How Saddam got weapons of mass destruction: Saddam Hussein's war machine is being built systematically to strike at the U.S. with new nuclear, biological and chemical weapons designed to kill millions

0 Comments | Insight on the News, Oct 15, 2002 | by Kenneth R. Timmermann

The availability of dual-use equipment such as neutron generators provides an additional sense of urgency to the United States and Britain in making the case for war against Iraq. This is how Saddam Hussein built his war machine in the 1980s and early 1990s, arms experts and analysts who track the arms industries in developing countries agree. And yet, instead of tightening export controls on such sales, the United Nations dramatically loosened them in May after intense lobbying from France, Germany, China and Russia convinced the State Department to go along. "Before the new rules," one French exporter of agricultural equipment tells INSIGHT, "it took us anywhere between 12 and 18 months to get a contract approved by the U.N. sanctions committee. Now they are required to give us an answer within 10 days, and failure to reply means the contract is automatically approved."

Particularly worrying is the loosening of restrictions on high-tech equipment. Goods now available for export to Iraq under U.N. Security Council Resolution 1409, which was adopted in May, include a broad range of equipment with clear military applications--from agricultural sprayers that can be used to disperse biological weapons, to fiber optics and telecommunications hardware that have been used by the Iraqi military to improve and harden its integrated air-defense network.

Until recently, state-owned Chinese companies were the main suppliers of fiber-optics gear to Baghdad [see "Rogues Lending Hand to Saddam," Feb. 18]. But new documents obtained by INSIGHT show that Europe's premier technology giants now are getting into the act. Siemens of Germany and Alcatel of France have racked up sales worth several hundred million dollars that recently were approved by the U.N. sanctions committee, directly and through overseas subsidiaries. Both companies were partners of Iraq's Ministry of Industry and Military Industrialization before the 1991 gulf war. Their return to Iraq, albeit under the auspices of providing civilian telecommunications equipment, gives Baghdad access to the most advanced technology currently available in the West.

Now, Saddam has agreed to the return of U.N. arms inspectors, but it will take them months to develop the cadres and tradecraft to counter Iraqi deception, Samore believes. Chief arms inspector Hans Blix "is operating with a skeletal staff because he has insisted that experts who come to work for him quit their government jobs to reassure Iraq that they won't engage in intelligence collection." In his previous role as head of the International Atomic Energy Agency, Blix regularly certified that Iraq was engaged in purely civilian nuclear research, thus allowing Saddam to import massive amounts of nuclear technology, which was used to develop nuclear weapons.

But the U.N. sanctions have become irrelevant for another reason. Since 1999 there has been no monitoring of trade across the international land borders with Iraq. "King Abdallah [of Jordan] threw Lloyds of London out of the port of Aqaba, where they were supposed to monitor Iraqi imports," the former Iraqi intelligence officer says. "There are regular convoys of trucks to Baghdad from Jordan, and now a direct rail link from Syria carrying military spare parts and production gear, including equipment needed in Iraq's nuclear-weapons plants."