BY ROHAN PEARCE
US Secretary of State Colin Powell made headlines on March 9 when he announced that Iraq's unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) program — pilotless "drones" — were the ever-elusive "smoking gun" that proved Iraq was concealing banned weapons.
Iraq's UAV projects were included in a report submitted to the UN Security Council on March 6 by UN weapons inspectors in Iraq. Contrary to US charges, Iraq's December 7 declaration to the Security Council did include information about the development of two new types of drone (which have been likened to model planes powered by two whipper-snipper engines by journalists who have seen the craft).
On March 10, White House spokesperson Ari Fleischer argued that the drones represented a "threat" to US troops. He also claimed that they could be disassembled and transported to the US, where they could be used to deliver "weapons of mass destruction".
However, according to British academic Glenn Rangwala: "How Iraq could possibly transport planes fitted with a mechanism for dispensing chemical or biological agents into the US is left unexplained, and would appear to be unexplainable."
Victoria Samson, an expert from the Center for Defense Information, a US think-tank, told the March 2 Chicago Tribune that even the massively more advanced US Predator UAVs have a "high crash rate" and "are slow aircraft and relatively easy [to shoot down]".
Claims made by the US and British governments that Iraq retains pre-1991 stocks of VX nerve agent have likewise fallen to pieces. A January 1999 report by UN weapons inspectors confirmed that there is evidence to support Iraq's claim that its VX was destroyed. The report noted, however, that inspectors were not able to absolutely prove that all of Iraq's VX stocks were destroyed. Iraq has since provided more information, most recently on March 14, to prove its unilateral destruction of the nerve agent did take place.
A dossier released in September by the International Institute for Strategic Studies also noted that even if Iraq did retain stocks of the agent: "Any VX produced by Iraq before 1991 is likely to have decomposed over the past decade."
Claims that Iraq managed to weaponise VX are also doubtful. Although UN inspectors claimed they found traces of VX on missile warheads in 1998, Rangwala notes that "further tests on the same material from two other laboratories 'found no nerve agent degradation products'".
[Glenn Rangwala's research is available at <http://middleeastreference.org.uk>.]
From Green Left Weekly, March 19, 2003.
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