Good evening and welcome to the Lisa to the six iteration of our lecture series Understanding Analysing Iraq after the disastrous 2003 invasion occupation. I am absolutely delighted to be able to introduce my friends and former colleague will take over is a professor of political science at the University of Oslo.
And it's not really here. The first slice of a really exciting project which is finished the first time, is going to be hopefully coming out soon, looking at the lead up to the invasion of Iraq and in particular looking at a puzzle that suddenly I have a generation of people who was politicised by by the invasion I thought about for a long time, which is why doesn't Saddam come clean when the writing's on the wall, that the invasion is going to occur?
So Wilfred is really the best placed person to speak to this issue. She's one of the leading experts on weapons of mass destruction, international security in the world, and she's previously the author of The Physics of Displacement of University Press. She's published in basically every major international Security and International relations journal. I think today we're going to get a paper that was just published in International Security.
We need the premium outlet for this kind of work called The Cheetah's Dilemma Iraq, WMD and the 2003 War. I invited you to join me and welcoming Wilfred for what is, I'm sure, going to be a really exciting talk. Thank you very much for that very kind introduction. It's wonderful to see a former colleague and to meet so many new friends. So thank you so much for having me. So this project is part of really my my main project as an academic.
I think when I was doing my master's thesis at The O.C. and Iraq Invasion was about to happen. And some of my feeling has stayed with me both as a theme that that merits research and also as a scenario where exciting new sources have kept emerging in the past two decades. So this is very, very much a moment where I'm excited to talk about some of my findings, some of my conclusions, and to discuss those with with all of you.
So I'm very happy to be here this evening. So as those of you who were around in 2003 may recall the case for the invasion, this infamous slam dunk case was based on Iraq having no actively pursuing weapons of mass destruction, WMD for short. And that was taken as the the safe threats in making the case for a war after the invasion. However, there were no such weapons, and that actually generally shocked many of the soldiers and inspectors, and that went to Iraq after 2003.
And it raised a big puzzle what had happened, in the words of one of their senior inspectors, David Kay. We were all wrong when he told the US Congress. It's important to stress that it wasn't just the states that wanted to go and go to war against Iraq, who believed there might be weapons or programs to produce weapons of mass destruction.
This was a belief that was held by all the countries in Europe and also in the Middle East, and I think was the belief that had set in during the 1990s when there were U.N. weapons inspections taking place to ensure that Iraq disarmed of these weapons as it was ordered to do by the U.N. Resolution 687, which ended the 1991 Gulf War.
Iraq's behaviour during the 1990s, its apparent resistance to these inspections, its reluctance dragging its feet, constantly reinforced a view very early on that Iraq's basic modus operandi was to cheat and retreats. And this year became entrenched as early as late 1991. I have found amongst the inspectors and the key countries on the U.N. Security Council, and there wasn't really anything Iraq could do that could convince countries otherwise.
So the story really begins in April 1991 with Resolution 687, a cease fire resolution ending the 1951 Gulf War. This resolution is sometimes called the mother of all resolutions. It's large. It contains many, many different aspects. But at the core of the resolution is the demands that Iraq verifiably and completely disarms those weapons of mass destruction completely and verifiably. He comes here completely is difficult to define in practice.
In many ways, this cease fire resolution can be compared to the missile treaty of Germany to disarm after the First World War. And it has it treats Iraq effectively as a defeated state, even though it's a cease fire resolution. According to Ambassador Tom Pickering, who was the U.S. ambassador at the Security Council overseeing the drafting of this resolution.
It treated Iraq as a defeated state with no sovereign rights of resistance, meaning that the inspectors had the right to go everywhere and look at everything. Naturally, the Iraqi authorities did not like this. They were concerned that amongst the inspectors there might be others or there might be opportunities for intelligence services to wiretap and piggyback systems that were established in Iraq. So they were constantly pushing back against this expansive rights of of access.
At the same time, in 1991, Iraq was in a terrible shape after the war. It was clear to senior Iraqi officials that the extensive sanctions that were imposed when Iraq had invaded Kuwait in 1990 and posed a threat to regime survival, as senior officials such as Tariq Aziz, often foreign minister, sometimes deputy prime minister, told his senior colleagues in late 1991, Iraq is collapsing. The legal institutions, the police, everything is eroding.
If you have any ideas how we can get rid of these sanctions, please let me know. Because in reality, Iraq is is failing, as you suggest. So getting rid of the sanctions was essential. And this resolution provided an avenue for this by set by setting out a path whereby if Iraq completely and verifiably disarmed of these weapons, the Security Council could lift the sanctions. That sounds like a straightforward arrangement.
Of course it wasn't. The resolution was designed in such a way that there was no automatic way but with Iraq's compliance, its disarmament, along with other areas that the resolution identified and lifting the sanctions. And so it meant that the Security Council, where many of the states that had gone to war against Iraq in 1991 would decide whether Iraq had sufficiently complied and sanctions could be lifted.
