THE
ROVING EYE The WMD-lite
scandal By Pepe Escobar
Whether it was poetic justice or yet one more
instance of hubris, in the end there was indeed an
"October surprise". Call it the WMD-lite scandal: the
disappearance of 380 tons of dual-use explosives in
Iraq. Certainly Republican Machiavelli-in-charge Karl
Rove didn't see this surprise coming - hitting the Bush
administration like a jet converted into a missile. Now
the neo-cons and Pentagon civilians are scrambling like
mad trying to cover US President George W Bush's back
and defuse yet another spectacular blunder.
Where's the booty? The 2nd Brigade of the US Army's 3rd
Infantry Division, on its way to Baghdad, reached the
sprawling al-Qaqaa compound on April 3, 2003. In a brief
arranged by the Pentagon itself, the brigade
commander at the time, Colonel Dave
Perkins, said early this week it was "very highly
improbable" that Iraqis could have looted - in fact
trucked out - 380 tons (345,000 kilograms) of dual-use
RDX and HMX explosives (which can be used to detonate
nuclear bombs) in the less than four weeks between the
last time inspectors for the United Nations' nuclear
watchdog the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA)
checked the seals on the bunkers where they were stored
and the arrival of the first US combat troops.
Perkins also confirmed that his brigade, as well
as the 101st Airborne Division, which arrived one week
later, conducted no searches at al-Qaqaa. The commander
of the 101st told CBS News he would have needed four
times as many troops as he had to fulfill this
particular mission - apart from all his other duties.
So this is the crucial point in the whole
affair: the Pentagon - as well as the IAEA - knew the
380 tons were stored at al-Qaqaa, but US troops didn't
make any move to search for them or secure them, because
this was not a priority at the time. This week White
House spokesman Scott McClellan all but admitted that
securing Iraq's oil fields and the Ministry of Oil was a
much higher priority than securing 345,000kg (760,000
pounds) of the most powerful non-nuclear explosives
around (less than one pound blew up Pan Am Flight 103
over Lockerbie, Scotland). In itself, this admission
blows up the Bush administration's whole case for
invading Iraq, weapons of mass destruction (WMD).
There was indeed a "window of opportunity" of
less than four weeks between the last IAEA inspection,
in early March 2003, and the storming of Baghdad, in
early April, when the explosives could have been looted.
But Iraqis conclusively deny this possibility. Mohammed
al-Sharaa, now in the Science Ministry and someone who
worked with UN weapons inspectors under Saddam Hussein,
said "it is impossible that these materials could have
been taken from this site before the regime's fall". He
said he and all other relevant officials had been under
orders by Saddam's regime since early March to make sure
"not even a shred of paper left the sites".
The
Central Intelligence Agency's (CIA) former weapons
inspector in Iraq, David Kay, also weighed in, saying
that looting while Saddam was in power would have been
highly implausible. Kay told CNN: "I find it hard to
believe that a convoy of 40-60 trucks left that facility
prior to or during the war, and we didn't spot it on
satellite or UAV [unmanned aerial vehicle]. That is
because it is the main road to Baghdad from the south, a
road that was constantly under surveillance. I also
don't find it hard to believe that looters could carry
it off in the dead of night or during the day and not
use the road network."
The spin The
initial White House spin was that the US knew absolutely
nothing about the missing explosives until recently,
October 15 - which in itself would already be an
admission of incompetence. But there's more: the Iraqis
claim they told former US proconsul Paul Bremer about it
as early as last May - when the occupying power was
still formally in charge of al-Qaqaa. And significantly,
the Iraqis have also said the White House forced them
not to report anything to the IAEA. Bremer - the man at
the center of this controversy - must have precise
answers. But he is not talking.
The Pentagon at
first tried to spin that al-Qaqaa was inspected in early
April by the 3rd Infantry Division. This was proved to
be nonsense: the sprawling al-Qaqaa complex is composed
of roughly 1,000 buildings and bunkers, and inspection
was not part of the mission. Now the Pentagon and its
propaganda arm Fox News are spinning that on April 3,
2003, the 3rd Infantry Division didn't find a "huge
quantity of munitions", so the explosives had to be
gone.
