be able to argue that they had complied with UN requirements. Some production capacity that Baghdad thought could be passed off as serving a civilian function was retained, and no admission of biological weapons was made at all. But the clear prime theme of Saddam was to defeat the UN constraints. Dispensing with WMD was a tactical retreat in his ongoing struggle…

‘From the evidence available through the actions and statements of a range of Iraqis, it seems clear that the guiding theme for WMD was to sustain the intellectual capacity achieved over so many years at such a great cost and to be in a position to produce again with as short a lead time as possible-within the vital constraint that no action should threaten the prime objective of ending international sanctions and constraints. Saddam continued to see the utility of WMD. He explained that he purposely gave an ambiguous impression about possession as a deterrent to Iran. He gave explicit direction to maintain the intellectual capabilities. As UN sanctions eroded there was a concomitant expansion of activities that could support full WMD reactivation. He directed that ballistic missile work continue that would support long-range missile development. Virtually no senior Iraqi believed that Saddam had forsaken WMD forever. Evidence suggests that, as resources became available and the constraints of sanctions decayed, there was a direct expansion of activity that would have the effect of supporting future WMD reconstitution.’

Now, there are several things wrong with this analysis. The first is that it makes very little sense. Saying he destroyed his WMD stocks in order to get the UN sanctions lifted is a strange argument, since he refused to show the UN that he had indeed destroyed the stocks in question, leaving them instead unaccounted for. Indeed, since he refused to prove he had destroyed them in order to get sanctions lifted, why should he have destroyed them in secret , thus perpetuating the sanctions regime?

The bluff theory doesn’t answer the main question. Sure, he was determined to maintain the appearance of WMD capability to deter or threaten Iran and others. But that does not explain why therefore he chose secretly to destroy the stuff rather than hang onto it - especially since the report says he repeatedly identified Iraq’s security with WMD, and intended to resume production once sanctions ended.

Next, the report says he was trying to maintain a balance between avoiding sanctions and appearing strong. But since — as it also says — he believed that sanctions were failing, why should he have felt the need to disarm?

There is yet a further inconsistency in the bluff theory. The report reveals that after the weapons inspectors left Iraq in 1998, Saddam passed a secret resolution renouncing compliance with the UN resolutions, thus underlining his intention to pursue further WMD activity. The bluff theory, however, holds that he showed a disarmament face to the UN while showing a WMD face to his enemies. So why, then, would he have renounced the UN resolutions in secret? Doesn’t that indicate that, far from keeping his destruction of WMD secret, as the bluff theory would have us believe, it was his WMD programme itself that was being kept secret?

Even more glaring than these analytical wrinkles are the report’s many inconsistencies. For its claim that Saddam destroyed all his WMD stocks in 1991 is flatly contradicted by other aspects of its account, which reveal the continued deception, denials and obstruction of the weapons inspectors during the 1990s. Why was there such obstruction if there was nothing to hide? Furthermore, the inspectors found actual evidence of WMD during this period:

‘Particularly in the early 1990s, the SRG concealed uranium enrichment equipment, missiles, missile manufacturing equipment, “know-how” documents from all the programs, as well as a supply of strategic materials.’

And also:

‘Two events in mid-1998 defined a turning point in UNSCOM/Iraq relations: The detection of VX-related compounds on ballistic missile warhead fragments and the discovery of a document describing the use of special weapons by the Iraqi Air Force. Both events convinced inspectors that their assessment of ongoing Iraqi concealment was correct…

‘On 1 July 1995, Iraq had admitted to the production of bulk biological agent, but had denied weaponizing it. To maintain the appearance of cooperation, however, Iraq had to provide more information to inspectors and withdraw the earlier FFCD. After making such strident demands of Rolf Ekeus and the UN, Iraq was now forced-to great embarrassment-to withdraw its threat to cease cooperation with UNSCOM and admit that its biological program was more extensive than previously acknowledged… From 1991 to 1995, the Iraqis
modified their tactics to continue the concealment of proscribed materials… The release of long-concealed WMD documentation planted at Husayn Kamil’s farm in August 1995, and Iraq’s declarations in February 1996 revealing new aspects of the WMD programs were major turning points in the Regime’s denial and deception efforts following the Desert Storm.’

Indeed, the ISG report actually says the destruction in 1991 was intended to deceive:

‘Following unexpectedly thorough inspections, Saddam ordered Husayn Kamil in July 1991 to destroy unilaterally large numbers of undeclared weapons and related materials to conceal Iraq’s WMD capabilities.’

So the 1991 exercise was far from any comprehensive shut-down of Iraq’s WMD capability. On the contrary, it was designed to conceal it.

There is a further fascinating paragraph which appears to have gone completely unnoticed:

‘According to presidential secretary Abd Hamid Mahmud Al Khatab Al Nasiri, during the mid-to late 1990s Saddam issued a presidential decree
directing the IIS [Iraqi Intelligence Service] to recruit UNSCOM inspectors, especially American inspectors. To entice their co-operation, the IIS was to offer the inspectors preferential treatment for future business dealings with Iraq, once they completed their duties with the United Nations. Tariq Aziz and an Iraqi-American were specifically tasked by the IIS to focus on a particular American inspector.’

So who was this inspector? Was it perhaps Scott Ritter, who suddenly and bafflingly turned upon the US and refuted the conclusions he had previously drawn, giving immense ammunition to the anti-war lobby? If it was not, he should surely make this clear.

Finally, people say that if Saddam did have any WMD, he would surely have used it during the war. Personally, I have never bought this argument, and find it as silly as saying that the fact that no WMD were found means that none existed. The ISG report rehearses the since-he-didn’t-use-it-he-couldn’t-have-had-it argument, but then offers an alternative explanation:

‘If WMD existed, Saddam may have opted not to use it for larger strategic or political reasons, because he did not think Coalition military action would unseat him. If he used WMD, Saddam would have shown that he had been lying all along to the international community and would lose whatever residual political support he might have retained in the UNSC. From the standpoint of Regime survival, once he used WMD against Coalition forces, he would foreclose the chance to outlast an occupation. Based on his experience with past coalition attacks, Saddam actually had more options by not using WMD, and if those failed, WMD always remained as the final alternative. Although the Iraqi Government might be threatened by a Coalition attack, Saddam-the ultimate survivor-believed if he could hold out long enough, he could create political and strategic opportunities for international sympathy and regional support to blunt an invasion. Asked by a US interviewer in 2004, why he had not used WMD against the Coalition during Desert Storm, Saddam replied, “Do you think we are mad? What would the world have thought of us? We would have completely discredited those who had supported us.” ‘

While he was in power, Saddam ran rings round the west because it never grasped - among so many other things about Iraq and the Middle East in general- the nature and depth of his strategic cunning. And even now he is in captivity, he is still running rings round a western world that is gullible and credulous, and would eagerly believe a dozen impossible things before breakfast provided they put the US and Tony Blair in the worst possible light. How the butcher of Baghdad must be laughing in his American prison cell at the contortions of the CIA - and all the useful idiots who are intent on giving him a posthumous victory.