U.S. Plans to Add to Teams to Hunt for Iraqi Weapons

April 27, 2003
By STEVEN R. WEISMAN - New York Times


WASHINGTON, April 26 - The Bush administration, concerned
about the failure to find unconventional weapons in Iraq,
is moving to triple the size of the team searching for
scientists and for incriminating lethal materials. Some
officials are even saying that they are losing hope of
finding actual weapons.

Administration officials, some speaking publicly and some
on condition of anonymity, insist that they remain entirely
confident that evidence of illegal chemical, biological and
nuclear weapons programs - as opposed to the weapons
themselves - will accumulate in coming weeks and months,
though perhaps slowly.

But to step up the pace, a military official said, about
1,000 military and scientific personnel will be added in
coming weeks to the team trying to interview Iraqis who may
have knowledge of Iraqi weapons programs and looking for
evidence. Only 500 are doing this job now, with perhaps 150
actually searching and the rest providing backup and
support.

"A fairly robust organization is going over there," said a
military official. "It will also look for evidence of war
crimes, terrorism connections, missing P.O.W.'s - anything
it can find that will help get to the weapons of mass
destruction."

Some officials say they think the United States should
react more positively to the demand by France that United
Nations inspectors certify that Iraq is free of
unconventional weapons before economic penalties against
the country are permanently lifted. Many United Nations
members favor a return to Iraq by Hans Blix as an
inspection leader as soon as the country is secure. Others
say that a couple of hundred more experts, with or without
Mr. Blix, cannot hurt and could actually help.

But theirs is a decidedly minority view. Even the State
Department, which advocated trying to find the weapons
using United Nations inspectors last fall, has no tolerance
for asking those inspectors to return.

"Forget it," one official said. "On principle, we don't
want the United Nations running around Iraq."

One official, discussing the American plans, said that
despite some polls indicating that Americans do not care
very much whether the weapons are found, White House
officials are pressing the United States Central Command to
step up the search for them because of worldwide skepticism
that the main American rationale for the war was not
proving to be true. "There's just a lot of pressure coming
from the White House on this," an administration official
said. "But Centcom is pushing back because they have other
things to do - like securing the country and guarding its
antiquities."

Administration officials and experts say that evidence of
Iraq's illegal weapons programs will most likely consist of
items like empty shells for chemical or biological weapons,
labs that could be used to make arms and so-called
precursor chemicals that could be converted to weapons use
but could also be used for fertilizers, pesticides and the
like.

"People are realizing that Saddam Hussein may not have
stored the weapons themselves, in part because when you put
chemical or biological agents into weapons, they
deteriorate very rapidly," an administration official said.
He and others said that if the weapons themselves - the
"smoking gun" that has eluded the United States since
United Nations inspectors went into Iraq last fall - should
not turn up, American experts may be forced to base their
case for the existence of weapons programs on fragmentary
evidence that could be interpreted in different ways.

"The evidence that we do find will be convincing to most
experts, but not necessarily to those predisposed to doubt
what we say," said an American official.

Another official said: "It may be that the Iraqis poured
toxins into the ground, or scoured out their shells, or
never filled their shells. There may be weapons, and there
may not be."

"But it will be clear," the official continued, referring
to weapons of mass destruction by their initials, "that
they were pursuing W.M.D. actively."

The increasing possibility of a somewhat ambiguous result
on weapons programs has led to a debate in the
administration over what to do now that President Bush has
decided that there will be no role for the United Nations
inspectors in finding or destroying illegal weapons.

Prime Minister Tony Blair of Britain, like some in the
administration, has argued that a United Nations team of
some sort may be necessary to ratify a conclusion that
weapons programs existed. The point, some officials say,
would be to convince skeptics that weapons programs were
indeed there. "The big concern is credibility," a military
official said. "When we say we have found something, are
the media sources in the Middle East and other parts of the
world going to believe it?"

While it appears that Mr. Blix's team will not be allowed
to return soon, some State Department officials say that
some kind of United Nations team might be acceptable
eventually to help verify incriminating evidence or to
destroy it.

"If there were a role for the United Nations on weapons, it
would be different from the one they had before," said an
administration official. "It's too early to say what their
role would be. It's too early to say that there will be no
role."

France has threatened to withhold its vote on lifting the
permanent sanctions against Iraq until there is some
agreement on the role for the United Nations in weapons
inspections and destruction. French officials say this is
faithful to the United Nations resolutions that were based
on a finding that Iraq, in defiance of the world community,
had such weapons. "How can we just walk away from what the
sanctions were all about?" a French official asked.

Americans say there is no room for negotiating with the
French on lifting sanctions if the issue is United Nations
weapons inspectors. They accuse France of having a hidden
agenda: ensuring contracts for French companies in an Iraqi
reconstruction program paid for with revenues from Iraqi
oil exports.

One problem is that American officials who now say they may
not find actual weapons have changed their arguments
somewhat. Secretary of State Colin L. Powell told the
United Nations that the United States had evidence of
actual weapons, not just weapons programs.

Indeed, he suggested that some of those weapons were
ordered sent into the field before the war. Now there is
some doubt about that because some experts say that if
there had been intelligence on their deployment, there
should have been intelligence to help Americans find them.

"There are still holes in what Iraq reported it had," said
Raymond Zilinskas, director of the chemical and biological
weapons nonproliferation program at the Monterey Institute
of International Studies in California. "The Iraqis always
said they destroyed the materials we know they had, but
they never offered proof."

But like some experts, Mr. Zilinskas said he doubted that
the Iraqis had actually started up weapons programs after a
first round of inspections ended in 1998. That does not
mean that elements of weapons programs cannot be found now
in Iraq, he said, only that the weapons themselves may not
be there.

"The British and now the Americans have been changing their
tune," said Mr. Zilinskas, who was a weapons inspector in
Iraq in the mid-1990's. "Before, they said Iraq had weapons
of mass destruction ready to go. The British said they were
on the shelf and could have been deployed within 45
minutes."

But in the face of doubts like those expressed by Mr.
Zilinskas, an administration official said: "Remember the
quagmire that we were supposed to be in during the war?
Don't start saying we're in a quagmire on the weapons.
We'll find them."

http://www.nytimes.com/2003/04/27/international/worldspecial/27WEAP.html?ex=1052481850&ei=1&en=b21340b004ff0068