Iraq’s Anthrax and the Myth of “Intelligence Failure”

A Manufactured Threat

Iraq, claimed the U.S. government, was a “threat” to the world because of its alleged possession of “weapons of mass destruction”. In order to explain that no WMD were found in Iraq after the invasion, the notion that there had been an “intelligence failure” has been widely propagated. But any analysis comparing the claims that were made against Iraq against the facts known, not in hindsight, but at the time, reveals huge obstacles to the “intelligence failure” theory.

Take any aspect of the case for war and perform the above analysis. Let’s take anthrax. Among the WMD Iraq was supposed to have possessed was weaponized anthrax, described by the Center for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) as “an acute infectious disease caused by the spore-forming bacterium Bacillus anthracis.”[1] As with other aspects of the government’s case for war, the story of Iraq’s anthrax is instructive, if we are willing to accept the conclusions that a review of the facts inevitably leads to.

First, let us recognize the now widely accepted judgment that Iraq actually had no anthrax at the time of the U.S. invasion, or for many years prior, for that matter. According to the report of the Iraq Survey Group (ISG) headed by Charles Duelfer, “ISG judges that in 1991 and 1992, Iraq appears to have destroyed its undeclared stocks of BW weapons and probably destroyed remaining holdings of bulk BW agent.”[2]

This is the conclusion—that Iraq had actually told the truth when it declared that it had unilaterally destroyed its proscribed biological weapons—that the CIA was finally forced to concede after the fruitless search for WMD in Iraq and tens of thousands (by the most conservative estimates) of deaths later.

In sharp contrast, the claim from the U.S. government prior to the invasion was that Iraq maintained stockpiles of biological weapons, including anthrax. In September of 2002, President Bush said, “The dangers we face only worsen from month to month and year to year…and each passing day could be the one on which the Iraq regime gives anthrax or VX nerve gas or someday a nuclear weapon to a terrorist group.” [3] Bush declared that the U.S. must ensure that Saddam Hussein “never has the capacity to use the stockpiles of anthrax that we know he has…”[4] That same month, Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld said that Saddam Hussein “has amassed large clandestine stockpiles of biological weapons, including anthrax, botulism toxin, and possibly smallpox.”[5]

The government claim was unambiguous, and stated not as a possibility or judgment, but as absolute fact: Iraq possessed weaponized anthrax, and not just in minute quantities, but in “stockpiles”. But what actual evidence was this claim based upon? Did the intelligence available at the time support these claims? Anthrax was an outstanding issue for UNMOVIC inspectors, but what was the nature of that unresolved dispute?

When he addressed the UN General Assembly in 2002, Bush gave the administration version, saying, “From 1991 to 1995, the Iraqi regime said it had no biological weapons. After a senior official in its program defected and exposed this lie, the regime admitted producing tens of thousands of liters of anthrax and other deadly biological agents…”[6]

The implication was clear, but the language highly deceptive, and highly relevant facts left deliberately undisclosed. It is true that for the first four years of UN inspections, Iraq denied ever having had a biological weapons program. Then Hussein Kamal defected and revealed that this was false, forcing Iraq to acknowledge its past program (not a then-current program, as implied by Bush’s choice of language), which pre-dated the 1991 Gulf War. Also noticeably absent from Bush’s remarks was the fact that Kamal had told UN inspectors that “nothing remained” of Iraq’s biological weapons, but that they were “destroyed” in 1991.[7]

Another relevant fact relegated to the dustbin of history by the Bush administration is that UN inspectors indeed verified that weapons had been destroyed by Iraq in 1991. As the British dossier on Iraq’s WMD from September 2002 acknowledged, “Iraq destroyed unilaterally and illegally, some biological weapons in 1991 and 1992 making accounting for these weapons impossible.”[8]

This is a remarkable admission, if one is willing to contemplate the implications. The United States and Britain went to war in Iraq claiming Iraq had failed to account for its WMD, even while it was recognized that “accounting for these weapons” would be “impossible”. In other words, they demanded that Iraq do the “impossible” and then invaded when what they knew was an “impossible” task was not accomplished.

The British dossier explained the issue regarding anthrax succinctly: “From a series of Iraqi declarations to the UN during the 1990s we know that by 1991 they had produced at least…8,500 litres of anthrax”, but the UN inspectors “were unable to account for…growth media procured for biological agent production (enough to produce over three times the 8,500 litres of anthrax spores Iraq admits to having manufactured)…” While Iraq had claimed its weapons had been destroyed, “Iraq could not explain large discrepancies between the amount of growth media (nutrients required for the specialized growth of agent) it procured before 1991 and the amounts of agent it admits to having manufactured.”[9]

In other words, the Iraqis admitted to having produced 8,500 litres of anthrax, but they could possibly have produced more. And as the chief inspector for the United Nations Monitoring, Verification and Inspection Commission (UNMOVIC) Hans Blix explained, “In most cases, the issues are outstanding not because there is information that contradicts Iraq’s account, but simply because there is a lack of supporting evidence” (emphasis added).[10] In other words, there was no evidence that Iraq still possessed any of its biological weapons produced prior to the arrival in 1991 of inspections teams (then known as the United Nations Special Commission, or UNSCOM). Inspectors simply couldn’t verify that all weapons had indeed been destroyed as declared by Iraq.

Furthermore, as Blix also explained, while “Iraq has declared that it produced about 8,500 litres” of anthrax, “which it states it unilaterally destroyed in the summer of 1991”, not only was there “no convincing evidence for its destruction”, but “Iraq has provided little evidence for this production…”[11]

In other words, not only was there no evidence that Iraq still possessed the 8,500 litres of anthrax it claimed to have produced, there was “little evidence” it had ever been produced in the first place. Often noted was the fact that it was within the realm of possibility that Iraq had actually produced more than the amount it claimed and that Iraq hadn’t destroyed this anthrax. On the other hand, there was the possibility, usually dismissed outright, that Iraq had destroyed the anthrax and other weapons it admitted to having produced (this author knows of not a single instance of this possibility being acknowledged by any government official).

It’s not surprising that only one of these two possible scenarios ever appeared within the rhetoric of administration officials in making the case for war against Iraq, just as it was never publicly acknowledged in administration speeches that inspectors had verified that weapons had been unilaterally destroyed in 1991. The nature of the outstanding issues of anthrax and other biological weapons were never fully explained, for the obvious reasons.

Consequently, it was also never explained that Iraq had been “fundamentally disarmed” by UN inspectors, in the words of former UNSCOM inspector Scott Ritter, with “90-95% of Iraq’s weapons of mass destruction capability…verifiably eliminated”. It was never revealed to the American public by the Bush administration that even had Iraq managed to maintain “stockpiles” of the anthrax it had produced, it had a shelf life which would have rendered it useless many years prior. Iraq, Ritter explained, produced only “liquid bulk anthrax”, which “even under ideal storage conditions, germinates in three years, becoming useless.”[12]

This was the nature of the “outstanding” issue as it pertained to anthrax in the months building up to war. For the obvious reasons, the full relevant facts were never disclosed to the American public by administration officials.