Introduction

The Iraqi regime has been developing chemical, biological, and nuclear weapons for more than a quarter-century. Since the 1960s and ‘70s, it has made substantial financial commitments towards developing and weaponizing anthrax, botulinum toxin, aflatoxin, plague, ricin, smallpox, mustard gas, sarin gas, VX, etc. Immense progress was made in the creation of nuclear weapons, which was luckily confounded in several separate instances. Iraq actually managed to construct a nuclear weapon in 1990, but lacked the enriched uranium needed to make it boom.
A number of nations are complicit in these programs, though the United States and France stand out. Germany and a handful of other nations don’t come out looking too great either.

Containment – The History of an Unproven Path

On April 3rd, 1991, the United Nations imposed a timeframe of 90 days for Iraq to disclose its arsenal of weapons of mass destruction. Iraq refused for several reasons. For one, nobody--not the UN, not Saddam Hussein--expected inspections to work as well as they did (at least initially). Two, Hussein prized his WMDs very highly. And three, he didn’t expect us to stick around for very long.

When first beginning their inspections, weapons inspectors were shocked at the complexity and size of the WMD programs they found. After the Israelis had crushed Iraq’s nuclear program in 1981 by destroying the Osiraq facility, Hussein learned the value of redundant and decoy operations. In the aftermath of the Gulf War, we found that we’d only managed to destroy 3 of 7 major nuclear facilities. Of 97 suspected (and bombed) targets, only 11 turned out to be WMD facilities.

In June 1991, inspectors discovered a small supply (several kilograms) of highly enriched uranium, along with a stock of un-enriched uranium (uranium occurs naturally in Iraq). At this point, Iraq admitted that they had an active nuclear weapons program. They grudgingly surrendered WMD-filled bombs and scuds along with a sizeable chunk of their nuclear program. Perhaps they intended to quit?
Then a couple of months later (August 1991), inspectors discovered a huge quantity of heavy water (for use in nuclear reactors). In September they uncovered sixty thousand documents concerning Iraq hiding its nuclear program in an (assumed harmless) Petro-Chemical 3 project outside of Baghdad. The Iraqis, at this point, physically held inspectors hostage for four days before finally, reluctantly, allowing them to leave with photo-copies of key documents.
Regardless of obvious Iraqi intent to deceive, especially where nuclear programs were concerned, inspections were apparently working quite well. Hussein had never planned on hiding his programs from the prying eyes of multiple foreign intelligence agencies and meticulous, close-up inspections from UN inspectors. Inspections worked so well, in fact, that talk started up about moving from active inspections to “long-term monitoring.”

Just about then, mid-1995, the inspectors were at the top of their game. Hussein hit rock-bottom. Hussein Kamel (former Minister of Industry and Military Industrialization of Iraq) defected for fear of his life and revealed the extent that the Iraqis had still managed to dupe inspectors. The Iraqis, in an attempt to discredit Kamel, moved tens of thousands of documents to his chicken farm for the inspectors to find. Nobody fell for the ruse, and we learned not only that Iraq had actually developed offensive biological weapons (of which we had no clue, and which they’d assured us they’d not), but also that all of Iraq’s WMD programs were considerably more advanced than we had thought. We also discovered that in 1990, Saddam Hussein had ordered a rush to enrich enough uranium for a nuclear weapon to be used against Tel Aviv if the coalition moved against him. It should be noted that he had all the parts all put together for a nuclear weapon--in effect, he had a nuclear weapon. He simply lacked the enriched uranium (it’s what he always lacked).

Throughout 1996 and 1997, the Iraqis consistently attempted to prevent inspectors from accessing certain facilities, sometimes violently. They went so far as to, in one instance, burn documents and dump ash-filled waste cans into a river while inspectors were watching and video-taping.
Over the period of inspections, Iraq continually tried to thwart the process. Somehow, with no bargaining chips, they managed to negotiate more and more restricted inspections, especially into sensitive areas. In late 1998, inspectors were barred from returning to Iraq. They were kept out of Iraq until 2002, and now we’re in the current situation.

What Saddam Hussein Wants, Will Do, and Won’t Do

Saddam Hussein’s actions would seem to demonstrate that he wants two things.

Power. A goal, the goal, of both the Iran-Iraq war and the invasion of Kuwait was oil. By controlling either Kuwaiti or Iranian oil fields, Saddam Hussein would have roughly ten percent of the world's oil production under his finger. This would give him appreciable control over global oil prices. As he has demonstrated affably with the oil-for-stuff program, Hussein prefers to do business with countries who go the extra mile for him, legally or otherwise (Syria is illegally, and very openly, pumping roughly 200,000 barrels of oil per day through the Iraq-Syrian oil pipeline to the tune of a $1-2 billion dollar profit for Iraq every year; Iraq gives them a discount on the oil as a favor for the illegal revenue).