So this was a difficult situation, of course, for Iraq in deciding how much to cooperate and how much to comply. To what extent would it hand over weapons and capabilities that, according to the experiences and perspectives of senior Iraqi officials, had played a crucial role in getting the war between Iran and Iraq? Chemical weapons were used on a large scale, and, according to the Iraqi officials, have been essential for their survival.
So to hand over these weapons and completely and verifiably would submit to monitoring of this was was a real security challenge for Iraq. And if there was no guarantee of sanctions being lifted in return, you have a real dilemma. And this frames the dilemma that I call the chief of staff, that which resulted from Iraq's initial stumbling want to say and in tackling this this situation.
So hopefully you can see here, I'm reminded read what Saddam Hussein himself said after he was captured in late 2003 when he was repeatedly debriefed as a as the Americans quoted about a number of things, but most notably his weapons of mass destruction and why there weren't any to be found. So Saddam Hussein insisted to his increasingly frustrated American counterparts debrief were that there were no such weapons and that Iraq had already sent this in the 1990s and provided documentation,
but that no one had believed them. But here Saddam is for once acknowledging a mistake. That didn't happen very often. Here. He acknowledges that Iraq made a mistake by destroying some weapons. And here he's talking about chemical weapons and biological weapons without U.N. supervision. And when questioned as to whether Iraq also made a mistake regarding failure to provide complete disclosure initially and throughout the inspection process,
Hussein responded, That's a very good question. I also think that's a very, very good question. And Saddam Hussein never answered it. He only said it was a good question. So it is been my task to try and provide some answers based on the sources that have become available since the 2003 invasion. And the good news, I suppose, is that there is a lot to work with. There is really an enormous amount of source material coming from different sources.
One is the captured records, and that's got them now somewhere in limbo in the United States system, but hopefully will emerge. And that I have was able to consult before the after holding them shut down. But the other sources that I have collected include the personal archives of many senior Iraqi scientists and officials who were involved in the U.N. disarmament inspection process and also their U.N. counterparts.
So through these sources, I have been able to to really look behind the scenes at the discussions between senior Iraqi officials regarding how much to disclose in terms of information about their weapons, how much to cooperate with U.N. inspectors when they were really not sure whether cooperation would be rewarded or not. And to get a sense of how this played out in doing the implementation process at various levels of this of this vast state apparatus.
And what has emerged quite clearly from from these sources is that they were really two important dynamics going on that I think we're not sufficiently understood, certainly not prior to 2003. The first is what I call a change of government, which is how much to reveal in terms of possibly information itself, incriminating information in this case, such as development testing and use of chemical and biological weapons on political prisoners, acts of genocide and so on and so forth.
When the reward continues to be elusive, when the sanctions are lifted, and even though you keep scaling up the disclosures. On the other hand, if you don't cooperate, you're likely to experience severe punishments, possibly even more. So this dilemma, I find, is central in the discussions between Iraqi regime officials throughout this process, and especially at key turning points in 2002 and 2003.
The other dynamics that I think surprised me at least and was likely a surprise to many observers who were looking at Iraq prior to 2003 was how severe the implementation problems were. So when Saddam Hussein and his senior officials decided to scale up cooperation to give the U.N. inspectors everything they asked for, which ultimately they did and their staff wouldn't do it.
And so there are examples in the sources of Saddam's senior ministers spending hours in their bureaucracies, pleading with people, saying, yes, we actually want you to cooperate. This is a genuine order. These do it. If not, there will be war.
Regardless of such pleading with, we find numerous examples of orders not being followed and even worse perhaps, of individuals hiding valuable documents, designs of centrifuges and things like that that were precisely what the inspectors were looking for and that they were hiding them even in their own gardens, in some cases for personal profit motives, in some cases waiting for the regime change they thought was increasingly likely.
So there are all kinds of problems that really sort of cuts against this this narrative of Iraq as a of an authoritarian state that was ruled by Saddam personally. And so what I find is there was a lot that didn't work the way that I wanted to. And in fact, one of his key problems was not only that his subordinates didn't do what they were told, but that his senior officials didn't even believe him when he said, we have no weapons.
So there's a lot going on in these sources, and I'm happy to talk about some of these things in my remarks today, and I'll share some examples of these sources as well. Hopefully you'll be as excited about them as I am.
So starting in the beginning, after the 1991 Gulf War, it's it's perhaps difficult to imagine just how extensive the damage was and how difficult it was for Iraqi officials to begin to respond to this cease fire resolution, which demanded that they admit inspectors within a few weeks. And for the inspectors, once they arrived, how difficult and dangerous the conditions were on the ground.
