THE REAL WORLD

Weapons of Mass Distraction
Tyranny is the real threat.

BY CLAUDIA ROSETT
Wednesday, January 28, 2004 12:01 a.m.

We've reached an intriguing moment in the saga of evil regimes and weapons of mass destruction--their presence or absence, and the uncertainty zone between.
In Iraq, the U.S. and the United Nations had reason to believe that Saddam Hussein--having invaded his neighbors, harbored terrorists, tortured and murdered hundreds of thousands of his fellow Iraqis, gassed the Kurds, plundered his country, and set a standard in the Middle East of fascist brutality to rival Hitler--was still pursuing weapons of mass destruction. A U.S.-led coalition toppled Saddam's regime. Now the recent U.S. point man for the weapons search in Iraq, David Kay, is saying it looks as if maybe Saddam didn't have any WMDs. At least not significant stocks, at least not that we've found. Mr. Kay's best guess is that Saddam only thought he had a WMD program.

This is now taken in some quarters to mean we should have left Saddam alone, because even if maybe he thought he was pursuing WMDs, he wasn't, except maybe in his own imagination, at least not at the moment we deposed him.

Meanwhile in North Korea, officials of Kim Jong Il's regime earlier this month ushered an unofficial U.S. delegation into their nuclear reactor complex at Yongbyon, and invited a former director of the Los Alamos National Laboratory, Sigfried Hecker, to examine what was apparently a sample of plutonium--that's nuclear bomb fuel--contained in a jelly jar.

This is taken, usually by the same crowd critical of the U.S. war to remove Saddam, as supporting evidence in the argument that we cannot remove Kim because, among other things, he does have weapons of mass destruction.





One might be tempted to conclude, then, that our only window for intervening in the quest of a threatening, terrorist-linked regime dabbling in WMDs is in that precise time window when there is irrefutable evidence that the rulers are developing WMD capability, but before the wares are ready to be handed out to terrorists or brandished in jelly jars as a "deterrent" to extort concessions from the free world. Except that this seems to be precisely the turf occupied at the moment by Iran, with its nuclear program, and while the clerics there are obviously rushing to get their bombs into production, no one genuinely seems to be preparing to stop that, either.
Meanwhile, to round out a little more of this picture, in Libya, our new pal Moammar Gadhafi, who has now renounced weapons of mass destruction, just treated visiting Rep. Curt Weldon to a tour of a Libyan nuclear reactor. In response, Mr. Weldon, a Pennsylvania Republican, effused that if Libya continues to cooperate, diplomatic normalization may be just ahead, and then--he was addressing the Libyan dictator who for the past 35 years has ruled Libya as a virtual prison camp, and still does--"there is no limit to what we can accomplish together."

I am left with the odd thought that of all the many evil things done by this roster of truly brutal, murderous, internationally aggressive regimes, the only one to actually use weapons of mass destruction was the now-designated-as-WMD-less Saddam.

Meanwhile, not so long ago, it was Afghanistan, a place lacking in almost every amenity, including weapons of mass destruction, that served as the launching base for the world's worst terrorist attack. The real WMDs, one might say, were the Al Qaeda planners, and their Taliban hosts.





Which brings me back to the current U.S. debate, in which the agreed trigger for action seems somehow restricted to weapons of mass destruction--and the sure knowledge and certain existence thereof. This is peculiar in itself. While WMDs certainly matter, they are by no means the sum total of an evil regime's capacity to do damage. In the case of the Soviet Union, which possessed thousands of nuclear warheads and conducted hundreds of detectable nuclear tests, none of those bombs ever actually went off in a war. Yet the harm done by that corrosive empire was vast beyond imagining, and in very tangible ways--including such legacies as Kim's North Korea--still haunts us today.
According to "The Black Book of Communism," the death toll from communism was some 100 million people. That same system supplied to a host of nations worldwide, including in the Middle East, blueprints for the one thing that Soviet communism developed with greater efficiency than any other system ever devised--techniques for the repression of human beings. And it is political repression, not weapons of mass destruction per se, that has turned the Middle East into the danger it now constitutes for the democratic world.

But somehow, in the hurly-burly of election-year politics, the focus is all on those elusive weapons. By all means, beef up our intelligence and double-check information--and wish everyone good luck in penetrating with perfect clarity the secrecy and layers of lies that are precisely the specialty of the world's most dangerous states. But let's not pretend that this is the chief standard by which we will ensure the safety of our children's children.

We seem to be heading for the surreal conclusion that it is all right to be a murderous tyrant who only thinks he is pursuing weapons of mass destruction--even if he apparently believes it himself strongly enough to take the risk of kicking out U.N. arms inspectors for four years. Somehow, I am not comforted by the vision of a Saddam presiding over a country where he is allocating resources for WMD, terrorists are traipsing through, and whatever is really going on is anyone's guess, including Saddam's.