Fame. Saddam Hussein compares himself to Nebuchadnezzar, al-Mansur, Saladin, heroes of the Arab world. In a children’s book about Saladin, guess whose picture tops the Saladin’s shoulders?
Why was Saddam planning to nuke Tel Aviv in the event of an invasion? Strategically, wouldn’t it make sense to strike at the invaders? Israeli troops weren’t even involved in the invasion! The reason, what we must assume to be the reason, involves the universal anti-Semitism in the Arab world. Hussein shares this dislike of the Israelis, as they are unilaterally responsible for obliterating his nuclear program in 1981.
One third of Israel’s population lives in and around Tel Aviv. It’s the business center of the country, and a cultural hotspot. It has no strategic value. But if Hussein, in one fell nuclear swoop, obliterated one-third of Israel's population, he would instantaneously become one of the heroes of Arabic history, like Nebuchadnezzar, al-Mansur, and Saladin.
Of course, he didn’t manage to enrich enough uranium in time to make his bomb. But as it would appear that he never really quit pursuing WMDs, the point is very pertinent.

What will and won’t Saddam Hussein do? Well, he will invade and overpower if given the incentive and opportunity (and given the wealth of oil in a few surrounding nations in the Gulf, incentive isn't lacking).
Would Saddam Hussein attack the United States? I personally doubt it, because it would be a stupid thing to do. But it’s worth remembering that he tried to assassinate an (ex) US President, so either he greatly underestimated the response that would generate or he’s suicidal. Since Hussein has demonstrated himself to be a congenial optimist, someone who’ll do bizarre things with the highest expectations, it’s probably the former.
Would he attack Europe? Doubtful. More likely than he would attack the US, but he doesn’t really have any incentive to do so.
Would he give chemical, biological, or nuclear weapons to terrorists? I don’t think so either, not unless we were already coming after him. He funds the Palestinian suicide bombers as much as he dares, to incite an Arab-Israeli conflict, but he wouldn’t dare give them chemical or biological weapons.
On a side note, I think all this talk about al Qaeda absolutely refusing to work with Iraq because they hate Hussein is complete and utter bull. Fundamentalist terrorists have plenty of reason to hate the Iraqi regime, but they aren’t stupid. Iraq is on their side of the fence--anti-America--and Iraq has a nasty arsenal of weapons they would happily use.

Now then, I’d like to point out that you don’t actually have to attack anybody--or even threaten to attack anybody--to actually threaten somebody. The situation with North Korea comes to mind. They’re playing hardball. Classic Soviet-style negotiation. Up the ante to incredible heights to ensure the relatively small returns you want. In this case, it’s likely that the North Koreans want food, oil, and just free stuff in general. They have nothing to win by starting a war and they haven’t literally threatened anyone, but that doesn’t make them any less threatening.
Iraq has demonstrated an unmatched zeal in pursuing weapons of mass destruction. Saddam Hussein doesn’t want food, though. He doesn’t need oil. Sure, he really, really wants the sanctions lifted, but continuing WMD proliferation only takes him further away from that goal.
So what is he trying to do?

Simple common sense dictates that it's unwise to attack a country with nuclear weapons, especially if that country has the will and capability to use them. This is true of chemical and biological weapons to a significantly lesser degree; nukes are in a category by themselves. To refer back to the North Korea situation, nuclear weapons give the North Koreans a considerable leg up at the bargaining table, even if they don't threaten to use them.
If Saddam Hussein managed to get a nuclear weapon, he would effectively control the Middle East. A coalition of nations forced Hussein back into Iraq during the Persian Gulf War. If the same situation occurred again, but Saddam Hussein had nuclear weapons, the capability to deliver them considerable distances, and the will to use them, would it be worthwhile for us to risk a nuclear war over a country so relatively insignificant as Kuwait? No ... no, not really.

The Middle East is really the last place on earth where we want a nuclear power. It is in the world’s best interest to keep nukes out of the middle east, at least at the current time, and definitely so when we’re talking about Saddam Hussein.

Iraq, Illegal Operations, and Weapons of Mass Destruction

Iraq has spent roughly $130 to $180 billion dollars on its programs for the development of weapons of mass destruction. This money goes towards the construction of facilities, the purchase of parts, the acquirement of expertise and documentation, the salaries of any number of tens of thousands of workers, and the operation to disguise and hide anything related to WMDs.