So in the first few weeks, there were a lot of strategic deliberations going on at the senior levels of the Iraqi regime regarding how much information should they provide the U.N. inspectors with in their initial declarations, their written statements about what they had, what kinds of weapons, what kinds of facilities, and also how welcoming should they be in terms of granting the inspectors access on the ground.
And one of the key architects of Iraq's initial response to this ceasefire resolution was Hussein Kamel, one of Saddam's son in law, who I think we can say was the son in law from [INAUDIBLE], because he really, really created a lot of problems throughout course of this entire saga.
But this was very, very powerful. And he was seen as someone who was, of course, not equal to Saddam in the regime, but he was certainly above many of the other senior ministers and was able to largely do whatever he wanted because everyone assumed Saddam Hussein that whatever he said he would do. So the same cargo was sitting down with the senior WMD scientists crafting a response to the 687 resolution that scientists recommended,
just coming clean immediately. They thought the U.N. inspectors will have unimpeded access. We can't hide these fast programs with thousands of employees and large infrastructure, and most of which was clearly identifiable, at least when it came to the nuclear weapons program. So why not just come clean and be done with it? Hussein Kamel disagrees.
He considered a range of options from full cooperation to no cooperation, but landed on an approach whereby the Iraqis would only disclose what they thought the outside world already knew when it came to their weapons of mass destruction programs. And not being very forthcoming in response to questions just answered very narrowly and that the U.N. inspectors figure it out essentially.
So this approach meant that there was a lot that the outside world did not know about Iraq's WMD programs, certainly when it came to the biological weapons program and the nuclear weapons program, because Iraq had used chemical weapons and missiles during the war against Iran. The outside world had a fairly updated view of those capabilities. It wasn't really feasible to hide too much of that.
But Hussein Kamel ordered that all the traces of the programs that were lesser known should be hidden in the few weeks prior to the arrival of the U.N. inspectors. And this led to hectic activity on the ground. You can imagine the scale of this challenge within a very short timeframe to find these alternative and, you know, purposes for all these big facilities, find alternative explanations for all of these activities.
And the Iraqi intelligence services were writing memos complaining about how difficult this was and how it wasn't really feasible to keep up this facade in the months ahead. At this point, they imagined that the inspections would last months and not years, but even months was a big headache for the Iraqi intelligence agencies to figure out way to alternative stories for these capabilities.
And so even as the U.N. inspectors were arriving, Iraqi intelligence agencies were organising this cover up effectively and did the best they could. But in some cases, when the inspectors started arriving at the sites, they were trucking out documents through the back door. So it really was a last minute operation and unsurprisingly, the inspectors caught on to it very quickly. So I mentioned David's case, and here you can see him wearing a light blue cap and sunglasses.
He was one of the first inspectors to arrive in Iraq in the late spring of 1991. And what he found was the most blatant cover up operation that you could possibly imagine. So in a series of inspections that he and his team uncovered, a convoy of 85 trucks loaded with large pieces of equipment that could only be used for a nuclear weapons program. And they even took pictures of this convoy as it was making its way away from that particular base where he was conducting his truck.
So if there was ever a smoking gun in this, this is it. And there was absolutely no way that this could be explained away because the equipment photographed on these trucks, it had no other purpose than a nuclear weapons program. So this led to a lot of raised eyebrows, shall we say, in the Security Council immediately sent a delegation to Baghdad to ensure Iraq's cooperation in and in the future.
And this is a memo, a handwritten memo from Hans Blix, who was at that point the head of the International Atomic Energy Agency. And these are his notes from meetings with senior Iraqi officials where they are demanding immediate access and unimpeded access for the inspectors. And Hans Blix was trying really trying to give his Iraqi counterparts a way out by saying things like perhaps you misinterpreted this resolution,
perhaps he interpreted the resolution differently from us. And so you didn't have to declare any nuclear equipment. But if you did, we can work this out. And here's the way forward. And, you know, the diplomatic suite thought that this would be a great way out of this very dicey situation with a lot of angry members on the Security Council calling for calling for action to punish Iraq.
He was disappointed to learn that the Iraqis weren't really interested in this kind of solution and that they just insisted that there was absolutely no nuclear weapons program in Iraq and they had no idea what he was talking about. So he left a few days later very, very pessimistic and curious, as you reported back to the IAEA, that he couldn't understand why why Iraq would not just come clean, given this obvious evidence and why they continued with this stonewalling.
So here is an example of some of the items that the Iraqis were trucking away and hiding in the desert. That's the U.N. inspectors found shortly after. And this was a real coup for for the inspectors because it was intractable evidence of a nuclear weapons program. And there was no, as I mentioned earlier, no other purpose for for any of this equipment. The Iraqi response was still denial.
