Articles from NYTimes

Three articles from the January 30th New York Times

Blix Says He Saw Nothing to Prompt a War

By JUDITH MILLER and JULIA PRESTON

NITED NATIONS, Jan. 30 — Days after delivering a broadly negative report on Iraq's cooperation with international inspectors, Hans Blix on Wednesday challenged several of the Bush administration's assertions about Iraqi cheating and the notion that time was running out for disarming Iraq through peaceful means.

In a two-hour interview in his United Nations offices overlooking Midtown Manhattan, Mr. Blix, the chief chemical and biological weapons inspector, seemed determined to dispel any impression that his report was intended to support the administration's campaign to build world support for a war to disarm Saddam Hussein.

"Whatever we say will be used by some," Mr. Blix said, adding that he had strived to be "as factual and conscientious" as possible. "I did not tailor my report to the political wishes or hopes in Baghdad or Washington or any other place."

Mr. Blix took issue with what he said were Secretary of State Colin L. Powell's claims that the inspectors had found that Iraqi officials were hiding and moving illicit materials within and outside of Iraq to prevent their discovery. He said that the inspectors had reported no such incidents.

Similarly, he said, he had not seen convincing evidence that Iraq was sending weapons scientists to Syria, Jordan or any other country to prevent them from being interviewed. Nor had he any reason to believe, as President Bush charged in his State of the Union speech, that Iraqi agents were posing as scientists.

He further disputed the Bush administration's allegations that his inspection agency might have been penetrated by Iraqi agents, and that sensitive information might have been leaked to Baghdad, compromising the inspections.

Finally, he said, he had seen no persuasive indications of Iraqi ties to Al Qaeda, which Mr. Bush also mentioned in his speech. "There are other states where there appear to be stronger links," such as Afghanistan, Mr. Blix said, noting that he had no intelligence reports on this issue. "It's bad enough that Iraq may have weapons of mass destruction."

More broadly, he challenged President Bush's argument that military action is needed to avoid the risk of a Sept. 11-style attack by terrorists wielding nuclear, biological or chemical weapons. The world is far less dangerous today than it was during the cold war, he said, when the Soviet Union and the United States threatened each other with thousands of nuclear-tipped missiles. On balance, "nuclear non-proliferation has been a success story," he said. "The world has made great progress."

Mr. Blix said he continued to endorse disarmament through peaceful means. "I think it would be terrible if this comes to an end by armed force, and I wish for this process of disarmament through the peaceful avenue of inspections," he said. "But I also know that diplomacy needs to be backed by force sometimes, and inspections need to be backed by pressure."

The decision to disarm Iraq through force was not his, he said, restating what has become a veritable mantra: It has to be decided by the "Security Council, and yes, by Iraq."

Mr. Blix reiterated his report's key finding that Iraq had not provided anything like the wholehearted cooperation he needed to certify that Saddam Hussein was not concealing nuclear, biological or chemical weapons. His concern about Iraq's attitude, he said, led him to refrain from explicitly asking for more time for inspections when he reported to the Security Council on Monday.

"I haven't pleaded for continuing inspections because I haven't seen a change of attitude on the part of Iraq," he said.

In the interview, Mr. Blix said that his examination of a liquid-filled warhead that inspectors had discovered in a bunker on Jan. 16 found no signs of any chemical weapons agent. The other 11 warheads found in the bunker were empty, he said, adding that scores of samples his team had taken across Iraq in the past two months had turned up "no trace" of either chemical or biological agents.

Mr. Blix spent hours Wednesday in a closed meeting being questioned about his report by members of the Security Council. Mr. Blix declined to discuss his session with the Security Council. But diplomats said that the United States ambassador, John D. Negroponte, had pressed Mr. Blix to make public the "indications" he referred to in his report that Iraq had made weapons with thousands of liters of anthrax it produced in the early 1990's.

Mr. Blix is said to have demurred, saying that the burden was on Iraq to prove that it had destroyed any anthrax weapons. He also assured Mr. Negroponte that he would probably be able to determine by Feb. 14 whether two missiles Iraq has declared it is developing exceed United Nations range limits. Mr. Blix stated in his report that the missiles seemed to be a "prima facie" case of a violation by Iraq of Council resolutions.

In the interview, Mr. Blix reiterated his longstanding position that "practical problems" prevented him from using the authority he was given to interview Iraqi scientists alone, without Iraqi government minders present, at a neutral place inside Iraq or outside the country. "We will at some point ask somebody if he is willing," Mr. Blix said, noting that inspectors were already "probing" the possibility of such interviews in their discussions with scientists during inspections.

As for Mr. Bush's charges that Iraqi intelligence agents were posing as scientists to be interviewed, Mr. Blix said he had seen scant evidence of it. "There were some occasions where people didn't seem very knowledgeable," he said. "But if it has happened, it's not from the top," and "it's certainly not anything that is common."

Mr. Blix said that the intelligence information being provided by Washington had improved of late. But diplomats and American officials said that tensions lingered over American suspicions that Iraq had infiltrated the United Nations Monitoring, Verification and Inspections Commission, known as Unmovic.

Both sides agree that American satellites photographed what American analysts said were Iraqi clean-up crews operating at a suspected chemical weapons site they had identified within 48 hours after the information about the site was shared with Unmovic. But the diplomats say inspectors concluded that the site was an old ammunition storage area often frequented by Iraqi trucks, and that there was no reason to believe it was involved in weapons activities.

"It was a wild goose chase." one diplomat said.

But an administration official said there was "good reason" to believe the site was suspect, and that Unmovic had waited a week before visiting it.

