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Those in the know offer a glimpse at his arsenal, from labs in 18-wheelers to Scuds.
By DAVID BALLINGRUD and PAUL DE LA GARZA
© St. Petersburg Times, published October 21, 2002
Saddam Hussein has always talked a good war, but he has yet to fight one.
In 1990, after his invasion of Kuwait, he promised the "mother of all battles," should the United States and its allies try to kick him out.
The Gulf War was a bloody rout, of course, over in weeks at a horrific cost to a proud and advanced nation.
Today, 12 years later, he is still in Baghdad, waving swords and firing guns in the air. But is he the threat the Bush administration says he is? A madman working feverishly to develop and use weapons of mass destruction?
Or is he a bellicose old despot, lacking the weapons to seriously threaten his enemies?
It's hard to know.
Richard Butler and Scott Ritter were United Nations weapons inspectors after the Gulf War, trying to outsmart and outmaneuver Iraqi officials attempting to hide as many tools of war as possible.
Today, they disagree about the threat posed by Hussein.
Butler, a former Australian diplomat who headed the inspection program from 1997 to 1999, says the Iraqis lied and cheated and set out to rebuild their military as soon as they could.
"From day one, Iraq said it had no biological weapons program," Butler told the Australian press. "It took us five years to get them to admit they lied, and they did. They said, 'Oops, we lied.' "
Although inspectors destroyed much of Iraq's chemical, biological and nuclear material, he says, they didn't get it all.
In his book, The Greatest Threat: Iraq, Weapons of Mass Destruction, and the Growing Crisis of Global Security, published two years after inspections ended in 1998, Butler warned that "no one is watching Saddam Hussein . . . he is building weapons."
Ritter, who worked for Butler, contends that the risks are overstated. Hussein today is "a defanged tiger," he says, and can be contained through an aggressive inspection program.
Even if the Iraqi dictator has managed to hide some components of a chemical/biological weapons capability, he says, the pieces are worthless unless they are assembled in a configuration that could be easily spotted.
He blames the Bush administration and his old boss Butler for heavy-handed scare tactics.
Terms such as "grave, imminent and dire" conjure up frightening images as bad as "the Japanese fleet cruising off the coast of Hawaii or German Panzer divisions charging across Europe," he said. "No such comparable threat exists."
The Pentagon calls it Iraq's "D and D program" -- denial and deception.
After the Gulf War, the Iraqis used every trick they could think of to frustrate and mislead the U.N. inspection teams. Some chemicals were buried, some distributed throughout the country's legitimate commercial chemical industry, some kept on the move in trucks.
Jonathan B. Tucker, a senior fellow at the United States Institute of Peace, served as a U.N. weapons inspector in Iraq in 1995. At a briefing earlier this month, Tucker said Iraqis tried to steer inspectors away from sensitive sites, sometimes telling "elaborate and preposterous cover stories to protect their clandestine programs."
But they could be tripped up. For example, he said, the inspectors -- called UNSCOM, for United Nations Special Command -- learned from Western suppliers that during 1988 alone Iraq had imported nearly 39 tons of a complex "growth medium," a material suitable for growing bacteria -- anthrax, perhaps. But the medium was "dual use," meaning it also could be used for growing cultures in hospitals.
UNSCOM was able to account for 22 tons of the media, leaving 17 tons unexplained, he said.
Confronted with this discrepancy, Iraqi authorities said the missing medium had been imported for medical diagnostics and destroyed in riots affecting health clinics in the aftermath of the Gulf War.
Not good enough, said Tucker.
Iraq's total hospital consumption of diagnostic media from 1987 to 1994 had been less than 200 kilograms per year, he said, and there were 17 tons unaccounted for. The discrepancy made it clear that the official Iraqi explanation was false. The Iraqis later admitted it.
Ridding Iraq of every military weapon is unrealistic, Tucker said. But, to deny it the capability to make militarily significant weapons of mass destruction "probably is doable, given full access."
It wouldn't be easy in the best of circumstances, however.
According to the Pentagon, the CIA and Britain's Joint Intelligence Committee, Iraq's weapons of mass destruction capability shapes up like this:
-- CHEMICAL AND BIOLOGICAL: Iraq has been involved in chemical and biological warfare research for more than 30 years. Today, lacking a meaningful air force and having only the remnants of the large army defeated in the Gulf War, Hussein regards weapons of mass destruction as the basis for his regional power. He does not consider them weapons of last resort.
Former UNSCOM inspector Butler recalls a comment by an Iraqi general explaining the use of chemical weapons against Iranian troops in the 1980s: "What do you expect?" the general said. "When you've got an insect problem, you use insecticide."
Hussein has continued to produce chemical and biological agents, some deployable within 45 minutes of an order to use them, according to British intelligence.
He has developed mobile laboratories for chemical or biological weapons use. In a recent Pentagon briefing, Dr. John Yurechko, intelligence officer at the Defense Intelligence Agency, described these as "basically large trucks -- you know, 18-wheelers that can move around relatively quickly, with trailers."
Specifically, the CIA says Baghdad has renewed production of chemical warfare agents sarin, cyclosarin and VX. However, capability is probably limited, the agency says.