And here's an example of one of the numerous statements that the Iraqi embassy in Vienna made where they're starting to sort of starting to acknowledge, but not really saying that, well, maybe there were some activities going on. Scientists do their own thing and but we have no idea it wasn't our fault anyway.
So they were still trying to create a distance between the evidence of a nuclear weapons program and the political authorities because of their concern about what the consequences would be in terms of the sanctions, but also the prospect of. Military strikes against the regime. Eventually, though, within a few days they relented and admitted that there had in fact been a nuclear weapons program. And this was the first of many such and missions where the inspectors found hard evidence.
The Iraqis admitted to capabilities and activities across these WMD programs. And this very much reinforced this early impression that there was always cheats and retreats. So this is what a smoking gun looks like when it's recorded by the IAEA. So this is a detailed accounting of of Iraq's many sins and failures of mission.
And so it was something that pains the IAEA a great deal to acknowledge the scale of the Iraqi nuclear weapons program, that I'd actually come quite close to a breakthrough and producing nuclear weapons at the time of the invasion of Kuwait. The IAEA, of course, was conducting inspections in Iraq precisely to provide assurance to other countries that there was no nuclear weapons program.
Well, hey presto, there clearly was. And this led to an overhaul of the IAEA inspection system leading to the additional protocol that is now applied in very many countries that provides much more access to inspectors on the ground. So that's one of the sort of direct consequences of what transpires in Iraq.
But these this shocking discovery of a cover up in action where, you know, what was being covered up was a vast nuclear weapons program that had come much closer to success than most countries had suspected prior to this war, led to a number of conclusions in, amongst others, the CIA. And this is a part of a document from the CIA in October of 1991. I'd like you to have a look at it. And so this is based on the events of that summer and a cover up of the nuclear weapons program.
And the CIA states here that this pattern of non-compliance to U.N. Security Council resolutions almost certainly is driven more by a desire to preserve future options than it is by a fear of revealing past indiscretions. This judgement is quite sensible, but it is a judgement that becomes entrenched. It is a view that becomes entrenched and is not seriously revisited at any point afterwards.
So what happens in the years between now for 1991 and 1995 is that Iraq gradually eases off those efforts to conceal information about its capabilities and programs. But this judgement is not affected in any way by Iraq's increasing efforts to demonstrate compliance. And so this is I think it's quite essential to show how early this this use became entrenched.
And the document continues to say that Iraq's continuing efforts to prevent the destruction or removal of its remaining nuclear infrastructure and our assessment of Saddam's tenacity and his desire for nuclear weapons lead us to conclude that Iraq intends to finish the weapons effort it started at least a decade ago. So continuing on the same theme, this this view becomes entrenched not only in intelligence agencies, but also in several governments, including those on the Security Council.
Over the next few years, however, Iraq tries to scale up its compliance, leading to a judgement in 1992 by the U.N. inspectors, saying that at this point, Iraq no longer poses a threat to the region in terms of its weapons of mass destruction. What is left is essentially accounting, accounting for how many weapons Iraq had for all the materials that went into the past programs and making sure that there's nothing hidden.
But this is an accounting. It's not a threat to international peace and security. So that view is communicated behind the scenes by the U.N. inspectors to to Washington and to London, along with a suggestion that perhaps Iraq's, you know, behaviour is driven by its concern to be seen as disarmed and weakened by its regional adversaries, notably Iran.
I think it's it's worth underlining that this explanation of Iraq's behaviour came as early as 1992 when you know that this was absolutely also the conclusion of the post 2003 investigation into Iraq's missing weapons of mass destruction. So in a way, it's quite striking that all of those discoveries after the war led to the same belief. But of course, the people who made those judgements were also present in 1992.
So again, bias is a big, big part of the story here, especially when dealing with a state that has been caught repeatedly in lies and deception at this point. And we're still now in late 1991. Iraqi officials have a big problem. They have a big problem because they have a lot more hidden that the U.N. inspectors haven't found out about yet. Specifically, they have thousands of chemical weapons and they also have some biological weapons that the outside world has realised that Iraq can produce.
Yes. So what happens is a unilateral destruction of secrets operation to destroy these weapons rather than hand them over to the U.N. inspectors for verification.
As the cease fire resolution demanded. And this last part of Iraq's initial cover up is really what seals it straight over the next few years, because the U.N. inspectors have focussed on material accounting, on accounting for every last piece, every last rocket, every warheads, and by destroying them in secret, by burning them, by exploding them by something, the chemicals in the ground. It will never be possible to verify the quantity, quantity, what Iraq once had.
So this in many ways is sort of the the original sin in this saga, where even as Iraq begins to admit what it has done, what it has destroyed, it will never be possible to fully. When Iraqi officials began to reveal that they had destroyed these weapons in secret in 1992 onwards, they had to explain why they had done this. It seemed like such a self-defeating thing to do.
