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Us adds teams hunt { April 27 2003 } Original Source Link: (May no longer be active)
http://www.nytimes.com/2003/04/27/international/worldspecial/27WEAP.htmlhttp://www.nytimes.com/2003/04/27/international/worldspecial/27WEAP.html
April 27, 2003
U.S. Plans to Add to Teams to Hunt for Iraqi Weapons
By STEVEN R. WEISMAN
WASHINGTON, April 26 — The Bush administration, concerned about the failure to find unconventional weapons in Iraq, is moving to triple the size of the team searching for scientists and for incriminating lethal materials. Some officials are even saying that they are losing hope of finding actual weapons.
Administration officials, some speaking publicly and some on condition of anonymity, insist that they remain entirely confident that evidence of illegal chemical, biological and nuclear weapons programs — as opposed to the weapons themselves — will accumulate in coming weeks and months, though perhaps slowly.
But to step up the pace, a military official said, about 1,000 military and scientific personnel will be added in coming weeks to the team trying to interview Iraqis who may have knowledge of Iraqi weapons programs and looking for evidence. Only 500 are doing this job now, with perhaps 150 actually searching and the rest providing backup and support.
"A fairly robust organization is going over there," said a military official. "It will also look for evidence of war crimes, terrorism connections, missing P.O.W.'s — anything it can find that will help get to the weapons of mass destruction."
Some officials say they think the United States should react more positively to the demand by France that United Nations inspectors certify that Iraq is free of unconventional weapons before economic penalties against the country are permanently lifted. Many United Nations members favor a return to Iraq by Hans Blix as an inspection leader as soon as the country is secure. Others say that a couple of hundred more experts, with or without Mr. Blix, cannot hurt and could actually help.
But theirs is a decidedly minority view. Even the State Department, which advocated trying to find the weapons using United Nations inspectors last fall, has no tolerance for asking those inspectors to return.
"Forget it," one official said. "On principle, we don't want the United Nations running around Iraq."
One official, discussing the American plans, said that despite some polls indicating that Americans do not care very much whether the weapons are found, White House officials are pressing the United States Central Command to step up the search for them because of worldwide skepticism that the main American rationale for the war was not proving to be true. "There's just a lot of pressure coming from the White House on this," an administration official said. "But Centcom is pushing back because they have other things to do — like securing the country and guarding its antiquities."
Administration officials and experts say that evidence of Iraq's illegal weapons programs will most likely consist of items like empty shells for chemical or biological weapons, labs that could be used to make arms and so-called precursor chemicals that could be converted to weapons use but could also be used for fertilizers, pesticides and the like.
"People are realizing that Saddam Hussein may not have stored the weapons themselves, in part because when you put chemical or biological agents into weapons, they deteriorate very rapidly," an administration official said. He and others said that if the weapons themselves — the "smoking gun" that has eluded the United States since United Nations inspectors went into Iraq last fall — should not turn up, American experts may be forced to base their case for the existence of weapons programs on fragmentary evidence that could be interpreted in different ways.
"The evidence that we do find will be convincing to most experts, but not necessarily to those predisposed to doubt what we say," said an American official.
Another official said: "It may be that the Iraqis poured toxins into the ground, or scoured out their shells, or never filled their shells. There may be weapons, and there may not be."
"But it will be clear," the official continued, referring to weapons of mass destruction by their initials, "that they were pursuing W.M.D. actively."
The increasing possibility of a somewhat ambiguous result on weapons programs has led to a debate in the administration over what to do now that President Bush has decided that there will be no role for the United Nations inspectors in finding or destroying illegal weapons.
Prime Minister Tony Blair of Britain, like some in the administration, has argued that a United Nations team of some sort may be necessary to ratify a conclusion that weapons programs existed. The point, some officials say, would be to convince skeptics that weapons programs were indeed there. "The big concern is credibility," a military official said. "When we say we have found something, are the media sources in the Middle East and other parts of the world going to believe it?"
While it appears that Mr. Blix's team will not be allowed to return soon, some State Department officials say that some kind of United Nations team might be acceptable eventually to help verify incriminating evidence or to destroy it.
"If there were a role for the United Nations on weapons, it would be different from the one they had before," said an administration official. "It's too early to say what their role would be. It's too early to say that there will be no role."
France has threatened to withhold its vote on lifting the permanent sanctions against Iraq until there is some agreement on the role for the United Nations in weapons inspections and destruction. French officials say this is faithful to the United Nations resolutions that were based on a finding that Iraq, in defiance of the world community, had such weapons. "How can we just walk away from what the sanctions were all about?" a French official asked.
Americans say there is no room for negotiating with the French on lifting sanctions if the issue is United Nations weapons inspectors. They accuse France of having a hidden agenda: ensuring contracts for French companies in an Iraqi reconstruction program paid for with revenues from Iraqi oil exports.
One problem is that American officials who now say they may not find actual weapons have changed their arguments somewhat. Secretary of State Colin L. Powell told the United Nations that the United States had evidence of actual weapons, not just weapons programs.
Indeed, he suggested that some of those weapons were ordered sent into the field before the war. Now there is some doubt about that because some experts say that if there had been intelligence on their deployment, there should have been intelligence to help Americans find them.
"There are still holes in what Iraq reported it had," said Raymond Zilinskas, director of the chemical and biological weapons nonproliferation program at the Monterey Institute of International Studies in California. "The Iraqis always said they destroyed the materials we know they had, but they never offered proof."
But like some experts, Mr. Zilinskas said he doubted that the Iraqis had actually started up weapons programs after a first round of inspections ended in 1998. That does not mean that elements of weapons programs cannot be found now in Iraq, he said, only that the weapons themselves may not be there.
"The British and now the Americans have been changing their tune," said Mr. Zilinskas, who was a weapons inspector in Iraq in the mid-1990's. "Before, they said Iraq had weapons of mass destruction ready to go. The British said they were on the shelf and could have been deployed within 45 minutes."
But in the face of doubts like those expressed by Mr. Zilinskas, an administration official said: "Remember the quagmire that we were supposed to be in during the war? Don't start saying we're in a quagmire on the weapons. We'll find them."
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