We found the weapons of mass destruction. We found biological laboratories. You remember when Colin Powell stood up in front of the world, and he said, Iraq has got laboratories, mobile labs to build biological weapons. They’re illegal. They’re against the United Nations resolutions, and we’ve so far discovered two. And we’ll find more weapons as time goes on. But for those who say we haven’t found the banned manufacturing devices or banned weapons, they’re wrong, we found them.
– George W. Bush, in an interview with Polish TVP, May 29, 2003
Well, he was only off by a year. As pointed out in another excellent report by Bob Drogin of the LA Times,
The Other Weapons Threat in Iraq, “a little-noticed section of [Duelfer's] 960-page report says the risk of a ‘devastating’ attack with unconventional weapons has grown since the U.S.-led invasion and occupation of Iraq last year.”
Although Duelfer’s group discovered there are several groups working to develop WMDs, the LA Times report discusses the one group about which most is known. This group, Al Abud, which was neutralized in June 2004, had a number of failures, but then, success finally came
…in late March when the two chemists working together produced ricin cake, a substance that can be converted to ricin poison. Investigators later determined that their lab could produce only enough ricin to cause isolated casualties and “was not capable of facilitating a mass-casualty ricin attack.”
They also found that the two scientists had prepared napalm, a highly flammable jellied gasoline used by U.S. troops in Vietnam, and sodium fluoride acetate, a poison. But Duelfer’s group said the nascent effort was “highly unlikely” to be capable of causing mass casualties.
Of course, Duelfer’s team discovered the group by chance. And it turns out that this group had no ties to Hussein’s regime and its scientists who had been working on the chemical munitions program prior to the first Gulf War. These were chemists, who, for ideological reasons, or for cold hard cash, decided to try their hands at manufacturing chemical weaponry. And, as the Times reports about Al Abud:
For now, the leaders and financiers of the network “remain at large, and alleged chemical munitions remain unaccounted,” the report says. It adds that other insurgent groups are “planning or attempting to produce or acquire” chemical and biological agents throughout Iraq, and says the availability of chemicals and munitions, as well as sympathetic former Iraqi weapons scientists, “increases the future threat.”
So, like every other unintended consequence of this whole fucked-up adventure, our intervention in Iraq has actually created the danger of WMDs being used against Americans and American interests, which we were supposedly going in to prevent. Nice job!
