I posed this question on another webboard and wondered what you guys would make of it.
WMD’s fit into three main categories. Nuclear, chemical and biological. Now, according to the dossier released by Tony Blair late last year Iraq was at least two years away from making a functioning nuclear warhead. They are even further away from making rockets that could blast the stuff farther than 450 miles. Now, the big fear is not so much that Saddam could launch these nukes at us himself, but that he can give one to Al Qaeda who would then do their worst with it. Right so far?
However, there are a great many ways of getting radioactive material other than through Iraq. One possible way is to get Radioactive Cesium 137 from abandoned dumps in Russia. A recent edition of Horizon (a British scientific documentary program) demostrated how the contents of one small, barrel sized container would be sufficient to construct a ‘dirty bomb’ which could contaminate all of West London. Surely, if we were really concerned about Al Qaeda agents getting their grubby little hands on nuclear material, we would be paying more attention to these desolate and dilapidated sites in Russia and other places where all one need do is walk in, extract the material and walk back out again (the dumps are, according to Horizon, completely unguarded). Ordinarily, that would be impossible due to contamination issues but we have already seen from 9/11 that Al Qaeda operatives generally don’t care if they live or die. In the 4-5 days it would take them to die from radiation sickness, they would have been able to transport the material back through airports (Radioactive cesium is a powder and is easily concealable) into the States and constructed a dirty bomb which could contaminate half of New York with radioactive waste.
Yet still we believe the greater danger is from Iraq which is under constant surveillance by a hundred and one different security teams and countless spy planes anyway. Surely, there is no reason for Al Qaeda to take nuclear weapons from Saddam when they can get nuclear material from other locations in the world without raising so much as an eyebrow.
Secondly, the question of Chemical weapons. In Britain recently there was a terrorist scare as a group of Algerian Al Qaeda operatives were arrested trying to make Ricin, one of the deadliest poisons known to man. They had actually succeeded in making it in their own kitchens and would have released it in the underground rail network had the police not stopped them. The key ingredient of Ricin is Castor Beans which are easily procurable. Also, the anthrax attacks in NYC after 9/11 demonstrate clearly that Al Qaeda is well funded enough to germinate the spores covertly in America. Even if Bush does get his way and bombs Iraq into the stone age, he wouldn’t have neutralised at all the chemical threat or the biological threat. Admittedly, he would have neturalised partially the nuclear threat but this is assuming Al Qaeda has ever attempted to procure weapons from Iraq, and that Hussein has even the slightest bit of interest in Al Qaeda in the first place.
In other words, given that even a highly successful war would still leave all these channels still open, what exactly will it solve? Is it worth (a) the inevitable deaths of thousands of Iraqi civilians, people just like you and me, many of them women and children (b)the high likelihood of casualities in our armed forces © the risk that Hussein’s several million strong Presidential guard would take to the streets and begin a guerilla war (d) the risk of inflaming the Islamic world, generating more terrorists and thus increasing the risk of more attacks directed specifically against the US and Britain, just to theoretically reduce the threat of a nuclear strike by a few percentage points?
If the answer is simply a blaze ‘Yes’ then would you also justify attacking Pakistan next? After all, they have plenty of nukes and plenty of Al Qaeda sympathisers. The amount of evidence that the actual government of Pakistan is in direct collusion with Bin Laden & co. is the same as that against Iraq (ie. zero) so why not? It seems to me that Pakistan is infinitely more of a threat. So, for that matter is North Korea and while Bush is starting to wheel his guns towards Kim Dae Jung, it seems probable that North Korea (being a nation that can actually defend itself as opposed to a tinpot dictatorship with just a few dilapidated Mig fighters and a hell of a lot of human shields) will be far more likely to receive a diplomatic settlement than Saddam. I also predict they will be far less co-operative (in other words, I don’t think they’re afraid to tell Bush simply to go to hell).
It seems to me that the real motivation behind this war is to bolster the economy, rally popular support for the government (Wars tend do that, at least initially - although this is already the most unpopular war in recent history. Just imagine how nasty it’s gonna get when the pictures of mothers with their legs blown off start hitting our screens) and to finish what Bush sr. started.
I’m open to different interpretations and would be interested in hearing your comments.