Survival: Global Politics and Strategy, vol. 51, no. 6, December 2009–January 2010, pp. 13–20
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So pervasive is the criticism of the invasion of Iraq in 2003, and even more so of the policy decisions taken in its immediate aftermath, that little attempt is made to situate these developments in some kind of historical context that takes account of the events which preceded the Bush administration’s decision to go to war. Of no aspect of these events is this more true than of the failure to find any serious trace of Iraq’s programmes for the development of nuclear, biological and chemical weapons, which it had been confidently predicted ahead of the invasion still existed in considerable quantities and with the capacity to be re-constituted fairly rapidly. That particular story is read backwards, with the benefit of 20/20 hindsight, and not forwards as those who shape historical events are compelled to experience it. The potential threat from these programmes is simply assumed to have been a convenient, and possibly fabricated, pretext for invading Iraq, despite the fact that many of those who opposed the invasion were just as convinced of their continued existence as were those who supported it, and that even Hans Blix, head of the UN team set up to search them out (UNMOVIC), did not believe he had yet got to the bottom of the story. It is surely time to take a more careful look at this complex issue and try to understand rather better what lay behind it, and at the possible consequences of the actions taken at that time.
Saddam Hussein’s drive to equip himself with the full panoply of weapons of mass destruction – nuclear, chemical and biological – goes back a long way, and was pursued without the slightest regard for Iraq’s status as a signatory of international treaties forswearing the possession of such weapons. The possibility that he might divert highly enriched uranium from the Osirak reactor into a nuclear-weapons programme had led the Israelis to bomb the reactor in 1981; the Iraqis had used chemical weapons liberally in their war with Iran in the 1980s and against their own Kurdish population. What was not by any means fully understood in the period before Iraq’s invasion of Kuwait in August 1990 was the full extent of the programmes that were under way, including the development of missiles for the delivery of these weapons. When the UN’s inspectors, mandated under the post-Gulf War Security Council Resolution 687, got to work they uncovered a massive nuclear programme designed to pursue several different routes to the production of fissile material and likely to reach fruition by the mid 1990s in a deliverable nuclear weapon; huge stockpiles of chemical weapons, including the nerve agent VX; and, eventually, a nascent biological programme which had not yet proceeded far along the road to weaponisation. All this is fully documented in the reports of the International Atomic Energy Agency and of UNSCOM, the first of the UN agencies set up to get rid of all Iraq’s weapons of mass destruction and of the means of their....
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David Hannay was British Ambassador to the United Nations from 1990–95. He is now an independent member of the upper house of the British parliament.
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