Hussein probably has stocked a few hundred metric tons of chemical agents, the agency says, and he has experience using it in bombs, artillery rockets and projectiles and missile warheads.
The expertise to produce and use these weapons is easily preserved. If microfilmed, the documents required to resume chemical weapons activity could be stored in a single briefcase, according to a U.N. report.
-- NUCLEAR: Hussein has tried to obtain materials and technology that could be used in the production of nuclear weapons, according to British intelligence. He has sought significant quantities of uranium from Africa, despite having no active civil nuclear power program that might require it.
The CIA takes a similar view. Left unchecked, the agency says, Iraq "probably" could have a nuclear weapon during this decade. If Baghdad acquires sufficient weapons-grade fissile material from abroad, it could make a nuclear weapon within a year. Without such material from abroad, the agency states, Iraq probably would not be able to make a weapon until the last half of the decade.
Especially worrisome, according to the CIA, is Iraq's recent aggressive attempts to obtain high-strength aluminum tubes that could be used in centrifuges needed to enrich uranium to weapons-grade.
The agency acknowledges, however, that the tubes would be part of a small-scale program. "Based on tubes of the size Iraq is trying to acquire, a few tens of thousands of centrifuges would be capable of producing enough highly enriched uranium for a couple of weapons per year."
-- CONVENTIONAL MISSILES: Baghdad has exceeded U.N. range limits of 150 kilometers with its ballistic missiles and is working with unmanned aerial vehicles, which provide another way to deliver biological and chemical agents. According to the CIA, these weapons could threaten the United States if Iraq could get them near U.S. shores.
According to British intelligence, Hussein has constructed new testing equipment for the development of missiles capable of reaching United Kingdom bases in Cyprus, NATO members Greece and Turkey, and Israel and Iraq's other gulf neighbors.
Gaps in Iraqi accounting to UNSCOM suggest that Hussein retains a covert force of up to a few dozen Scuds with ranges of 650 to 900 kilometers, according to the CIA.
The Scud is not a good, modern battlefield missile. But as a potential carrier of chemical or biological weapons, it packs a psychological wallop.
For months the Bush administration has pushed, with little rebuttal, for the power to take military action against Iraq. In recent weeks, the number of doubters has increased.
There is a divide between Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld and the military leadership at the Pentagon, the Washington Post reported last week. Some officers wonder whether the civilian leadership takes their concerns about a conflict with Iraq seriously.
"There are a lot of unknowns and variables as to what could happen," said retired Marine Corps Gen. Anthony C. Zinni, the former commander-in-chief of U.S. Central Command, based in Tampa.
"Will the combat drag us into the cities and become bloody, urban . . . where our technology and advantages are diminished?" Zinni asked in a recent speech at the Middle East Institute in Washington.
Zinni, who has served as special Middle East envoy for the Bush administration, echoed those -- including Sen. Bob Graham , D-Fla. -- who say now is not the time to go to war with Iraq.
"I am convinced that we need to deal with Saddam down the road, but I think that the time is difficult because of the conditions in the region and all the other events that are going on," Zinni said. "I believe that he can be deterred and is containable at this moment. As a matter of fact, I think the containment can be ratcheted up in a way that is acceptable to everybody."
Zinni spoke at length about the need to do war right, if it's done at all. Among 10 conditions he listed for war are that the United States form a coalition, the war be short, destruction be light, and Israel stay out.
Lee H. Hamilton, director of the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars in Washington, says the United States has not exhausted its options. He said he wants to see a multifaceted diplomatic, economic and covert strategy to stop Iraq's weapons programs and promote change in the Iraqi regime.
Hamilton, who once chaired the House Intelligence Committee, believes America's 10-year policy of containment against Iraq has worked, contributing to stability in the Persian Gulf region and giving the United States access to oil at affordable prices.
He said he does not believe Iraq is the No. 1 threat to Americans, instead pointing to al-Qaida. What Iraq is a threat to, he said, is stability in the region and access to cheap oil.
"Can you contain Iraq? The answer is we have contained him for 10 years," Hamilton said in an interview, noting that Hussein has not used his weapons of mass destruction nor crossed international borders since the Gulf War. The failure of the policy, he said, is that he remains in power.
Economic sanctions and enforcement of the no-fly zone over southern Iraq have been most effective in containing Hussein, Hamilton said. Covert activity to encourage opposition inside the country, the threat of military force, and diplomatic efforts to reduce Hussein's influence in the Arab world and across Europe have also worked.
"I would continue the containment policy," Hamilton said. But, he said, depending on how Iraq responds to a call by the United Nations for weapons inspectors, "You have to respond to that question on a day-to-day basis."
Even the CIA seems to contradict the administration position that Hussein poses an immediate threat to the U.S.
"Baghdad for now appears to be drawing the line short of conducting terrorist attacks with conventional or (chemical/biological weapons) against the United States," CIA director George J. Tenet wrote Graham recently. "Should Saddam conclude that a U.S.-led attack could no longer be deterred, he probably would become much more less constrained in adopting terrorist actions."
The letter went on: "Saddam might decide that the extreme step of assisting Islamic terrorists in conducting a (weapons of mass destruction) attack against the United States would be his last chance to exact vengeance by taking a large number of victims with him."