And the explanation was that they were concerned that if they, after all this, came clean about destroying even more weapons, including weapons other countries didn't know that they had, they thought that they would be attacked and that the regime's survival would be in danger. So make of it what you will of that explanation. But that was what several different Iraqi officials said, independent of each other.
And I think it reinforces this disclosure to them that was driven by this this cover up in 1991 and continues to affect Iraqi deliberations about how much to complain about in years to come. So this is an image of one of the key facilities in the Iraq, the biological weapons programs. And its importance was given away to the U.N. inspectors by this large portrait and also the large walls surrounding it. So those were two clues that get their attention immediately.
So as I mentioned, biological weapons were weapons that Iraq had kept trying to keep secrets. They had tried to keep these weapons of secrets, in part because they were closely tied to their security services. And this was a red line for the Iraqi authorities. They did not want to implicate the security services in any of their declarations.
That means that they couldn't give a convincing account of the unilateral destruction in 1991, either because they were conducted in large part by the security apparatus and also these weapons, when they were developed during the seventies and eighties, were tested on political prisoners, which was one of the many grave crimes that senior Iraqi officials were concerned that they would be held to account for.
They were frequently, when they were discussing amongst themselves talking about the Nuremberg trials as examples of what they wanted to avoid. So this was very much something that they that they were concerned about. When the U.N. inspectors came with more and more evidence of a vibrant biological weapons program, and in early 1995, this came to a head when U.N. officials had, again, concrete evidence of a biological weapons program that they presented to Iraqi officials.
And this led to an extensive debate amongst senior Iraqi officials, such as the same colonel on the one hand, and Tariq Aziz on the other hand about what to do. And Tariq Aziz had the view that, well, we have admitted to everything else. Why not just admit this as well? How would the sanctions be lifted and be done with it? Hussein Kamal said On the contrary, if we admit to this now, we will live with sanctions forever.
And his reasoning was that and Iraq's disclosures and declarations to the United Nations over the past four years have been based on concealing the biological weapons and hiding them amongst the chemical weapons declarations. And so if they now confessed to having produced biological weapons, it will lead to a reopening of all the files across all areas. And this would never and it's the same problem, he said.
So the conclusion of this extensive debate was a bureaucratic compromise in a way whereby Iraqi officials told U.N. inspectors that, yes, we had such a program, yes, we produced biological weapons agents in large, large quantities, but we didn't weaponize them. Of course, this was a ridiculous thing to say. Why would you produce vast amounts of weapons agents and not put it into any weapons? But this bureaucratic compromise was a way to avoid this reopening of the accounting.
So it's one of many, many examples of how Iraq's concern about the accounting part of this verification came in the way of coming across as credible, because many of these bureaucratic compromises that came along the way when they were crafting their declarations to the U.N. inspectors were designed to avoid these kind of entanglement effects. So overall, when Iraq tried to come clean, it often undermined itself in the process.
And I think that is one of the key dynamics that I believe is linked to this disclosure that Iraq was facing throughout this period. After this disclosure of his admission in July 1995 of Iraq having a biological weapons program and producing biological weapons agents. Things were looking pretty good for Iraq. There was talk of sanctions relief and even movement towards lifting sanctions in the Security Council.
But then Hussein Kamal, this son in law from health defects, because he had been fighting with Saddam's brothers and various other regime members about corruption and things of that nature, which made him very unpopular. So he defected to Jordan, taking with him some of the hidden documents from the WMD programs and the Iraqi officials essentially in conflict because they don't know what he will disclose in Jordan.
So what they do is to hand over everything that they have hidden in terms of documents from the programs dating back decades in an effort to come free. But even this effort backfires for the Iraqi officials because it is only cited as evidence by sceptical Security Council members to say that, look, they're all always hiding something, even now. So as Iraq was trying to come clean, their efforts to do so essentially backfired.
Nonetheless, the Iraqis somehow continued to try and scale up their cooperation and convince the inspectors there's nothing left of the next couple of years, but nothing resolved so that eventually the Iraqis tire of this and decide to get rid of the inspectors, as senior Iraqi officials put it at the time, when you can have sanctions with inspections or sanctions without inspections, you can choose which one you would like.
And after a series of confrontations in 97 and 98 and the U.N. inspectors leave Iraq just before a military campaign and they don't come back in from late 1998 onwards. So when the inspectors leave, access on the ground is lost and other countries don't have an eye on the ground, as they have for the past seven years, and there are a lot there are growing concerns about what Iraq is doing now that the inspectors have left Iraq and can no longer monitor their programs and their capabilities.
But it turns out that nothing much happens, if anything. The rockets that exist from Iraqi sources show that some enterprising Iraqi scientists pitch WMD programs. They're told not to proceed because that would violate U.N. resolutions and really risk punishment, etc. So they're left in this situation where they've stopped cooperating because there was no way forward, no way to get sanctions lifted.
