A rchive Date
[ 25-01-2004 ]
Category
[ International Relations ]
sub-Categoy
[ U.S ]
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[http://www.chron.com/cs/CDA/ssistory.mpl/nation/2369886
ANALYSIS
Was Iraq the greatest threat?
4 other nations more advanced in unconventional arms
By DAVID E. SANGER New York Times
Jan. 25, 2004, 9:28AM
WASHINGTON - The bluntly worded conclusion by the chief American arms inspector in Iraq, David Kay, that Saddam Hussein "got rid" of his unconventional weapons long before the Iraq invasion last year underscores a point that has become clear to intelligence experts in the past few months: President Bush moved first, and most decisively, against a country that posed a smaller proliferation risk than North Korea, Libya and Iran, or even one of America's allies, Pakistan.
While Kay's team has come up largely empty-handed so far, contributing to his decision to resign on Friday, a team of American experts visiting North Korea was shown what appeared to be at least a rudimentary ability to produce plutonium - though they were not able to confirm that North Korea spent 2003 churning out new weapons.
Meanwhile, investigators crawling through Libya's newly opened nuclear weapons program have uncovered a remarkably sophisticated network of nuclear suppliers, spanning the globe from Malaysia to Dubai.
On Friday, Pakistan's president, Gen. Pervez Musharraf, acknowledged what his government has slowly begun to admit over the past month: Pakistani nuclear scientists set up a nuclear bazaar that stretches back 15 years, selling sophisticated technology for enriching uranium for what Musharraf called "personal financial gain."
In retrospect, as even some of the administration's own intelligence experts now acknowledge, each of those programs was more advanced than was Iraq's and consequently posed a greater threat of passing weapons and technology to terrorists.
Speaking to reporters on his plane on Saturday on the way to Tbilisi, Georgia, Secretary of State Colin Powell said that Kay's comments left open the question of whether weapons stockpiles existed in Iraq but not the question of Saddam's abilities and intentions to produce and use such weapons. As a result, he asserted, the comments did not undercut the rationale for going to war.
But the new information also shows that the National Intelligence Estimate, produced in 2002 by the CIA and other agencies, significantly overestimated Iraq's current abilities. The document provided the rationale for going to war quickly, without waiting for the U.N. Security Council to become convinced of the threat.
Intelligence officials now say that comparable assessments understated the progress Iran and Libya were making in enriching uranium and missed many of the signals that Pakistan's scientists had provided their designs to Iran and Libya. To this day, the intelligence agencies are arguing over what exactly the North Koreans are able to accomplish, facing a difficult task of sorting out what is boast and what is real.
Yet of all these threats, Bush determined, by his own account, that the combination of Saddam's ambitions and his potential to obtain unconventional weapons some day in the near future posed the greater threat. His critics say he was motivated by settling unfinished business; his defenders say it would have been foolish to wait, only to discover too late that Saddam could unleash hidden weapons.
Bush and his aides are still defending their warnings about mobile biological laboratories, active nuclear programs and the like. The president defended his decision all week with no apologies but using wording that was far more hedged than the claims he made last year.
In a carefully worded assessment in his State of the Union address, he said Kay's group had found evidence of "WMD-related program activities," words drawn straight from Kay's interim report to Congress. But he avoided any mention of Kay's broader conclusions at the time, that Iraq had no active stockpiles of chemical or biological weapons, much less the chief inspector's more recent conclusion that it was highly unlikely that such stockpiles would ever be found.
Traveling the country this week, Bush made clear that he had no regrets. He told audiences in Ohio, Arizona and New Mexico this week that Saddam was a "brutal dictator" who gassed his own people, set up gulags and rape rooms, and deserved the fate he met - a line that drew big applause at every stop.
Bush also argued that Saddam's fall was making other nations with nuclear ambitions come clean.
"Nine months of intense discussion with Gadhafi worked because the word of this country matters," Bush said in Roswell, N.M., on Thursday, referring to the Libyan leader, Moammar Gadhafi. "When you say something, you better believe it. People now trust the word of America."
But America's allies and competitors are likely to interpret Kay's findings very differently: that America's word - or at least its intelligence findings - cannot be fully trusted.
 World Fact Book (CIA)]
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