Global Security Newswire

Experts have challenged U.S. President George W. Bush’s recent assertion that prewar Iraq had the “capacity” to produce weapons of mass destruction, the Boston Globe reported yesterday (see GSN, Feb. 12).

In an interview last week with NBC’s Meet the Press, Bush said that former chief U.S. weapons inspector in Iraq David Kay had reported that Iraq had the “capacity” to produce weapons of mass destruction. Kay did not use such language, though, to describe prewar Iraq’s WMD production capabilities in either an interim report last fall or in testimony before the Senate Armed Services Committee late last month, according to the Globe.

Several experts have questioned Bush’s characterization of Kay’s findings, the Globe reported. 

“There are easily ways in which that would be a true statement and easily ways in which it could be a stretch,” said Gerald Epstein, a former assistant director for national security at the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy.

“It all depends on the squishy word ‘capacity.’ Almost everything is dual-use technology — there is biotech all over the world that is not much different than what you’d need to produce a weapon. But does that mean having everything ready to go for a military attack using that weapon? No, that’s very different,” Epstein said.

Kay himself said the issue of Iraq’s WMD “capacity” was more complex than Bush had asserted.

“Did they have the capacity to make a small number of chemical or biological weapons using existing civilian infrastructure? Sure,” Kay said.  “Look, if some nut can make enough anthrax to terrorize us in very small amounts, Iraq could have made some. That’s different than saying it could have made large amounts of weaponized anthrax that would have been useful in a militarized conflict,” he said.

National Security Council spokesman Sean McCormack said Bush’s assertion was based on portions of Kay’s interim report that said evidence had been found of prewar Iraq’s “weapons of mass destruction-related program activities.”

“One question is, ‘How close (to making a weapon) do you want them to be able to be?’” McCormack said (Charlie Savage, Boston Globe, Feb. 17).