On Wednesday, February 5th last, the US Secretary of State, Colin Powell, presented the United Nations Security Council with the "proof" the world demanded of Iraq's possession of weapons of mass destruction, writes Vincent Browne.
It was an impressive, impassioned performance, delivered by the "dove" of the Bush administration, and had all the more credibility on that account.
He said he wanted to "share" with the Security Council what the US "knows about Iraq's weapons of mass destruction, as well as Iraq's involvement in terrorism".
The "evidence" included supposed telephone intercepts that suggested Iraqi officials might be attempting to conceal weapons of mass destruction. He named sites where weapons of mass destruction were being manufactured and stored - he said there were 65 such sites throughout Iraq. He said the US had amassed "much intelligence indicating that Iraq is continuing to make these \ weapons". They had eyewitness accounts.
He said: "In a matter of months they can produce a quantity of biological poison equal to the entire amount that Iraq claimed to have produced in the years prior to the Gulf War." One "source" for this information "was actually present during biological agent production".
Another source said Iraq had manufactured "mobile production systems mounted on road-trailer units and on rail cars". He continued: "We know that Iraq has at least seven of these mobile biological agent factories. The truck-mounted ones have at least two or three trucks each." Later on he said: "There can be no doubt that Saddam Hussein has biological weapons and the capability to rapidly produce more, many more. And he has the ability to dispense these lethal poisons and diseases in ways that can cause massive death and destruction."
Moving on, he said: "We know Iraq has embedded key portions of its illicit chemical weapons infrastructure within its legitimate civilian industry." He named a few sites where this was happening. He said: "Our conservative estimate is that Iraq today has a stockpile of between 100 and 500 tons of chemical weapons agent. That is enough to fill 16,000 battlefield rockets".
Then there was the "evidence" of a nuclear arms plan, the aluminium tubes.
Concluding, he said: "Leaving Saddam Hussein in possession of weapons of mass destruction for a few more months or years is not an option, not in post-September 11th world."
The war on Iraq started on March 20th. During the two and a bit weeks before the fall of Baghdad, there were numerous opportunities for Saddam Hussein to use whatever weapons of mass destruction he possessed against the invading forces. Indeed, if he had such weapons and ever intended using them, surely that was the moment when both he and his regime were in most peril? Yet he didn't. If these weapons posed no threat to invading US forces in Iraq, how could they pose a threat to the territory of the United States thousands of miles away?
But now some nine weeks have elapsed since the fall of Baghdad and during almost all of that time the Americans have been in a position to interview a great many people who, supposedly, were at the heart of the Iraqi weapons programmes. Nothing has shown up, apart from two lorries that might or might not have been intended to produce chemical or biological weapons, although no trace of either has been found in the lorries.
The following is an extract from a question and answer session involving Donald Rumsfield, at a meeting of the Council on Foreign Relations in New York on Tuesday of last week. He was asked what intelligence the US had on the presence in Iraq of biological and chemical weapons. He replied: "Well, we had information that ... we had facts. We know the Iraqis used chemical weapons against the Iranians. We had facts. We know they used chemical weapons against their own population and killed thousands. Tens of thousands with chemical weapons. So we knew we had a leader that was perfectly willing to use chemical weapons against people. Second, we had intelligence, information, people chatting with each other about 'Don't mention these words. Don't say that'..."
"We know that they had learned to live in an inspections environment that the UN had over them. And they'd gotten very good in living in an inspections environment. Now what happened? Why weren't they used? I don't know. There are several possible reasons for that. And we may end up finding out precisely. We're now interrogating We may actually find out what happened Now if the speed and the way that plan was executed surprised them, it may very well be that they didn't have time to blow the dams, or use chemical weapons. It is also possible that they decided that they would destroy them prior to a conflict. I don't know the answer."
Meanwhile, the British Foreign Secretary, Jack Straw, says whether Iraq had or had not weapons of mass destruction wasn't the point.