Why does the US continue to ignore Baghdad’s threats?

By: Laurie Mylroie
The Boston Globe , March 28, 1995

The prospect of Iran acquiring nuclear weapons in five years rightly exercises American officials.
But there is a more immediate danger of no less magnitude — Saddam Hussein’s biological agents.
He may well use them to force the lifting of sanctions if sanctions really start to threaten his hold
on power.

“When people reach the verge of collective death, they will be able to spread death to all…”

“When one realizes that death is one’s inexorable fate, there remains nothing to deter one from
taking the most risky steps to influence the course of events.”

Such threats appeared daily in Iraq’s government-controlled press from Sept. 27 through Oct. 12,
1994. The last such threat spoke explicitly of the use of biological and chemical agents, “if the
Iraqi regime realizes that the United States is after its head.” The threat appeared in an Arabic
paper in London, affording plausible deniability. But it is unlikely that the paper, al-Ouds al-Arabi, funded by and close to the Iraqis, would have raised such a possibility without official
direction.

The US bureaucracies that deal with Iraq were slow to pick up Baghdad’s threats. And when
they did, they failed to understand their seriousness. The bureaucracies first suggested that Iraq
was pressuring the UN weapons inspectors on the eve of a Security Council sanctions review.
Then, after a crisis that began with the US announcement Oct. 7 that Iraqi forces were on
Kuwait’s border, the bureaucracies reinterpreted the threats as the threat to invade Kuwait.

But that was not what the Iraqi press said. Its clear import was terrorism on a massive scale:
“Does the United States understand…the meaning of every Iraqi becoming a missile that can cross
to countries and cities?”

Since the January 1993 shootings outside the CIA, the United States has been the object of a
number of terrorist attacks and attempted attacks — most recently, the assassination of two US
diplomats in Karachi. The Justice Department has been the lead agency investigating the
terrorism, but it is oriented to trying and prosecuting individuals, not determining state
sponsorship. It has missed Saddam’s hand in the terror and blinded the national security
bureaucracies to the threat Baghdad poses.

In February 1993, Saddam tried to topple New York’s tallest tower onto its twin amid a cloud of
cyanide gas, or so the judge charged at the defendants’ sentencing. If the national security
bureaucracies understood that, they would understand that Saddam is far more vengeful and
blood-thirsty than they appreciate. They would understand that the Iraqi threats made from Sept.
27 to Oct. 12 are probably about something very serious.

Baghdad continues to hide its biological weapons program from the UN weapons inspectors. Iraq
denies it has one but has provided no reasonable account of what it has done with the huge
quantities of material it imported for such a program. Moreover, Iraq’s former head of military
intelligence reports that Iraq has more than 200 anthrax bombs and the means to deliver them.

Any Iraqi attempt to try to force the lifting of sanctions through the use of biological agents
would probably begin with terrorism in America. A terrible disease would break out in a major
city, but there would be little to link it to Iraq or any other sponsor. The suspicion would exist
that such an epidemic was unnatural, and perhaps the administration might recall the threats Iraq
made last fall.

But in the absence of hard evidence linking such a disaster to Iraq, would the administration act?
What would it do in the face of the prospect of more epidemics in more American cities? Agree
to lift sanctions? Unleash Armageddon? It would not be difficult to decimate the populations of
Israel and Kuwait, concentrated as they are.

Saddam is the most brutal figure in power today, responsible, through his wars against his
neighbors and reign of terror at home, for the deaths of more innocent people than any other man
alive. The Iraqi press has told America, “We will do something very nasty if you keep sanctions
on to the point where the regime is at risk.” If anyone were to use weapons of mass destruction
against civilians, Saddam is a prime candidate. We have seen in Tokyo what havoc can be
wreaked from such weapons. Why do we ignore Baghdad’s threats?

We may well be on the verge of making the same kind of mistake many people made in the ’30s,
when their fear of communism blinded them to the danger posed by fascism. A justified
opposition to Iran and Islamic fundamentalism cannot be permitted to blind us to the more
immediate peril posed by Saddam.