The case of the missing WMD

大量破壊兵器の行方

Judging by polls, letters to editors and online exchanges, the general public thinks that the facts we have justify nothing but skepticism. Teams of U.N. inspectors failed to find WMD in Iraq in the months before the war. Occupying forces have failed to find them since the war. Therefore, people conclude, Iraq did not pose — in fact, could not have posed — the threat of which it was accused.

There have been varied responses to the case of the missing WMD. Critics say it proves the pre-emptive war was indefensible all along (how can you pre-empt the nonexistent?) The war's supporters are divided. A few may have lost faith in the righteousness of the cause. More, though, have merely changed their grounds for supporting it. The war was justified, the logic goes, because of the domestic horrors perpetrated by the Saddam regime. The advertised "war of pre-emption" quickly became a "war of liberation" as what emerged from the desert landscape was not WMD but mass graves.

The one response missing, until recently, was any authoritative challenge to the assumption that the absence of WMD necessarily means that pre-invasion Iraq no longer posed a threat to anyone but its people. But the gap was filled by a cogently reasoned article by Rolf Ekeus, ex-chairman of the U.N. Special Commission (UNSCOM) on Iraq, published in The Washington Post on June 29. For many, the former chief weapons inspector was the first to try to explain, in laymen's terms, why Iraq really did pose "a major threat to international peace and security," and why what he calls the "rather bizarre" focus on missing weapons represents a "distortion and trivialization" of that threat.

Why bizarre? Because, Mr. Ekeus says, there's more to a chemical or biological weapons program than rusting drums and pieces of munitions. Certainly, the Iraqis possessed — and used — warfare agents in their 1980-88 war against Iran. But one thing they learned was that biological and chemical agents deteriorated after just a couple of weeks of storage because Iraqi scientists lacked sufficiently high-quality equipment.

As a result, Mr. Ekeus writes, "the Iraqi policy after the Gulf War (1991) was to halt all production of warfare agents and to focus on design and engineering, with the purpose of activating production and shipping of warfare agents, and munitions directly to the battlefields in the event of war. . . . Such work could be blended into ordinary civilian production facilities and activities, e.g., for agricultural purposes."

"This combination of researchers, engineers, know-how, precursors, batch-production techniques and testing is what constituted Iraq's chemical threat — its chemical weapon." The same, he says, is true of its biological warfare program, which remains just that — a program, an abstract capability, rather than a stash of stored agents of "doubtful quality."

As to the precise nature of the threat this posed, Mr. Ekeus scoffs at the idea that Iraq's WMD capabilities were ever directed at the United States or even Israel, or that its failure to use them in the recent war meant that it didn't possess the capability. Iraq's WMD program, he argues, was developed in the contexts of the regional rivalry with Iran and the suppression of its minorities. The real threat posed by Iraq was twofold: the possibility that it might use WMD on the battlefield against a poorly equipped and ill-trained neighbor; and the chance that Iraqi weapons specialists — distinct from the Iraqi regime — might have signed on to help terrorist networks such as al-Qaeda.

Mr. Ekeus overall pulls no punches: "Letting Saddam Hussein remain in power with his chemical and biological weapons capability . . . would have been to tolerate a continuing destabilizing arms race in the Gulf." WMD may never be found in Iraq, he concedes. But WMD was and remains the war's justification.

The Japan Times Weekly
July 12, 2003
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開戦前のイラクで国連査察団は大量破壊兵器を発見できなかったし、終戦後、占領軍にも発見されていない。

戦争反対派は「先制攻撃のための戦争」は弁護の余地がないと主張している。賛成派のうち一部は、戦争の大義に疑問を持つ一方、多くは立場を変えて、戦争の目的はイラク国民をフセインの恐怖政治から「解放」することだったと主張している。

国連イラク特別委員会のイキアス元委員長はワシントン・ポスト紙に寄稿した記事の中で、なぜイラクが国際平和と安全保障に脅威を与えたか、なぜ行方不明の大量破壊兵器に対する「少し奇妙な」重点の置き方が脅威の「歪曲と矮小化」につながるのかについて分かりやすく分析している。

イキアス氏によれば、イラクは生物化学兵器の性能劣化を防止する技術を持たなかったため2週間ほどしか備蓄がもたず、開戦同時に兵器の生産を開始、直ちに戦場へ輸送する体制を作っていた。脅威の原因は備蓄ではなく生産・輸送計画だったのだ。

恐れるべきは、イラクが大量破壊兵器を隣国イランに対し使用し、同様武器をアルカイダなどのテロ組織に売却する可能性だったとイキアス氏はいう。

氏は大量破壊兵器生産能力を持っていたフセイン政権の支配を許容すれば、湾岸地域の軍備拡張競争につながっただろうという。大量破壊兵器がイラクで発見されなくても、その脅威が戦争正当化の理由だったのだ。