And they're in this situation where they're struggling to control their own scientists and their own bureaucrats. And there are several documents where even Saddam and other senior officials keep asking. We don't have any active programs. Right. So all of these questions can be interpreted as, oh, they're interested or they could be interpreted as they really have a problem because they can't oversee the scientists.
And I very much think it is that they couldn't oversee and control their scientists, but they certainly tried as best they could. And I think the rationale and reasons that they gave to those pitching these biological weapons programs, for example, in the early 2000, was that you can't because the violence U.N. resolutions. In 2002, attention turns again to Iraq and its WMD programs.
And this is a time when this feature set becomes a much sharper because the UN passes a resolution, Resolution 1441, in November 2002, where Iraq is found in non-compliance and now once again has to turn over a declaration of not only its past programs, but also everything that it has done since 1998. In a matter of a few weeks, once that has been submitted, there will be a renewed round of U.N. inspections conducted by these to make it familiar to many of you covered every day.
Now, the WHO is then the director of the IAEA, and Hans Blix, former director of the IAEA, and then the director of the UN inspectors charged with all of the WMD areas going back into Iraq. So one of the many puzzles about Iraq's behaviour during this period, 2000 to 2003 is, well, why weren't they more proactive in demonstrating that they didn't have these weapons, that they didn't have these capabilities?
And one of the interesting pieces of information from the sources that I've access is that, in fact, in early 2002, the Iraqi regime was considering such a proactive measure to actually publish their declarations from their past WMD programs in newspapers as a response to some of these emerging allegations from the U.S. and the U.K. that they had resumed their weapons programs.
And so going through all this correspondence between Iraqi scientists, intelligence agencies and various officials, you can see all the reasons why they couldn't come clean about this. And those reasons are in themselves Very interesting. One of the main themes in in all these weapons areas was that we can't provide this information because it violates our obligations under various non-proliferation Treaty so that they would be good citizens.
Also, they can't publish this because they would blow the cover of their former suppliers. They can't provide this information because that would reveal operational details of their military capabilities when it came to ballistic missiles. So you can actually go through and see all of the reasons why they can't publish this. Nowhere do you see we can't publish this because it would in the way that we have any programs, because there were no active programs.
But again, to those who are curious as to why Iraq was more proactive in rebutting these claims before the inspections resumed. Well, good news there on thousands of pages of sources for you to look at where you can go in and see exactly that. And in my mind, the reasons overall point to two main themes. One is, again, that disclosing this information report has all kinds of global contracts with your former suppliers with being a good citizen of these WMD non-proliferation treaties.
And also, there's an element of security when it comes to the ballistic missiles only, but that this is not a core theme in the rationales given. So I think it does tell us something about the logic at that time. But Iraq has to compile these accounts, as I said, of of their past programs. So they set out to do that. And it's compiled declarations of thousands of pages where they essentially try to account for everything and try to prove a negative that there were no new programs.
So as you can imagine, they were caught between a rock and a hard place. They were founded on compliance. They were trying to fight that judgements. But how do you find that judgement? How do you prove a negative? On the other hand, they were very concerned with giving any information that could be interpreted as potentially a violation. Now, with many of these programs, WMD programs, you have the dual use problem where the same activity can be used for civilian purposes or military purposes.
So you can see certain places in these 2002 declarations where the Iraqis are removing information, historical information that they had previously declared because they were so concerned to do anything that would justify those who wanted to go for an invasion. So predictably, perhaps they are then accused of of not coming fully clean, of not being proactive and not doing enough to convince others that they don't have these weapons or capabilities.
But frankly, I think it is difficult to see precisely what else they could have done, apart from being perhaps less cautious when it came to this sort of grey zone information. Inspectors arrived in late 2002 and orders go out to Iraqi officials at the top there, as you may see, to just allow the inspectors to go in, even if they don't have Iraqi minders with them. So this was an increasing kind of ultimately the access compared to what had been the case previously after some initial hiccups.
And then below, perhaps you can see that they're also instructed to not mention the term nerve gas in any communication whatsoever. So this is an example, and there are many others of ways in which Iraqi officials tried to ensure that there would be no traces of any language equipment or anything on the site that could be cited as a violation. They didn't have nerve gas. They. They just didn't want their officials or guards to talk about it never got in anyway.
And for those who recall the Powell presentation in the Security Council, I'm sure you can imagine why. So these measures were done by Iraqi officials with the goal of avoiding any kind of trouble. Ultimately, they were interpreted as aggressive attempts by the U.N. inspectors to sanitise the signs and maybe hide evidence. So, again, it backfired. And this effort to to ensure no trouble actually backfired is for some a man who was the director of the Iraqi Monitoring Directorate.
