February 11, 2003

Inspections Are
A Total Waste of Time:
Saddam's "acceptance" of U-2 surveillance only shows his confidence in his deception.--by Khirdir Hamza

My 20 years of work in Iraq's nuclear-weapons program and military industry were partly a training course in methods of deception and camouflage to keep the program secret. Given what I know about Saddam Hussein's commitment to developing and using weapons of mass destruction, the following two points are abundantly clear to me: First, the U.N. weapons inspectors will not find anything Saddam does not want them to find. Second, France, Germany, and to a degree, Russia, are opposed to U.S. military action in Iraq mainly because they maintain lucrative trade deals with Baghdad, many of which are arms-related.
[...]
What has become obvious is that the U.N. inspection process was designed to delay any possible U.S. military action to disarm Iraq. Germany, France, and Russia, states we called "friendly" when I was in Baghdad, are also engaged in a strategy of delay and obstruction.

In the two decades before the Gulf War, I played a role in Iraq's efforts to acquire major technologies from friendly states. In 1974, I headed an Iraqi delegation to France to purchase a nuclear reactor. It was a 40-megawatt research reactor that our sources in the IAEA told us should cost no more than $50 million. But the French deal ended up costing Baghdad more than $200 million. The French-controlled Habbania Resort project cost Baghdad a whopping $750 million, and with the same huge profit margin. With these kinds of deals coming their way, is it any surprise that the French are so desperate to save Saddam's regime?

Germany was the hub of Iraq's military purchases in the 1980s. Our commercial attache, Ali Abdul Mutalib, was allocated billions of dollars to spend each year on German military industry imports. These imports included many proscribed technologies with the German government looking the other way. In 1989, German engineer Karl Schaab sold us classified technology to build and operate the centrifuges we needed for our uranium-enrichment program. German authorities have since found Mr. Schaab guilty of selling nuclear secrets, but because the technology was considered "dual use" he was fined only $32,000 and given five years probation.

Meanwhile, other German firms have provided Iraq with the technology it needs to make missile parts. Mr. Blix's recent finding that Iraq is trying to enlarge the diameter of its missiles to a size capable of delivering nuclear weapons would not be feasible without this technology transfer.

Russia has long been a major supplier of conventional armaments to Iraq--yet again at exorbitant prices. Even the Kalashnikov rifles used by the Iraqi forces are sold to Iraq at several times the price of comparable guns sold by other suppliers.

Saddam's policy of squandering Iraq's resources by paying outrageous prices to friendly states seems to be paying off. The irresponsibility and lack of morality these states are displaying in trying to keep the world's worst butcher in power is perhaps indicative of a new world order. It is a world of winks and nods to emerging rogue states--for a price. It remains for the U.S. and its allies to institute an opposing order in which no price is high enough for dictators like Saddam to thrive.

Mr. Hamza, a former director of Iraq's nuclear-weapons program, is the co-author of "Saddam's Bombmaker: The Terrifying Inside Story of the Iraqi Nuclear and Biological Weapons Agenda" (Scribner, 2000).

I can heartily recommend Dr. Hamza's great book: I read it about a year ago and couldn't put it down.
Hamza indeed knows where "all the bodies are buried" when it comes to Saddam's nuclear program, that is until he defected to the West in 1995.
Who knows how far along Saddam has gotten now in the 7 years since Hamza was there?
Note how he cautions us all that the UNSCOM weapons inspection program is a fool's errand.
Check out Steven Den Beste's piece also The Players and the Game on why France and Germany (and Russia) have been such obstructionists to our U.S.-led war on Iraq.
Brace yourself, though.
He and I, and I think Dr. Hamza, too, all think Saddam may have nukes or at the very least, some kind of WMD that is very terrible that France and Germany have sold Iraq and for the express purpose of using Iraq to oppose U.S.-U.K. geopolitical power...which would make them our enemies as much as Saddam.
Funny how that works, but perhaps it's too soon to join Richard Perle in this pronouncement about France...
Only time will tell and I hope these Cassandras are wrong, for the record, but I'll bet they're not.