What needs to start sinking in, somehow, is that while arsenals matter, what matters even more is the set of rules and values that a regime defends and its leaders live by. This, more than anything signed on paper or offered as totalitarian propaganda, tells us where the worst dangers lie. We have heard by now too many discussions in which mass graves, mass starvation, conventional mass murder and terrorist trafficking are all somehow hived off from the high and nuanced talk of geostrategy, of bomb estimates and inspections, so scientific but imprecise.
It is necessary in this war to ask where we can best spend our scarce resources. But in judging the priorities, it would be a good idea to be less focused right now on a near-religious calling to base policy on WMD bean counters, and more concerned with creating incentives for dictators to be running so scared that they will not only foreswear weapons of mass murder, but take on the burden themselves of proving to us that they have no such programs or intentions. We are far from that point, and whatever delights the current squabble over Saddam's WMDs may afford, it does nothing to serve the real security needs of the democratic world.
Ms. Rosett is a fellow at the Foundation for the Defense of Democracies and the Hudson Institute. Her column appears here and in The Wall Street Journal Europe on alternate Wednesdays.

Copyright ? 2004 Dow Jones & Company, Inc. All Rights Reserved.

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David Kay Is Right
By George Neumayr
Published 1/28/2004 1:07:07 AM
The conventional wisdom before the Iraq war was that Saddam Hussein had plenty of weapons of mass destruction but no ties to Al Qaeda. It is beginning to look like the conventional wisdom was backwards: Saddam Hussein's regime had ties to Al Qaeda but nowhere near the level of weapons of mass destruction suspected.

Iraq under Hussein was a nest for anti-American terrorists. Little noticed in weapons inspector David Kay's recent remarks was his observation that Iraq was not less dangerous than assumed but more dangerous: "I actually think what we learned during the inspection made Iraq a more dangerous place, potentially, than, in fact, we thought it was even before the war."

What Kay means is that terrorists were traveling through a country where free-lancing scientists had nuclear, biological, and chemical programs underway -- erratic weapons programs even Hussein wasn't aware of that these terrorists could have easily exploited: "We know that terrorists were passing through Iraq. And now we know that there was little control over Iraq's weapons capabilities. I think it shows that Iraq was a very dangerous place. The country had the technology, the ability to produce, and there were terrorist groups passing through the country -- and no central control." Up until the war started Iraqi scientists were "actively working to produce a biological weapon using the poison ricin," says Kay.

The antiwar Democrats are cheering Kay's report that he found WMD programs but not WMD stockpiles. They conveniently ignore that the assumption of WMD stockpiles was a bipartisan blunder and completely ignore Kay's point that WMD programs, chaotically administered in a haven for terrorists, is itself an imminent threat. Kay's statement in effect punctures their claim that the Iraq war had nothing to do with the war on terrorism.


EVEN AS THESE DEMOCRATS DENY any connection between Hussein's Iraq and Al Qaeda, the U.S. military is capturing Al Qaeda operatives in Iraq. Last week the White House announced the capture of Hassan Ghul. Ghul worked for Khalid Sheik Mohammed, the architect of the 9/11 attacks.

The war has led to the capture of innumerable terrorists like Ghul. But the antiwar Democrats don't want Americans to know that Hussein's Iraq was a safe haven for Al Qaeda operatives, as this information causes their claim that the Iraq war undermined the war on terrorism to collapse.

After Vice President Dick Cheney recently endorsed the Weekly Standard's article, "Case Closed: The U.S. government's secret memo detailing cooperation between Saddam Hussein and Osama bin Laden," Democratic presidential nominee Wesley Clark rebuked him.

The media, though curious about the WMDs claim, has also been generally incurious about connections between Iraq and Al Qaeda, and usually observes with sourness that a majority of Americans still believe Hussein was part of the Islamic terror network responsible for 9/11.

The Los Angeles Times basically scoffed at Cheney's remark that evidence of a relationship between Hussein's Iraq and Al Qaeda is "overwhelming." The Times reported dismissively that "U.S. intelligence officials agree that there was contact between Hussein's agents and Al Qaeda members as far back as a decade ago and that operatives with ties to Al Qaeda had at times found safe haven in Iraq. But no intelligence has surfaced to suggest a deeper relationship, and other information turned up recently has suggested that significant ties were unlikely...Sept. 11 mastermind Khalid Shaikh Mohammed, who is in custody, has told American interrogators that Al Qaeda rejected the idea of any working relationship with Iraq, which was seen by the terrorist network as a corrupt, secular regime."

Notice that the Times is relying here on the testimony of a terrorist whose deputy was just captured in Iraq. And why would the relationship have to be "deep" to invalidate Cheney's comment? Because an irregular, marriage-of-convenience relationship existed between Hussein's Iraq and the terrorist network behind the 9/11 attacks, the Bush administration had no cause to worry about it?

Senator Jay Rockefeller called Cheney's remarks "perplexing." What's perplexing is that senators can yawn at intelligence (leaked to the Weekly Standard) showing among other things that Osama bin Laden received bomb training from the Iraqi Intelligence Service's principal technical expert, that Al Qaeda agents met with Hussein's officials to set up terrorist camps, received money and weapons from them, and continued meeting with them after 9/11. The Standard also drew attention to intelligence about Al Qaeda terrorist planner Abu Musab al Zarqawi that helps to explain the post-war insurgency: "According to sensitive reporting, al Zarqawi was setting up sleeper cells in Baghdad to be activated in case of a U.S. occupation of the city."

If the Democrats consider this intelligence bogus, they should say so and call for more probes, not browbeat Cheney into silence. But this time they may not want a new investigation lest too much evidence turn up.


George Neumayr is managing editor of The American Spectator.