Shoulder to Shoulder and Stabbed in the Back
LONDON — "Chutzpah" is the word applied to people who radiate belief in themselves without any visible reason to justify it. In the chutzpah stakes, U.S. Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld is way off the scale.
Before the Iraq war, he told us that Saddam Hussein had "large stockpiles of chemical and biological weapons and an active program to develop nuclear weapons.'' After the war, he explained away the failure to find any of these stockpiles or nuclear installations by saying Hussein's people probably "decided they would destroy them prior to a conflict.''
You have to admire Rumsfeld's effrontery. But not his logic.
The least plausible explanation is that Hussein destroyed his means of defense on the eve of an invasion. The more plausible explanation is that he did not have any large stockpiles of weapons of mass destruction.
When the Cabinet of British Prime Minister Tony Blair's government discussed the dossier on Hussein's WMD, I argued that I found the document curiously derivative. It set out what we knew about Hussein's chemical and biological arsenal at the time of the 1991 Gulf War. It then leaped to the conclusion that Hussein must still possess all those weapons.
There was no hard intelligence of a current weapons program that would represent a new and compelling threat to our interests. Nor did the dossier at any stage admit the basic scientific fact that biological and chemical agents have a finite shelf life -- a principle understood by every pharmacist. Go to your medicine chest and check out the existence of an expiration date on nearly everything you possess. Nerve agents of good quality have a shelf life of about five years and anthrax in liquid solution of about three years. Hussein's stocks were not of good quality. The Pentagon itself concluded that Iraqi chemical munitions were of such poor standard that they were usable for only a few weeks.
Even if Hussein had destroyed none of his arsenal from 1991, it would long ago have become useless.
So why did Rumsfeld build a case for war on a false claim of Hussein's capability? Enter stage right (far right) his deputy, Paul Wolfowitz, a man of such ferociously reactionary opinion that he has at least the advantage to his department of making Rumsfeld appear reasonable. Wolfowitz has now disclosed: "For bureaucratic reasons, we settled on weapons of mass destruction because it was the one issue everyone could agree on.''
