Finding Saddam Hussein's
Weapons of Mass Destruction

After a month of fighting in Iraq, important questions remain: "Where are the weapons of mass destruction that the Bush administration says Saddam Hussein has been hiding, and are U.S. soldiers or U.S. inspectors better equipped to find and destroy them than U.N. inspectors?" And why is the administration fighting letting U.N. inspectors back in, when this is something the United States and United Nations can do better together?

Already news organizations have reported several instances where U.S. soldiers have mistaken pesticides or fertilizers for chemicals that might be used to make chemical weapons. Also, as first reported by the Los Angeles Times, U.S. Marines have unwittingly broken U.N. seals meant to keep control of radioactive materials at Tuwaitha, the Iraqi nuclear facility south east of Baghdad. Not appreciating the significance of the facility, the Marines left the contents unattended for days during which time the materials could have been diverted or stolen.

U.S. and coalition forces have done a superb job in Iraq, but they are not trained chemists, biologists, nor nuclear physicists as U.N. inspectors are.

Also, the war itself did not expose chemical or biological weapons. Despite raining down over 20,000 bombs and missiles, none have struck a confirmed weapons of mass destruction site. And in heavily bombed areas, the debris and rubble may have made it more difficult to find them.

President Bush stated priority for this war has been disarming Iraq of its weapons of mass destruction. If the United States is going to destroy Iraq's weapons sites, it has to find them first. Information from U.S. intelligence agencies has not been effective, and it may have been wrong.

Speaking before the U.N. Security Council on Feb. 14, the lead U.N. inspectors showed that some of Secretary of State Colin Powell's assertions nine days earlier about Iraq's efforts toward weapons of mass destruction were not supportable. U.S. intelligence agencies do not appear to have better information, and now Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld and other administration officials are openly appealing to Iraqi citizens for information to locate weapons sites.

Before the war with Iraq began, the United Nations proposed tripling or quadrupling the number of inspectors from 250 to 1,000. The administration mocked that proposal saying that more inspectors would not help. Now after the war, the administration is building a team of 1,000 U.S. inspectors to go into Iraq in defiance of the United Nations, and is actively opposing letting U.N. inspectors back in.

Either weapons of mass destruction will be found, or they won't. If weapons of mass destruction are found, those caches should be destroyed, openly and publicly, to the relief of the world.

But if U.S. soldiers try to be both war-fighters and inspectors, they run the risk of creating further confusion about what has been found and being distracted from the priority of restoring civil order. And if the inspectors are only U.S. inspectors operating alone, the United States will be accused of planting what they find or exaggerating its importance.

We know inspectors can find weapons with a certainty and level of control that is unmatched. Between 1991 and 1998, U.N. weapons inspectors methodically destroyed more weapons than were destroyed during the whole of the Persian Gulf War, including 40,000 chemical munitions, 690 tons of chemical warfare agents, 3,000 tons of precursor chemicals, 48 SCUD missiles, a "super gun" and biological warfare-related factories and equipment. The International Atomic Energy Agency found and dismantled a developing Iraqi nuclear weapons program.

This is exactly what we want the United Nations and International Atomic Energy Agency inspectors to do again now.

By contrast, in March 1991 during Operation Desert Storm when U.S. troops blew up a cache of chemical weapons containing sarin gas at the Khamisiyah site in Iraq, they set off a decade-long inquiry into what actually happened. It took the Department of Defense five years to officially recognize that chemical weapons were present at that site and that U.S. soldiers had destroyed them. The blast also exposed large numbers of troops to chemical agents, one of the leading theories for the cause of Gulf War Syndrome, a debate that to this day, 12 years later, is still unresolved.

This is exactly what we don't want to happen again.

Now that U.S. and coalition forces have cleared the way, U.N. inspectors can resume the work they started before the war but without interference from Saddam Hussein's guards and "minders." The United States can help to populate these teams, but shouldn't hoard the job. U.N. inspectors are trained and equipped for this job and have a proven track record of success.

Coyle is a senior adviser at the Center for Defense Information. He was an assistant secretary of defense from 1994 to 2001.

By Philip E. Coyle CDI Senior Advisor

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