Countdown to War

This Wednesday, Secretary of State Colin L. Powell will argue the Bush administration’s case against Iraq to the U.N. Security Council. His task will be to convince skeptics here and abroad that Saddam Hussein retains weapons of mass destruction, has continuing ties to terrorist groups and is in violation of Security Council Resolution 1441’s unequivocal demand that he disarm.

His job will not be easy. More than likely, there will be no “smoking gun.” Instead, Powell’s brief will consist of lots of smoke, powder burns and shell casings. To sell the government’s case, he will use defector and prisoner reports on Hussein’s clandestine programs, some newer finds -- such as Iraq’s illicit import of rocket engines and fuel -- and Baghdad’s ongoing program to frustrate the U.N.’s inspection teams.

But the heart of his brief will remain the U.N.’s own previous reports. Drawn principally from Iraqi documents uncovered in the last set of inspections, they indicate that Baghdad has not fully accounted for large stocks of chemical and biological agents, munitions capable of use for chemical or biological attacks and nuclear weapons-related designs and components. As Powell recently told European newspaper editors, what we have is “a gap” between what Iraqi records say the country has and what it has previously disclosed and destroyed. And while this gap is real enough, it is not something tangible, something you can wrap your hand around, let alone take a picture of.

As a result, there is not likely to be an “Adlai Stevenson moment” -- no dramatic equivalent of the 1962 Security Council session at which Stevenson, the U.S. ambassador to the United Nations, displayed large, overhead photographs of the Soviet missiles being deployed in Cuba.

The reason why is pretty straightforward. In the years following the Cuban missile crisis, Moscow schooled its allies and friends, including Iraq, in the fine art of concealment and deception. As technologically advanced as U.S. reconnaissance satellites are, they can’t see inside buildings or underground. Nor can they even hint at what is going on inside a structure if your adversary knows you are looking for certain telltale signs of illicit activity, such as unusual power sources or ventilation systems.

Moreover, the targets U.S. intelligence looks for are not in many cases large, overt objects like ballistic missiles. Instead, the hunt is for chemical and biological labs that can be housed in a few nondescript rooms or even medium-size RVs. Unless you have other intelligence -- human or intercepted communications -- that tells you where to look, it is virtually impossible to find those labs in a country about the size of California.

There is always the possibility that the U.S. does have intelligence that, if released, would dramatically alter the character of the debate. But the decision to use that intelligence is not as easy as it might seem at first. Once used, how that intelligence was collected will likely become apparent to Iraq’s own intelligence organizations (and those of other adversaries), which, in turn, will then move to shut off that source. The price for revealing such capabilities can be high.

One famous case was the British government’s decision to reveal, in 1927, that it had been intercepting and reading Soviet encrypted cables in order to justify breaking off diplomatic relations with Moscow. (The cables showed Russian officials stationed in London being directed by Moscow to conduct clandestine activities aimed at causing major labor unrest in Britain.) In response, Moscow changed its codes and tightened up its security. London thus sacrificed the only real window it had on the communist regime’s strategies and activities. It was not until the late 1940s that the West again began to read encoded Soviet communications -- too late to prevent the damage done by Soviet intelligence’s penetration of the U.S. and British intelligence services, the U.S. and British governments and our nuclear weapons program.

Nor is this only an old problem. To take a recent example: It appears that blame for the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks was quickly assigned to Osama bin Laden and company based on intercepts of mobile phone conversations. But once that became public, it has proved extremely difficult to track down Al Qaeda’s leaders precisely because they are fully aware of the fact that we have the capacity to intercept and locate their phones.

Is there similar intelligence for Iraq? Maybe. But what is the cost for releasing it? Do we lose a chance to hit clandestine chemical and biological weapon sites with a surprise strike at the war’s start? If so, will British and American troops be put at greater risk? Or, upon release of some other intelligence about Hussein’s program to deceive U.N. inspectors, will we lose our window on the decisions and whereabouts of the Iraqi leadership? And, if conflict does come, does this prevent us from bringing the war to a quick and decisive end by eliminating Hussein and his cronies?

Complicating this decision will be the fact that, in the absence of a smoking gun, much of the case put forward by Powell will be either circumstantial or disputable at some level. In turn, we can expect many in the media to air those doubts in an effort to be balanced in their reporting. But balanced accounts -- “on the one hand, on the other” -- are not necessarily objective accounts if the overall case is not allowed to speak for itself. If something is an 80% certainty, treating it as though it is a 50-50 proposition is misleading.

There will be those who will want to extend the period for inspections until either a smoking gun is found or all remaining doubts are settled. If this were an honest effort to get at the bottom of things in Iraq, it might be justifiable. But that is not the case. As the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace pointed out in a report last fall, inspections of this sort would require far more intrusive efforts and a virtual army of inspectors, none of which Powell’s likely challengers are arguing for. The truth is, these skeptics are interested in extending inspections not because they want to find Iraq’s weapons but because they want to stop the U.S. and its allies from taking action militarily, come hell or high water.

In short, Powell’s visit to the United Nations will be no picnic. However, he does have two strong cards to play that could make all the difference.

The first is the secretary of State himself. As every student of rhetoric knows, the credibility of who is making the argument is often as important as the argument itself. Whatever Powell’s status within the inner circles of the administration, he is widely respected by precisely those in the rest of the world who are most skeptical of President Bush’s Iraq policy. They will be hard-pressed to dismiss Powell as the tool of a “cowboy” president.

Second, the yardstick for judging whether Iraq is violating its U.N. obligations does not rest on proving beyond a shadow of a doubt that Hussein has weapons of mass destruction. Rather, the core issue before the Security Council is whether Iraq is actively cooperating in disarming itself or proving that it has destroyed the weapons it previously had. Under Resolution 1441, the job of the inspectors is to verify and monitor Iraq’s disarmament, not engage in a game of hide-and-seek with Baghdad.

On that front, the evidence of Iraq’s lack of full cooperation is not in dispute. It has continually frustrated interviews with scientists, rejected required surveillance flights over Iraq, provided a completely inadequate accounting of its past weapons programs and created an army of anti-inspectors whose task, day in and day out, is to hide material, papers and weapons from the U.N. inspectors.

Come Wednesday, skeptics of U.S. policy will probably argue that Powell has not provided the smoking gun that would justify taking action against Iraq. Under the terms of the Security Council’s own resolution, he has every right to turn the question back to them and ask: What proof do you have that Iraq has disarmed?