Reading the fine print

Thanks to Left I On The News for the link to this, from the Los Angeles Times for October 10:

An exhaustive report released last week by Charles A. Duelfer, the CIA's chief weapons investigator in Iraq, concluded that Saddam Hussein destroyed his stockpiles of chemical and biological weapons in the early 1990s and never tried to rebuild them. But a little-noticed section of the 960-page report says the risk of a "devastating" attack with unconventional weapons has grown since the U.S.-led invasion and occupation of Iraq last year.

A network of insurgents dubbed the "Al Abud network" by investigators has been actively trying to manufacture chemical weapons such as nerve gases and blister agents for use against US and other forces in Iraq.

Investigators from Duelfer's Iraq Survey Group learned of the Al Abud threat by chance in March when a U.S. Army patrol raided a laboratory in a Baghdad market known for chemical supply shops. They discovered an Iraqi chemist who had successfully produced small quantities of ricin, a potentially deadly toxin made from castor beans.

After the chemist was interrogated, Duelfer quickly created a special team of covert agents, analysts and weapons experts to track down the scientist's contacts and arrest other members of the Al Abud network, named for the lab where the chemist was found.

Apparently, the toxins and agents produced were neither of sufficient sophistication nor in sufficient quantity to cause significant casualties. It's the source that's worrisome.

Neither of the two chemists who worked for Al Abud had ties to Hussein's long-defunct weapons programs, and Duelfer's investigators found no evidence that the group's poison project was part of a "prescribed plan by the former regime to fuel an insurgency."

That is, this is something that has developed since and because of the invasion. What's more,

the leaders and financiers of the network "remain at large, and alleged chemical munitions remain unaccounted," the report says. It adds that other insurgent groups are "planning or attempting to produce or acquire" chemical and biological agents throughout Iraq, and says the availability of chemicals and munitions, as well as sympathetic former Iraqi weapons scientists, "increases the future threat."

And, quite unlike Saddam Hussein, if these folks do succeed they will spread the results around.

There are two other points to be made here. One is that, as you can gather from the Times' article by reading between the lines, making poison gas is not something you can just knock out in a basement lab. The group here had several failures before being able to produce even a small amount. To produce the large quantities needed to make it a militarily effective weapon takes the resources of an industrialized nation. And once you have an effective weapon it takes an industrialized nation to deliver it effectively. Saddam Hussein used poison gas to slaughter 5,000 Kurds in the town of Halabja on March 16, 1988 in the worst such atrocity of recent times. But that took a day-long aerial assault, not a single uncontrolled release.

The other is that even with a relatively controlled release, chemical weapons are unreliable and unpredictable. For example, on March 20, 1995, the Japanese apocalyptic cult Aum Shinrikyo released sarin gas into the Tokyo subway system - a relatively contained area and certainly more contained than open air - at the height of morning rush hour. Thousands got sick, but only 12 died. ("Only," of course, being a relative term.)

What this means is that CBW (chemical and biological warfare) is not particularly useful militarily against any but the weakest opponents. (Yes, Saddam used poison gas against Iran. Recall how well that war went for him.) Its real "value" is as a weapon of terror, of shock, of panic. The sudden sickness of hundreds, even thousands. The sudden deaths of dozens, maybe more. All from something that can in some cases be neither seen nor smelled nor tasted. That can be delivered stealthily, anonymously. That can be in the air you breathe, in the water you drink, on the handrail you casually touch on your way down the stairs at your office.

The bottom line here is that while the potential spread of poison gas know-how is a genuine threat not only to us but perhaps much more to other, locally-disfavored, populations around the world, there are others that worry me more: the spread of nuclear weapons technology, for example. But what deserves to be emphasized and re-emphasized is that even if this is not a significant threat to us, it is still a threat that has increased as the result of the invasion and occupation of Iraq.