IF SADDAM HUSSEIN IS BUILDING BIOLOGICAL WEAPONS, IS THE UNITED STATES THE LIKELY TARGET?

(Washington, D.C.): A report released yesterday appears to
confirm the worst: Saddam Hussein has secreted away at least
17 tons of material that can be used to breed bacteria which can,
in turn, be used in biological weapons (BW). If the sheer
volume of this concealed activity is any guide to the size of the
Iraqi BW program, it suggests that Saddam is contemplating the
murder of large numbers — perhaps millions — of people. If so,
the question occurs: Who is the likely target of such a genocidal
campaign?

A Sign of Things to Come — The World Trade Center
Bombing?

An unhappy answer to that question may be found in the
wreckage of the World Trade Center following its 1993 bombing. An
analysis of that bombing performed by Dr. Laurie Mylroie — a
renowned Middle East expert, best-selling author and
distinguished member of the Center’s Board of Advisors —
indicates that the attack on the World Trade Center may have
been perpetrated by Saddam Hussein as an act of revenge for
his defeat in the Gulf war. Highlights of Dr. Mylroie’s findings
include the following:

• Sometime in June 1992, Iraqi intelligence learned of a
  bush-league campaign of twelve pipe-bombings being
  plotted by followers of the New Jersey-based Islamic
  radical, Sheik Omar. Saddam’s operatives took over,
  targeting the very symbol of U.S. capitalism and urban
  civilization — New York’s twin-towered, skyscraping
  World Trade Center (WTC) — for a far more devastating
  attack.
• The act was planned, moreover, in such a way as to
  deceive the American people and their government into
  holding the original plotters — and their presumed
  sponsors in Iran — responsible for the bombing, not
  Iraq. In this way, Saddam could satisfy his
  culture’s tradition of exacting revenge against an enemy.
  Better still, from his point of view, that enemy would be
  induced to retaliate against Iraq’s most dangerous
  regional foe, Iran.
• The bomb used in the World Trade Center was intended to
  employ metal additives dramatically to boost its
  explosive power. Had it been properly positioned and
  detonated according to plan, it could have toppled one of
  the World Trade Center’s towers into the other, killing
  tens of thousands of people and causing incalculable
  damage in lower Manhattan.
• The bomb also apparently was designed to vaporize
  cyanide gas — which, if distributed through the tower’s
  ventilation system, would have assured massive casualties
  throughout the bombed structure.

Given the Clinton Administration’s failure to date to address
the evidence of Saddam’s involvement in the terror attack on the
World Trade Center, it seems clear that U.S. intelligence,
counter-terrorist and law-enforcement agencies still cannot come
to grips with what one noted Middle East expert, Douglas Feith,
calls “strategic crime” — acts of state-sponsored
terrorism that are a hybrid of warfare and criminal activity.

Indeed, these incidents tend to fall between America’s
bureaucratic cracks. For example, the prosecutors in New York
have appeared unaware of the grounds for concern about Iraqi
involvement. Counter-terrorist officials in Washington seem
oblivious to the extent of the evidence of such involvement
developed in the original World Trade Center trial. And
policy-makers in the Clinton Administration seem determined to
ignore the possibility of Saddam’s role, lest they be obliged to do
something about it.

Dr. Mylroie believes that there may well be other agents
of Iraqi intelligence still at large in this country (known as
“sleepers”) waiting to carry out far more deadly acts
of revenge against the United States. In this regard, she
notes that on 27 September 1994, as Iraqi troops tested American
resolve by preparing a new assault against Kuwait, Saddam Hussein
declared: “We will open the storehouses of the
universe” against the United States. Two days later, Babil
— a newspaper in Iraq owned by Saddam’s son, Uday — amplified,
saying: “Does the United States realize the meaning of
opening the stores of the world with the will of Iraqi
people?…Does it realize the meaning of every Iraqi becoming a
missile that can cross to countries and cities?”

