December 9, 2002

A Tough Case: How to Convict Hussein

By DAVID E. SANGER

WASHINGTON, Dec. 8 � At the height of the 1962 Cuban missile crisis, Adlai E. Stevenson, the American chief delegate to the United Nations, crystallized one of the most dramatic moments of the cold war when he displayed spy-plane photos of Soviet nuclear missiles being delivered in Cuba � images that swept away Soviet denials that anything nefarious was afoot.

Some officials in Washington recalled that moment this weekend. The administration was asked why President Bush has not orchestrated a similar display of evidence that would cut through 12,000 pages of Iraqi declarations, and back up Washington's assertion that Saddam Hussein never gave up his weapons of mass destruction.

"It's a very different challenge," a senior administration official said.

Nations trying to hide their weapons programs are familiar with the power of American spy satellites, and are far more skilled at hiding weaponry from view.

There are suspicions that Iraq's stockpiles of biological weapons are aboard ever-moving vans, and that its program to develop highly enriched uranium is buried deep underground. In short, this is a far harder task than watching workers unload nuclear missiles four decades ago, this official explained.

In private, administration officials concede that there is no single piece of intelligence that can undermine the Iraqi declarations.

Instead, they say, there are only patterns of Iraqi purchases, the scattered reports of defectors and Mr. Hussein's own history of making "final" declarations that eventually proved to be neither final nor true.

The absence of a smoking missile so far creates a far more difficult diplomatic task for Mr. Bush. As he insists that Iraq prove a negative � that it no longer possesses the weapons that inspectors found before 1998 � Mr. Bush is under pressure to come up with evidence as debate-ending as those photos of the missiles shown to the Security Council in 1962.

Today the Iraqis may have made the process a little easier when Gen. Amir al-Saadi, who has run many of Iraq's weapons programs, said in Baghdad that the immense document proved Iraq had given up its arms programs and then, curiously, described how close it had come to developing a nuclear weapon.

"We have the complete documentation from design to all the other things," he said, speaking in the present tense in fluent English. "We haven't reached the final assembly of a bomb nor tested it."

If General Saadi was discussing a current program � and that was not entirely clear � Mr. Bush may have all that he needs to prove that Iraq is in "material breach" of its 11-year-old commitments to disarm.

The administration is betting that General Saadi and his colleagues together will ultimately prove to be the Adlai Stevenson of this drama, that they will unintentionally provide the road map to continuing weapons projects, or false claims that those projects have been dismantled.

So for now the administration appears to have settled on a three-part strategy that began to come into view late last week.

The first step, which preceded the Iraqi delivery of documents this weekend, was to demand that Iraq do far more than simply provide its list to the United Nations. Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld and the president's national security adviser, Condoleezza Rice, have both said that the only way for Iraq to clear up doubt is to lead the inspectors to the weapons stores, and to the scientists who worked on the programs. There must be irrefutable evidence, they argue, that tons of precursors to VX, a chemical agent, and biological experiments have been destroyed.

"This is why it is so important to bring the scientists out of Iraq," said one senior official. "Unless we are talking to them outside Saddam's atmosphere of intimidation, we will never know what really happened, whether anything was destroyed."

Step two, expected in the next few weeks, is to counter the voluminous Iraqi report with selected bits and pieces of intelligence, each of which could call into question the accuracy of the weekend declarations.

American officials briefing reporters at the White House on Friday noted, for example, the thousands of tons of VX that arms inspectors found after Iraq had said the substance had never been successfully produced or turned into weapons. But after the inspectors left in 1998, they said they could not verify Iraq's claims about how much had been produced or destroyed.

Over the weekend, Jack Straw, the British foreign secretary, said the first thing Mr. Hussein had to do was account for those "thousands of tons of material."

Part three of the strategy, then, is to launch a global campaign to argue that the 12,000 pages, and supporting documents, fail to answer those questions. "We can't make that declaration now, because we haven't gotten the documents yet," one senior official said over the weekend. "But we're headed that way."

As a diplomatic matter, however, that will be difficult. "It is a tough case to make," said Kenneth M. Pollack, a former national security aide and Central Intelligence Agency expert on Iraqi weapons who has written a book, "The Threatening Storm," arguing for an invasion of Iraq. "But the fact is that the case isn't likely to get easier to make in the next few months."

The chain of events the White House desperately wants to avoid is a lengthy analysis of the weekend declarations, followed by a point-by-point debate with the Iraqis over whether that is sufficient. It has warned the C.I.A. and the national laboratories that they should home in on a few Iraqi claims that the United States believes it can demonstrate as false. It is unclear whether Mr. Bush is willing to declassify intelligence to emphasize the point.

That is where statements like General Saadi's today may help. Iraq has never provided crucial technical documents from its nuclear program. If those are not included in the submission made over the weekend, his statements will be evidence that the report is incomplete. If such documents are included in the submissions, inspectors will demand to see where the equipment is today, or demand evidence of its destruction.

But it is unclear whether murky evidence of the destruction of the weaponry will satisfy the Security Council that a reason for war exists. Perhaps for this reason, Ms. Rice and others repeat frequently now that "the burden of proof is on the Iraqis," and that this declaration was, in the words of the Security Council resolution, a "final chance" to come clean.

White House officials know they have to win that argument because they have little hope that the inspections themselves will find anything Mr. Hussein is intent on hiding.

"How do 300 searchers, with 80 to 100 men on the ground, search a major nation with hundreds or thousands of facilities and mobile assets?" asked Anthony H. Cordesman of the Center for Strategic and International Studies, in a report last week.

He answered this way: "Very slowly, and not comprehensively."

Copyright The New York Times Company

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And for those of you who read my recent diatribe against the "big fat liar" that is our president these days, Security Advisor Dr. Richard Perle was in fact rather candid this week, admitting that the attack on Iraq would not be deterred by any weapons inspections, regardless of the findings.

I hate to say "I told you so"...actually, in this case, I honesty do wish I had been wrong...

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