We should be concerned about unaccounted for weapons in Iraq, writes Dr Tom Clonan
The capture last week of Saddam Hussein's personal secretary, Abid Hamid Mahmoud al-Tikriti provided US and British forces some respite from their ongoing losses in post-war Iraq.
It may also have yielded the intelligence that pre-empted an attack last Wednesday night on a six-vehicle convoy near the city of Qaim on the border between Syria and Iraq. The attack was reportedly designed to either kill or capture Saddam Hussein, believed to have been in the convoy attempting to flee to Syria.
The attack is reported to have been carried out by 'Task Force 20'.
'Task Force 20' is a unit comprised of personnel from various elements of US Special Forces. It is a highly secretive formation whose mission is to "seize, destroy, render safe, capture or recover weapons of mass destruction". Despite these stated aims, the unit would appear to have failed thus far to locate weapons of mass destruction (WMDs) in Iraq. The unit does appear however to have excelled in locating key figures associated with the Baathist regime. These would include Mohammed Abbas, the Palestinian resistance leader seized in Baghdad in April. They also include the capture of top Iraqi biological weapons experts Rihab Rashid Taha and Huda Salih Mahdi Ammash.
Whilst the American public are as yet seemingly unconcerned with the failure of US forces to locate weapons of mass destruction in Iraq, they are becoming increasingly uneasy about the rising death toll amongst troops based there. With 18 US soldiers killed by hostile fire in the last eight weeks, many Americans are beginning to feel that President Bush's May 1st announcement of the end of "major combat" in Iraq to have been premature. This will have been exacerbated by the deaths yesterday of at least six British soldiers in attacks at al Amarah, north of Basra.
Such losses, allied to statements made by US senators this week indicating that US and British troops would be required in Iraq for up to five more years in order to maintain stability will suggest a Vietnam-type scenario to the British and American public.
At present the US and British grip on order and stability in Iraq seems tenuous at best. At worst, an allegedly heavy-handed response to street protests on the part of under-resourced and over-stretched US infantry is blamed for contributing to a negative cycle of violence in cities such as Falluja and Baghdad. US soldiers in Iraq, trained almost exclusively for conventional combat operations have been accused of being nervous and trigger-happy in face-to-face confrontations with Iraqis in street demonstrations. British soldiers, consistent with their experiences in Northern Ireland, continue to be engaged in tense skirmishes and stand-offs with Iraqi citizens. This tension has been deliberately exacerbated by Iraqi resistance groups mounting suicide bombings and sniper attacks on US and British checkpoints and patrols.
Added to this explosive mix are the cultural differences between Iraqis and US and British troops. To many westerners, the body language and communications repertoires employed by Iraqis giving vent to emotion in street demonstrations appear threatening and aggressive. This is especially so for troops trained in the use of maximum force in combat operations and unfamiliar with peace enforcement duties. Watching these scenes unfold in Iraq, Irish troops with service in the Lebanon will be all too familiar with such displays of emotion and will probably reflect how they learned - often the hard way - to distinguish between legitimate protest and attack.
The painstaking process of relationship-building with the civil community continues to provide a steep learning curve for US and British troops in Iraq. With a successful track record in peace enforcement in the Balkans and elsewhere, ironically for coalition forces, the main obstacle to such success in Iraq lies in their unprecedented military victory over Saddam's regime. Simply stated, the US and British overpowered and ousted the Iraqi regime with a relatively small invasion force. This small force, currently numbering around 146,000, is proving insufficient to hold ground and provide the order and stability necessary for nation building.
Indeed, on February 25th this year, prior to the invasion of Iraq, the US army chief of staff, General Eric Shinseki, testifying before the US senate's armed services committee stated that "several hundred thousand" troops would be required to maintain an occupation of Iraq. This estimate was subsequently dismissed by Secretary Rumsfeld and he may have done so on the grounds of its financial cost to the American public. The US-based Brookings Institute estimated that with a US force numbering 250,000, occupation of Iraq would cost between $10-$20 billion per year. The American Academy of Arts and Sciences estimated that a longer-term occupation of the order now being contemplated would cost between $99 billion and $1.2 trillion dollars.
Despite a current cost of approximately $3 billion per month to the US and British governments, the question of the whereabouts of Saddam's WMDs remains unanswered. Despite some justifiable scepticism about the Blair administration's intelligence dossier on WMDs, there is no doubt that WMDs remain unaccounted for in Iraq.
Among those materials still unaccounted for, Hans Blix and the UN have listed 350 tonnes of chemical warfare agent, 1.5 tonnes of VX gas, 3,000 tonnes of chemical warfare precursors and 2,160 kg of growth media for biological weapons - enough to produce 26,000 litres of Anthrax. Given the fate of nuclear materials abandoned by the Iraqis at the Tuwaitha facility, it behoves western governments, Ireland included, to be concerned about the fate of the as yet undiscovered WMDs within Iraq.
For the moment, the US, British and Iraqi people are paying the human and fiscal price for this ongoing search. In time however, if such materials get into the wrong hands, we and some of our sceptical European neighbours may pay a much higher price.
Dr Tom Clonan is a retired army officer with experience in the Middle East and former Yugoslavia. He is a fellow of the US-based Inter University Seminar on Armed Forces and Society. He currently lectures in the School of Media, DIT.