For the past twelve years, UN sanctions have been in place against Iraq. Iraq has lost out on billions upon billions of dollars in oil sales because of these sanctions. Rather than disarm, Saddam Hussein has cost himself an immense oil wealth. The Iraqi people are suffering from incredible neglect (which, make no mistake, is within Hussein’s power to remedy). The economy has tanked; inflation has reached three thousand percent (it’s improved since). Also, the conventional military power of Iraq is in a relatively poor state, neglected in the name of weapons of mass destruction.
By smuggling oil and placing surcharges on oil in the oil-for-stuff program, Hussein collects an estimated $2-3 billion dollars which he can do whatever he wants with, money which is impossible to track.
Iraq, in mid-2002, attempted to buy atomized aluminum power and titanium engine parts from an Indian company. These parts were in such a quantity and of such a quality that the Indian government concluded that they could realistically only have been intended for chemical warfare and ballistic missile production.
China is one of the permanent nations on the Security Council. In 2000--in a blatant violation of UN sanctions--they undertook the construction of a nationwide fiber-optic communication system for the Iraqi government. There’s simply no way they could’ve thought this would escape the world's notice.
Russia, another member of the P-5, broke the ban on commercial flights to Iraq in 2000. Iraq has also acquired missile gyroscopes from Russian submarine-launched nuclear ballistic missiles, though there’s no substantial evidence that these went directly from the Russians to the Iraqis.

Iraq has not accounted for significant amounts of chemical and biological weapons, along with the ballistic missiles which could be used to disperse them. The most optimistic accounts say that inspectors managed to uncover and destroy 95% of Iraq’s WMD arsenal. This is ridiculous. Scott Ritter, the voice of optimism, guesstimates 85-95%. The pessimists place this percentage far lower. The truth, which is probably somewhere inbetween, would put the inspector’s effectiveness anywhere from 50-75%. But the figure in general is meaningless.
It’s not a simple task to store chemical and biological weapons. It is actually easier to fire up a production facility and wait for a few weeks than to store chemical and biological weapons for months or years at a time. The point is, actual quantities of the weapons surrendered to inspectors are meaningless unless we also receive the scientists, workers, blueprints, and facilities which Iraq used (and could use again, and does use) to manufacture them. Which, I should note, there’s no real way of verifying that the Iraqis gave to us (and in many cases, didn’t even bother to pretend they did).

Effective Inspections

It is frankly impossible to say how much of Hussein’s actual arsenal we discovered and destroyed, but as I’ve said, that point is moot.
A history of inspections, based on the information we do have, demonstrates that the Iraqis have consistently attempted to thwart inspectors. In some cases, they’ve been very successful. It took the information from defectors such as Hussein Kamel, Khidhir Hamza, and Wafiq al-Samarra’i to enlighten us to the shocking extent that the Iraqis had succeeded in deceiving us. Without this type of information, we will never be able to know exactly how successful any Iraqi WMD program, be it nuclear, chemical, or biological is until we’re made aware of it by the Iraqis themselves.

Without cooperation, inspectors have to rely on dumb luck, Iraqi mistakes, or foreign intelligence. There’s a formidable amount of manpower allocated to Iraq’s own intelligence branches, so the chance that inspectors just stumble on to something is slim to none. A mistake by the Iraqis? Possible, but doubtful. They had eight years to learn the method of inspections and four years to adapt their programs to evade those same inspections. And foreign intelligence information is useful, but it’s been (very) wrong before and I don’t believe that it’s consistent enough to bet on.

Simply, we don’t really know the current state of Iraq’s programs. There were four inspector-free years between 1998 and 2002, and what we know about the current regime would indicate that the Iraqis probably weren’t sitting on their hands in that time-period. They were undoubtedly continuing work on various WMD programs, and very importantly, on methods to conceal them. Dual-use facilities, mobile laboratories, yada yada yada.

Many former inspectors have said that it would require 12-18 months of inspections to establish a baseline of Iraq’s WMD programs, something we can judge our progress against. Whether this figure is still viable given the time Iraq has had to bury its programs is very questionable, but let’s just assume it is. This means that we won’t really know what Iraq is and isn’t capable of, probably is and probably isn’t hiding, until around June 2004. The task of actually finding and removing those weapons would still exist. In other words, inspections would take a good number of years. History has shown that when inspections, just the intense focus on Iraq in general, continues for more than just a couple of years, support begins to crumble. We are having difficulty disarming Iraq with support, and it cannot be done without support.

Hans Blix, along with many other inspectors, has pointed out that inspections simply cannot work without Iraqi cooperation. It’s too easy to hide things in a country the size of Iraq. In other words, inspections could offer no guarantee of success regardless of their duration.

So far, the current inspections have gone smoothly. The Iraqis have smiled, they’ve handed over (worthless) documents. They’ve opened doors. Inspectors haven’t had to hang around waiting for the guy with the right key to show up. Process, the “how” of inspections, has not been lacking. But there has been no cooperation on substance, which is crucial.

