October 13, 2004
Arab News
It is clear that something very odd has been happening with the remnants of Iraq’s nuclear program. The UN’s nuclear watchdog, the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA), has complained that since the US invasion, it has lost track of what is happening in Iraq. Remarkably, this has occurred because the Americans refused to allow IAEA inspectors access to the site.
The IAEA has thus had to rely on outside sources of information, including satellite images. Its position has been made all the more difficult because the Iraqi government has yet to organize the regular reporting required by the IAEA. Yesterday the organization’s head, Muhammad El-Baradei produced a series of extremely worrying revelations that equipment and material which could be used for the manufacture of nuclear weapons were missing. Most extraordinarily, an entire building containing machinery has been dismantled and carried away. El-Baradei has further revealed that an Iraqi-built rocket engine has been discovered for sale outside Iraq.
The IAEA also reports that Iraq’s main nuclear facility at Tuwaitha was looted after the invasion last year. It is not clear precisely what material went missing. The US has removed two tons of nuclear material from Iraq but the IAEA believes that there is at least 500 tons of related items which need to be removed. The question that needs to be answered is why the Americans have behaved so oddly in this matter. The first puzzle is why the US command did not go immediately to the Tuwaitha facilities and secure them. After all, it was to stop Saddam using the alleged “weapons of mass destruction” that the invasion was launched. If the Americans truly believed that Saddam had nuclear arms, Tuwaitha should have been one of the prime areas of concern.
It is also strange that the Americans have kept the IAEA inspectors out of Iraq. In the early days, US teams were frantically combing Iraq looking for the WMDs which UN weapons teams were reasonably certain no longer existed. Perhaps it was thought that inspectors from another UN agency might have got in the way and complicated matters. But the Bush White House had long ago given up trying to pretend they could produce any physical evidence for their allegations of ready and waiting weapons systems. So why haven’t El-Baradei’s people been allowed in?
But the most puzzling question is why the US has not tried to transform the existence of this Iraqi nuclear material and its apparent theft to its own advantage by claiming that sinister elements within the old Baathist regime have spirited it away. It may be that spin doctors among the US occupation authorities failed to spot the opportunity. There could, however, be an altogether darker explanation and this might be that the US knew perfectly well what nuclear weapons-making equipment the Iraqis possessed and were aware of the shock its revelation would cause if the IAEA discovered them. And perhaps this was because American companies had sold it to them.
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