"Whether something was removed, or whether it was ever there remains an open question," he complained. He noted that although the C.I.A. was still providing inspectors with sensitive information, concerns remained about Unmovic's ability to safeguard it.

"Iraqis may have bugged offices or hotel rooms of some Unmovic people," he said, noting there were "several examples" in which Iraqis seemed to have either "advance knowledge, or very good luck in going to places before inspectors."

A War Crime or an Act of War?

By STEPHEN C. PELLETIERE

ECHANICSBURG, Pa. — It was no surprise that President Bush, lacking smoking-gun evidence of Iraq's weapons programs, used his State of the Union address to re-emphasize the moral case for an invasion: "The dictator who is assembling the world's most dangerous weapons has already used them on whole villages, leaving thousands of his own citizens dead, blind or disfigured."

The accusation that Iraq has used chemical weapons against its citizens is a familiar part of the debate. The piece of hard evidence most frequently brought up concerns the gassing of Iraqi Kurds at the town of Halabja in March 1988, near the end of the eight-year Iran-Iraq war. President Bush himself has cited Iraq's "gassing its own people," specifically at Halabja, as a reason to topple Saddam Hussein.

But the truth is, all we know for certain is that Kurds were bombarded with poison gas that day at Halabja. We cannot say with any certainty that Iraqi chemical weapons killed the Kurds. This is not the only distortion in the Halabja story.

I am in a position to know because, as the Central Intelligence Agency's senior political analyst on Iraq during the Iran-Iraq war, and as a professor at the Army War College from 1988 to 2000, I was privy to much of the classified material that flowed through Washington having to do with the Persian Gulf. In addition, I headed a 1991 Army investigation into how the Iraqis would fight a war against the United States; the classified version of the report went into great detail on the Halabja affair.

This much about the gassing at Halabja we undoubtedly know: it came about in the course of a battle between Iraqis and Iranians. Iraq used chemical weapons to try to kill Iranians who had seized the town, which is in northern Iraq not far from the Iranian border. The Kurdish civilians who died had the misfortune to be caught up in that exchange. But they were not Iraq's main target.

And the story gets murkier: immediately after the battle the United States Defense Intelligence Agency investigated and produced a classified report, which it circulated within the intelligence community on a need-to-know basis. That study asserted that it was Iranian gas that killed the Kurds, not Iraqi gas.

The agency did find that each side used gas against the other in the battle around Halabja. The condition of the dead Kurds' bodies, however, indicated they had been killed with a blood agent — that is, a cyanide-based gas — which Iran was known to use. The Iraqis, who are thought to have used mustard gas in the battle, are not known to have possessed blood agents at the time.

These facts have long been in the public domain but, extraordinarily, as often as the Halabja affair is cited, they are rarely mentioned. A much-discussed article in The New Yorker last March did not make reference to the Defense Intelligence Agency report or consider that Iranian gas might have killed the Kurds. On the rare occasions the report is brought up, there is usually speculation, with no proof, that it was skewed out of American political favoritism toward Iraq in its war against Iran.

I am not trying to rehabilitate the character of Saddam Hussein. He has much to answer for in the area of human rights abuses. But accusing him of gassing his own people at Halabja as an act of genocide is not correct, because as far as the information we have goes, all of the cases where gas was used involved battles. These were tragedies of war. There may be justifications for invading Iraq, but Halabja is not one of them.

In fact, those who really feel that the disaster at Halabja has bearing on today might want to consider a different question: Why was Iran so keen on taking the town? A closer look may shed light on America's impetus to invade Iraq.

We are constantly reminded that Iraq has perhaps the world's largest reserves of oil. But in a regional and perhaps even geopolitical sense, it may be more important that Iraq has the most extensive river system in the Middle East. In addition to the Tigris and Euphrates, there are the Greater Zab and Lesser Zab rivers in the north of the country. Iraq was covered with irrigation works by the sixth century A.D., and was a granary for the region.

Before the Persian Gulf war, Iraq had built an impressive system of dams and river control projects, the largest being the Darbandikhan dam in the Kurdish area. And it was this dam the Iranians were aiming to take control of when they seized Halabja. In the 1990's there was much discussion over the construction of a so-called Peace Pipeline that would bring the waters of the Tigris and Euphrates south to the parched Gulf states and, by extension, Israel. No progress has been made on this, largely because of Iraqi intransigence. With Iraq in American hands, of course, all that could change.

Thus America could alter the destiny of the Middle East in a way that probably could not be challenged for decades — not solely by controlling Iraq's oil, but by controlling its water. Even if America didn't occupy the country, once Mr. Hussein's Baath Party is driven from power, many lucrative opportunities would open up for American companies.

All that is needed to get us into war is one clear reason for acting, one that would be generally persuasive. But efforts to link the Iraqis directly to Osama bin Laden have proved inconclusive. Assertions that Iraq threatens its neighbors have also failed to create much resolve; in its present debilitated condition — thanks to United Nations sanctions — Iraq's conventional forces threaten no one.

Perhaps the strongest argument left for taking us to war quickly is that Saddam Hussein has committed human rights atrocities against his people. And the most dramatic case are the accusations about Halabja.

Before we go to war over Halabja, the administration owes the American people the full facts. And if it has other examples of Saddam Hussein gassing Kurds, it must show that they were not pro-Iranian Kurdish guerrillas who died fighting alongside Iranian Revolutionary Guards. Until Washington gives us proof of Saddam Hussein's supposed atrocities, why are we picking on Iraq on human rights grounds, particularly when there are so many other repressive regimes Washington supports?

Stephen C. Pelletiere is author of "Iraq and the International Oil System: Why America Went to War in the Persian Gulf."

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