The point remains that the soldiers were
not specifically looking for any explosives: this may
have been at best a very brief inspection. But what they
did find were thousands of vials of white powder (RDX
and HMX are white powders). According to an Associated
Press report at the time, the powder was believed to be
explosives. As this was a quick inspection, it does not
prove that all 380 tons were at al-Qaqaa. But it may be
evidence that on April 3 at least some of the stuff was
there.
Iraqi reporters working for the New York
Times actually managed to interview two employees of
al-Qaqaa - a chemical engineer and a mechanic - and a
former employee, a chemist. They can't say exactly when
the 380 tons of explosives vanished from al-Qaqaa. It
may be possible that the Republican Guards, Saddam
fedayeen or Mukhabarat agents discreetly trucked out a
few kilos before the invasion. But Wathiq al-Dulaimi, a
regional security chief who was based nearby in
Latifiya, is absolutely adamant that "the looting
started after the collapse of the regime". He also said
the booty went straight to Baghdad.
Why this
is so serious It's unimaginable that both the
Pentagon and the CIA didn't know exactly what was going
on in al-Qaqaa: the sensitive compound had to be under
saturated satellite surveillance early last year, as
well as each and every Iraqi weapons site. But this
information is classified - and it won't be disclosed
for public scrutiny.
The buck, once again, stops
with Bush, not Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld. It
was Bush who accepted Rumsfeld's gamble and decided to
send a very small army to Iraq, absolutely incapable of
performing a proper post-invasion job (and that's the
key reason for the widespread looting after April 9,
2003: the grand theoretician of Italian Marxism, Antonio
Gramsci, will tell us that when the old order collapses
and the new order is yet unborn, chaos is the norm).
It's also fair to assume that if there were any
WMD in al-Qaqaa they could have been trucked out to the
Iraqi resistance - or to al-Qaeda operatives - in no
time. Judging by the avalanche of deadly explosions in
these past 18 months, unknown quantities of RDX and HMX
have certainly reached the hands of the Iraqi resistance
- and might eventually reach terrorist networks who
would be able to blow up the entire airline industry. If
one follows the warped Bush administration rhetoric of
Iraq as the front line on the "war on terror", this
means in fact that "terrorists" may well be in
possession of plenty of WMD-lite.
How does the
Bush administration get away with all this? Once again,
thanks to the media. Apart from the New York Times, CBS
News and the blogosphere, US corporate media are doing
what the can to shun the story - duly following the
White House line. The entire Bush administration spin
now consists of "proving" the explosives had already
disappeared before April 3, 2003. But accumulated
evidence from the "reality-based community" - ie the
real world, as compared with the Bush administration's
fantasyland - keeps interfering.
The main Karl
Rove-directed administration strategy remains
misrepresenting reality to influence people's judgments
- and then hurling a barrage of insults. The Bush
administration initially ignores any accusation based on
facts. Then it brands the accusation - incompetence in
al-Qaqaa, for instance - as a lie. Finally it uses its
own fabricated lie - or in this case a different excuse
every day - to go into character-assassination mode.
This is the heart of Bush's delayed - at least by two
and a half days - "response" to Senator John Kerry on
the al-Qaqaa scandal: "See, our military is now
investigating a number of possible scenarios, including
this one - that explosives may have been moved before
our troops even arrived, even arrived at the site. The
investigation is important and ongoing. And a political
candidate who jumps to conclusions without knowing the
facts is not the person you want as the
commander-in-chief."
In this
shift-away-the-blame environment, only minor fall guys
are responsible for something. National Security Adviser
Condoleezza Rice was not responsible for ignoring
al-Qaeda before September 11, 2001. Bremer was not
responsible for screwing up the occupation. Rumsfeld was
not responsible for Abu Ghraib. And certainly Bush is
not responsible for anything he does as
commander-in-chief: after all, he's on a mission from
God.
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commander at the time, Colonel Dave
Perkins, said early this week it was "very highly
improbable" that Iraqis could have looted - in fact
trucked out - 380 tons (345,000 kilograms) of dual-use
RDX and HMX explosives (which can be used to detonate
nuclear bombs) in the less than four weeks between the
last time inspectors for the United Nations' nuclear
watchdog the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA)
checked the seals on the bunkers where they were stored
and the arrival of the first US combat troops.
