Global Security Newswire

WASHINGTON — Iraq’s lingering WMD architecture, including cadres of weapons scientists, posed a threat to the international community before the United States invaded this year, former chief U.N. weapons inspector Rolf Ekeus told Global Security Newswire yesterday (see GSN, Nov. 17).

Prior to Operation Iraqi Freedom, the Bush administration asserted that Iraq held actual stockpiles of weapons of mass destruction and related WMD programs, but coalition forces scouring the country following the overthrow of former Iraqi President Saddam Hussein have had relatively little success in finding evidence to back such claims. Last month, chief U.S. weapons inspector in Iraq David Kay reported that his Iraqi Survey Group had uncovered no actual weapons of mass destruction or evidence of active chemical and nuclear weapons programs in Iraq. Kay also reported, though, that a large number of WMD program-related activities had been discovered.

In a brief interview with GSN yesterday on the sidelines of a conference held here by the Chemical and Biological Arms Control Institute, Ekeus said that prewar Iraq’s “built-in” WMD system posed a threat to the international community (see GSN, Sept. 5). Ekeus is the former executive chairman of the U.N. Special Commission on Iraq, which conducted weapons inspections in Iraq following the 1991 Gulf War.

He also said, however, that he believed that international inspections conducted in Iraq immediately before the U.S.-led invasion began would have been successful if they had been allowed to continue. He described the effort carried out by UNSCOM’s successor, the U.N. Monitoring, Verification and Inspection Commission (UNMOVIC), as a “search job” and said that UNMOVIC had not been structured to penetrate Iraqi WMD capabilities, which would have required the addition of additional scientists and technicians to the inspection teams.

During a conference panel, Ekeus praised the efforts of UNSCOM’s inspections in Iraq, noting that the organization had discovered a secret Iraqi program to manufacture VX nerve agent and the existence of an Iraqi biological weapons program. He also discounted the impact of information provided by Iraqi defector Hussein Kamal al-Majid on UNSCOM’s search for evidence of Iraqi biological weapons efforts. According to reports, al-Majid, a son-in-law of Hussein who defected in 1995, provided information that led UNSCOM to find a supply of documents at an Iraqi chicken farm.

Ekeus said yesterday, however, that it was “good homework” on the part of UNSCOM that cracked Iraq’s secret WMD programs.