Huge Intelligence Gap Revealed by Iraq : How to dispose of all those weapons U.S. didn’t know about

Unexpectedly and disturbingly, Iraq appears to have emerged from its military defeat at the hands of the U.S.-led coalition with a huge chemical warfare arsenal still intact. In an accounting demanded by the U.N. Security Council, Iraq says it retains more than 11,000 chemical warheads for bombs and artillery shells, nearly 10,000 of which contain nerve gas, as well as more than 1,000 tons of liquid nerve and chemical agents stored in vats. Baghdad also has chagrined high U.S. Air Force officials by revealing that 28 of its fixed Scud missile launching sites in western Iraq remain operational, along with 52 Scuds. Further, Iraq says that contrary to the confident belief of the wartime allied military command, 30 of these missiles can in fact carry chemical warheads.

The accuracy of these numbers will soon be tested when a special 25-member commission appointed by U.N. Secretary General Javier Perez de Cuellar begins to inventory and supervise the destruction of Iraq’s chemical and nerve weapons. Meanwhile, U.S. officials are left to ponder the grim and chilling significance of the Iraqi report.

Saddam Hussein can of course be expected to lie and dissimulate when it comes to disclosing the extent of his nuclear and biological weapons capabilities, and American officials are convinced he is doing just that when he denies having any such programs. But no point is served if Iraq overstates how many chemical weapons and Scud missiles it still has, especially since U.N. inspectors will soon be able to count for themselves. Take it as a given, then, that Iraq came out of the war with at least 11,131 gas and nerve-agent warheads intact. What conclusions should be drawn?

For starters, it’s clear that U.S. intelligence agencies woefully underestimated the extent of Iraq’s chemical weapons stocks and production capabilities. That may be a shock, but it’s not a surprise. For decades, the United States has stinted on its Third World intelligence gathering efforts, devoting most of its human and electronic resources to Soviet bloc countries. U.S. intelligence agencies are still trying to play catch-up in the Third World, a difficult task that is made all the harder when the target is a highly regimented police state like Iraq. It’s now clear that what was known about Iraq’s chemical weapons arsenal was not just inadequate but could have come close to being disastrously so.

It’s also clear that the relentless allied air offensive against Scud missile sites, while it may eventually have suppressed that threat, did not eliminate it. Part of the reason is that the military planners simply had no good idea of how many missiles and launching sites Iraq had. More to the point, even the enormously impressive electronic wizardry the United States brought to the theater of operations proved incapable of pinpointing all of the fixed Scud launching sites. The implications are deeply disturbing. Had only one chemically armed Scud fired from western Iraq fallen on Israel, the political course of the war could have been drastically altered.

Ahead lies the mammoth and dangerous challenge of disposing of Iraq’s chemical weapons--those it admits having as well as others it may still be trying to hide. To all their other woes Iraqis must now add the threat many could face as tons of toxic agents are destroyed around the country.

That is a technological problem for specialists working under U.N. auspices. U.S. intelligence agencies meanwhile know they have a problem of their own. Tens of thousands of bombing raids failed to wipe out Iraq’s chemical weapons stocks or Scud launchers, primarily, it must be assumed, because solid information about their extent and their locations simply wasn’t available. This defines an intelligence gap that cries out to be closed, because in another time, against another enemy, we may not be so lucky.