The Biological Warfare Threat

The recent chemical warfare attack against the Tokyo
subway system is a vivid reminder of the acute vulnerability of
civilian populations to relatively low-tech weapons of mass
destruction. If Saddam Hussein has indeed amassed a vast
stockpile of deadly biological agents, he would have the
potential to inflict a level of damage against the people of the
United States that would make the recent havoc in Japan seem like
child’s play. And if Dr. Mylroie is correct in her judgment that
Saddam is determined to exact his revenge for Desert Storm, the
question is not whether such an attack will come — but when.
(See the attached op.ed. article
she published in the Boston Globe on 28 March 1995.)

The Bottom Line

Long before Desert Storm, the Center for Security Policy was
among those who believed that the removal of Saddam Hussein and
his ruling clique from power must be an urgent priority for the
United States. It was apparent that economic sanctions would not
accomplish that objective (or the more narrow one of liberating
Kuwait) before the Gulf war; they certainly will not do so today.

The Ekeus report makes clear that the risk of Saddam’s
continued rule in Iraq is a mortal danger to American lives and
interests. For some time, U.S. intelligence has been
expecting the Butcher of Baghdad to lash out this spring if the
sanctions regime against Iraq is not relaxed. Presumably the
Security Council will refuse to agree to ease or end sanctions in
light of the latest U.N. findings about the Iraqi BW program.
Saddam’s next, murderous attack could come at any time — within
weeks or months, whenever he feels he is going down.

The Center for Security Policy believes that four steps
require urgent action:

1. The United States must utilize every resource at its
   disposal to effect the immediate elimination of Saddam
   Hussein and his police state apparatus. This will
   require Washington to end, once and for all, its
   ambivalence concerning the demise of the “devil we
   know.” It will also require a sustained campaign of
   covert and overt action designed to give the people of
   Iraq an opportunity to liberate themselves from Saddam’s
   bloody misrule.
2. The Clinton Administration must accord vastly greater
   priority to defending the American people against
   biological warfare. This will entail giving more
   resources and attention to such activities as BW-related
   intelligence collection, reconnaissance and detection,
   individual and collective protection, inoculation and
   treatment, etc. It will also demand an end to foolish
   utopian delusions about verifiably banning biological or
   chemical weapons from the face of the earth. href=”#N_1_”>⁽¹⁾ This effort
   will not be wasted — even if the BW threat from Saddam
   Hussein is neutralized — inasmuch as the Russians and
   many other nations are believed to be engaged in
   offensive biological warfare programs in violation of
   international law.
3. The congressional oversight committees should hold
   urgent hearings — at least some of which are open to the
   public — to inquire what the U.S. intelligence community
   has done to explore the extent of Saddam Hussein’s
   involvement in the World Trade Center bombing. If, as
   appears to be the case, no such intelligence
   investigation has been performed in parallel with the
   criminal prosecution (in contrast to other terrorist
   incidents such as the Pan Am 103 bombing), why not? Not
   the least of the reasons for doing such an inquiry would
   be that it might shed light on the ways in which the next
   blow from Saddam might be struck.
4. Since Saddam Hussein has evidently squirrelled away a
   number of ballistic missiles with which he might try to
   deliver his biological (or, for that matter, chemical or
   nuclear) weapons against U.S. forces overseas, it is
   folly to remain without competent defenses against such
   missiles. As things stand now, America’s only fielded
   anti-missile system — the Patriot — could, if used
   against missiles carrying biological or chemical agents,
   have the unintended and extremely undesirable effect of
   distributing such agents over a larger area than would
   otherwise be the case. Defending the United States and
   its forces and allies overseas against such an attack
   must be accomplished at the earliest possible moment.

(1) See in this regard the Center’s recent
Decision Briefs entitled, 30 Seconds Under Tokyo:
Subway Gas Attack Shows Futility, Folly of Trying to ‘Rid the
World of Chemical Weapons’ (No. 95-D 17,
20 March 1995) and Heed Not Clinton’s Reckless ‘Call to Arms
Control’ (No. 95-D 07, 31
January 1995).