He was in the unhappy position of the board of Iraq's response to the inspectors, and he was one who spent hours and hours pleading with his staff to just do what they were told and increase their cooperation in early 2003, which some of them did and some of them did not. Big You also recall some of the allegations that were made by the U.S. and the U.K., including aluminium tubes, uranium imports, magnets and various other items.
Well, I accessed through my Iraqi friends, perhaps sources, some of their own internal investigations that they started in early 2003. Initially, they didn't want to respond to these claims because they found them ridiculous and outlandish and plainly based on falsified documents. But when the International Atomic Energy Agency began to raise these points with Iraq in early 2003, they felt compelled to respond.
So they conducted all these inspections, investigations themselves, the Iraqis, to find out what had happened. And we at each and every single one. To the Iraqis, great frustration. However, the International Atomic Energy Agency didn't report that for weeks and weeks and weeks. And when they eventually did, it was effectively too late.
So, again, to add to the accusation that the Iraqis were not proactive, I think you have to take into consideration that they did probably as much as they possibly could at the time, but that there were delays in their processing in the U.N. agencies that also created this impression that they were doing too little, too late.
As Hans Blix puts it, and this is another example for those who want to indulge in the original Arabic, Amer al-Saadi was in charge of getting some he was a senior official involved in overseeing the Iraqi WMD programs and then later on in dealing with the U.N. inspections. And he became sort of the public face of Iraq's effort to prove its case or at least make its case in public.
In the spring of 2003, in a series of efforts to make suggestions of how to resolve the remaining questions about Iraq's WMD and the disarmament back in 1991. And there were a number of suggestions that he, he and his colleagues made that were feasible. According to Hans Blix, they would have been feasible in a matter of months, maybe weeks. So these questions could have been resolved, perhaps not completely, because that's not technically possible.
But substantively, they could have been. But as Saadi said in one of his last press conferences, that we're not trying to escape a war here. War is coming. We're doing what we can to not to make the case for war, at least by making all these suggestions. And I think that this is this is ultimately what and what the Iraqi officials thought they could achieve with their efforts in February and March 2003.
So what's left of all of this? What's what is the judgement of Iraq's behaviour and what, if anything, does all this new evidence suggests in terms of how we can rethink things differently about Iraq's behaviour?
This is an example of one of the CIA's own retrospective assessments after of course, the unknown finding of of WMD, where Iraq's own behaviour is cited as a cause of misperception and Iraq's behaviour is puzzling because it doesn't make sense that they would secretly destroy weapons, that they would hide documents when they handed over their capabilities and destroyed their weapons. But I think that's the fundamental dilemma that they face.
That overall, the changes that I know does go some way to explaining some of the more puzzling aspects of Iraq's behaviour, and specifically this hiding of their the history of their program. Several documents and supporting documents these bureaucratic. That I've talked about as opposed to just coming clean in the first instance. So Iraq's the logic behind Iraq's behaviour continues to be debated as as it should be.
And I do think that new sources give us much more fine grained evidence to suggest different arguments and different different theories that are brought to bear on Iraq's behaviour. And in my mind, there is certainly a lot in the Iraqi correspondence pointing to this concern about being asked to hand over these self-incriminating pieces of evidence and how that kept blowing up in their faces.
And that's for this reason. They wanted to avoid this kind of entanglement of the facts in the accounting of their WMD disarmament, other parts of their behaviour is not really puzzling. It's not puzzling that they would be wary of handing over information about their security services, for example, or Saddam's residences.
So that's much less puzzling. But still, I think that there is plenty of evidence to engage with for having a better sense of some of the puzzles surrounding Iraq's behaviour during those four years. I should stop here. Thanks very. It was an empty seat. So it is a slightly awkward tradition that I have to ask you some questions beforehand to kick us off, and then we'll go to the audience.
So thank you. Thank you so much. I've heard versions of this paper develop over the last several years, and I would really, really recommend that everybody, if this is an interesting topic to you, go and find the paper version that came out in international security, I think last year or maybe last year on the cheap Islamic is a really wonderful read. So I read that and I've read the parts of the broader manuscript.
So for the benefit of the audience, some bits that didn't come up in the talk that I want to just a preview on, just to begin with some clarifying questions. Yeah. Can you provide a description of Iraq's nuclear and biological programs at their peak prior to 1991? I know you said that it's difficult to quantify it, but can you just describe and give us a sense of what this involved?
Can you also this is maybe a provocation. I'm deeply conscious of the enormous human costs of the sanctions program. Can we, though, say, putting that aside, if we can suffer that, can we see that actually the sanctions program and the inspections worked? Were these successful thirds? I want to I want to push you on the cheapest element, because it seems to me, you know, the way this is set up, you're talking about, the puzzles are rooted in the kind of logics and behaviour of the Iraqi regime.