All of this worthless cooperation has come at gunpoint (the United States’ gun). We cannot increase the threatening rhetoric any more without actually invading Iraq. It’s impossible. If the Iraqis will not cooperate unless compelled to, and if we cannot compel them any more then we currently are, why should we expect any future cooperation? And if effective inspections cannot occur without this cooperation, what sense does it make to push for more inspection?

Hussein has seen too much talk, too many resolutions, to believe a threat from the UN will amount to anything much. As time passes, two things will happen:

1. International support will crumble. Syria, China, and Russia openly broke UN sanctions against Iraq. Syria still does it, every single day. Other countries do so less obviously. There’s no reason to believe that this won’t happen again.
2. It’ll become even more apparent that the UN is toothless. Some bark, no bite. Every time we escalate like this and then drop the ball, we lose credibility. If we continue to give the world the impression that we will not use force, a lot of trouble is going to follow.

So then. We must have inspections, because we must disarm Iraq. To have worthwhile inspections, we must have Iraqi cooperation. We cannot compel Iraqi cooperation with sanctions or simple threat of force. By allowing more time to pass, the support for inspections will only crumble. Logically then, force is the only viable alternative if we wish to disarm Hussein.

The Effect of Invasion on Iraq

Iraq has a population of roughly 24 million. Theoretically, there are 6 million males in Iraq of requisite age to serve in the military. The probable size of Iraq’s military manpower (at least in 1999) was about 450,000. Their air force is negligible, their navy is non-existent.
If we mount an effective psychological campaign, I think we can expect just over half of the regular army to offer little more than a token resistance. The heavy divisions, the better-trained soldiers, are a different story. Like the Republican Guard, they consider themselves professional soldiers. Fighting to the best of their ability is a matter of honor.

What can I say? This will be a war. A few ten thousands of Iraqi soldiers will offer tough resistance. Hussein will try to force urban conflict. Hundreds of invading soldiers will die. A few thousand civilians will die. Hussein will use chemical and biological weapons. It won’t be pretty, because it’s war.

The war will be fodder for terrorists. Everything we do is, even if we do nothing. It’s a foregone conclusion. I don’t even consider it a factor.

The Future of Iraq

A democracy in Iraq? Yes. A Western-style democracy? No.

There is a strong tribal mentality in the Arab world, probably too strong at this point for a Western-style democracy. If individuals cannot see past tribal boundaries, there will be too much natural infighting and power-playing for an effective new nation to rise in Iraq. The situation, I think, calls for a different style democracy. An Arab-style democracy, which takes into account the unit-oriented life in the middle east. I can’t tell you what precise form this would take, but it would be emphasize stronger local governments and less powerful, less intrusive national government.

A strong military presence, preferably from all around the world, would be required for the first few years, but could begin tapering back after about five years. An initial government would necessarily consist of generals, not politicians, although we should begin phasing Iraqis into the government as soon as possible. At the very least, an attempt should be made to gather a council of prominent Iraqis to advise the de facto government.

A stable, post-war Iraq is very desirable. It will cost a lot of money, though Iraq's oil wealth should help relieve the burden. The worst thing we can do is conquer the country and then abandon it within months, or even a couple of years. I don't care if people accuse us of being imperialistic, but in the interest of Iraq, we must maintain a good militaristic presence there for about roughly decade.

Summary

Containment has crumbled. The world's attention span is too short, and there's no reason to believe that the new inspections will hold longer than the last ones. Someone of Saddam Hussein's single-minded zeal is bound to succeed at some point unless he is closely watched (and even then...), but the watchers don't show much long-term interest in their job.

Saddam Hussein's WMD programs have consistently been more developed than intelligence estimates guess, especially where nuclear programs are concerned.

There is no guarantee that inspectors can disarm Iraq, and no evidence that they'll be more than marginally effective. Substantial Iraqi cooperation--essential to effective inspections--is not forthcoming, and will never be.

If Saddam Hussein gets a nuclear weapon, and thirty years of history demonstrate that it is his goal to do so, he will be in a good situation to control a significant percentage of world oil production and to undermine the fragile state of middle eastern affairs.

He does not currently present a threat to the United States or the world, but by the time he does the costs of removing him from power will have risen prohibitively.

Sources

The Threatening Storm - Kenneth Pollack
A Century of Spies - Jeffrey T. Richelson

Hans Blix Security Council reports, January 27th & February 14th & March 7th
Colin Powell's February 5th Security Council report

Many White House, Iraqi, and UN documents
FoxNews.com news stories and resources (WMD Handbook)
CNN.com news stories and resources
Other, less significant, news sites

Countless papers, articles, news stories, and many posts on different forums