On Saturday, Britain's Home Secretary David Blunkett said a most remarkable thing. In an interview with the BBC, he said he hoped no weapons of mass destruction were found in Iraq but he acknowledged that failure to find such weapons would lead to a "very interesting debate."
It certainly would. For, of course, it was Saddam's possession of these weapons, and the possibility that he might use them against the US and its allies or give them to terrorist organizations for a similar purpose that was the reason for the continuing war. We were not told that Saddam might have these weapons, remember, but that he certainly did have them, hidden away from the prying eyes of the UN weapons inspectors. Invasion was said to be the only way to disarm Saddam.
Blunkett's remarks therefore become quite extraordinary. He is in effect saying that he hopes the US/UK's entire justification for the invasion of a sovereign state, deposition of its government and occupation of its territory, will turn out to be a tissue of ... well what? Mistakes, would be the most generous interpretation, a tissue of lies, the one that many are likely to believe. That will make for an interesting debate indeed.
With this in mind, and with the war reaching a possible denouement this week, we need perhaps to take note of some small but important details.
The first is that there is no general agreement on what constitutes "weapons of mass destruction," except that they are of a nuclear, chemical or biological nature. Nuclear weapons are without question massively destructive and are something that surely nobody ever seriously thought that Saddam had; the pro-war camp only made themselves look ridiculous by suggesting otherwise. So it's a question of chemical and biological weapons, then. And here the question of "mass" becomes quite important.
There is little history of the use of biological weapons, partly because almost as soon as the Cold War superpowers had the biochemistry and technological skills to make them they very sensibly banned them instead -- in the 1972 Biological Weapons Convention. As a result there has been no recorded military use of such weapons (we exclude the tossing of excrement and rotting corpses into medieval cities). We note that 50kg of anthrax, successfully "weaponized," could have the same effect as a tactical nuclear weapon say 20,000 to 30,000 deaths. But the weaponizing has proved exceptionally difficult even for the US itself. It is hard to believe that Iraq has anything like the technology to be able to do this. We shall need a very high standard of proof.
As for chemical weapons, these have been around a long time. Both sides used poison gas in World War I. In the early 1920s Winston Churchill was an enthusiast of taming tribes in, yes, Iraq, by the use of air-dropped gas bombs, hardly different in scope from "Chemical" Ali's activities at Halabja. Mustard gas shells have been around for a long time. They are unpleasant weapons and illegal weapons but not weapons of "mass" destruction. Nobody ever suggested that the 8,000 Halabja casualties were the result of a single weapon.
Once again then, we shall have to look very carefully at what "evidence" for the Anglo-US claims there might be. If the Iraq war is not to look like a 19th century-style imperialist land-grab by the US, as critics such as Noam Chomsky have claimed, then those of us who want to believe in the veracity of the US will have to hope Blunkett is wrong.
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