And I want to hear the other side of that, which is the logics and reasoning of the US, because this seems to be US led in a lot of the key kind of turning points of the narrative.
When Iraq does come clean, it's often met with scepticism and I wonder whether I think this is maybe you can speak to this, whether this scepticism is actually motivated reasoning, where the reception of this information is deliberately being miscast or whether there are actually other interests at stake in which the outcome would have been inevitable anyway, and why this might be specific to this Jesus dilemma as it applies to Iraq, the US,
and how Iraq sits in the broader constellation of regional politics and some of the other interests that the US may have had as it applied to Iraq. And finally, and I think you get a flavour of this, how do Iraq regime elites respond to 911 on the need to invasion of Afghanistan? And how does that pattern some of its kind of compliance responses? Thanks. Thank you very much for a few substantive and great questions.
So starting with the state of Iraq's WMD programs circa 19 9091, the chemical weapons program was, I suppose, thriving. It had really delivered during the Iran-Iraq war with horrific consequences and was in a state where they could deliver on demands, so to speak. They didn't have to store the weapons, they could produce them and use them very, very quickly. So that had become a very well honed machine and included fairly rudimentary, but also quite advanced weapons capabilities.
Iraq's biological weapons program was struggling because they were under great pressure to deliver weapons and deliver some weapons. But those weapons could only kill you if they hit you on your head, essentially because producing biological weapons is from an engineering point of view, very, very complex. You get the right particles. You don't want to kill the poison upon landing and so upon impact and so on. So they were making efforts, but largely failing to produce very powerful weapons.
Iraq's nuclear weapons program was, as I indicated, on the verge of a major breakthrough in 19 9091. And Saddam's nuclear scientists were really puzzled as to why he invaded Kuwait at what was such a fateful time for their nuclear weapons program. And according to both some national assessments and the IAEA assessments, within a few years, Iraq would likely have had nuclear weapons. They were preparing to test test to do test explosions and so on.
So it's a very odd picture, but they were certainly serious in all their efforts to develop these weapons and in the case of the chemical weapons to use them.
And I think that the same ambition applied to the biological weapons program, but less successfully so in terms of the sanctions and inspections package, I think in a way, again, I agree with you, setting aside the enormous humanitarian costs of of those of the sanctions, they certainly had an impact in shaping the Iraqi regime's choices on their behaviour.
Frankly, I've been surprised, looking at the records, how long the Iraqis kept hoping that by complying just a little more, a little more, the sanctions might be eased or lifted. And the final blow came in 1997, when Madeleine Albright, then foreign minister. The US said that it doesn't matter what the Iraqis do, we will not lift sanctions regardless. So it really took up until then for them to stop trying, which I think is quite astounding in a way.
But once that clarification came, of course, then the incentive disappeared. But I would say that the sanctions and inspections as a whole was very effective and the inspections really were far more effective than anyone had imagined. And there had not been ever an effort by the UN itself to disarm or oversee disarmament of these weapons in any country before and since.
Frankly, you haven't really seen it because of the way the processes in Syria and elsewhere were not really conducted in the same manner. But this was this was a laboratory, in a way. Iraq became a laboratory for the various regimes to to prevent chemical weapons that emerged during the 1990s. So surprisingly effective, I think one one could say the logics and reasoning of the US.
Great, great question. There is, as I indicated in some of the documents that I that I showed very early on, an impression set in of Iraq's motives and Iraq's mode of modus operandi, and that held firm across different US administrations. So the motivated reasoning would perhaps vary to some extent between those administrations. But the fundamental view of Iraq's M.O. persisted.
So, yes, they were surprised and shocked by these early discoveries of Iraqi cheating and and cover ups and were more and more reluctant to to give them the benefit of the doubt. And, of course, there was an element of not wanting to take the risk by giving Iraq the benefit of the doubt, lifting sanctions and then possibly seeing Iraq resume its its capabilities. But it does seem to me that this this bias or this belief sets in very, very early on.
And it's one that Bob Jervis described as a surprising lack of curiosity when the US in this instance, intelligence community looked at Iraq's behaviour and immediately jumped to the conclusion that they're hiding this to preserve capabilities and discounting that they are hiding embarrassing facts about their own past behaviour or even incriminating information about their own past behaviour.
How did Iraqi officials respond to 911? Well, some wanted to provide a message to the US the message of support Saddam. So would was not interested in in doing that. And in in some ways, certainly there is evidence suggesting that Saddam Hussein thought that the US would be so preoccupied in Afghanistan that a war in Iraq would be or an invasion would be less likely. That, of course, was wrong. Other senior Iraqi officials took the opposite view and thought we are likely next.
And when these accusations started coming in 2002, they became increasingly concerned that war could be on the horizon. Great. Thank you so much. Can we thank our speaker?