Scotland on Sunday April 13, 2003
21 Days That Shook The World (Pt II)
By Ian Mather
forces were repelling the foreign mercenaries came to be accompanied by the sound of approaching gunfire. In the end, even the information minister failed to appear, though he went out in style, letting be known that he had decided to take a day off. By then he had been nicknamed Comical Ali.
In the extremely unlikely event that Saddam is ever in a position to publish his memoirs, he will have some explaining to do. His forces fought an inept and badly prepared campaign despite the fact that the Allied invasion can hardly have come as a surprise. Besides the superb performance of the US forces, the key to success was the poor preparedness and lack of organisation of the Iraqis, said retired Israeli army colonel Gal Luft. A central mystery is why Saddam did not try to slow the Allied advance by blowing up any of the bridges over the Euphrates or the Tigris, or destroy any of the dams to flood the roads along which the Allies had to advance. When the Allies arrived at Baghdad airport they found that the Iraqis had not even cratered the runways to stop them from using them but had simply piled earth on them. It was only hours before a runway was cleared for coalition aircraft to begin landing there.
The defences of Baghdad itself were amateurish. They were abysmal, Luft said.
No trenches, no barricades, no sniper positions, no booby traps, no mines.
Another mystery is why the Iraqis did not resort to the use of chemical weapons, as many assumed they would. The point of the war was supposed to be to destroy such weapons on the grounds that Saddam was not only capable of using them but had already done so in the past when he ordered the gassing of thousands of Iraqi Kurds. At the UN, Powell had made much of the risk posed by a pilotless aircraft being used by Iraqis to spread dust impregnated with anthrax over US forces.
That's their only ace in the hole, said Patrick Garrett before the war began. If the regime falls, that would be the last act of desperation .
Since chemical weapons were supposed to be there for Saddam's use in extremis, it is hard to imagine circumstances more extreme than those facing the Iraqi dictator last week. Yet they were not used.
Garrett said: Clearly, the administration was of the impression that chemical -biological weapons could be used. Perhaps some Iraq military, the ones who were in a position to pull the chemical trigger, thought that maybe this was not such a great idea.
The official explanation for Saddam's non-use of chemical weapons was President Bush's threat before the invasion of Iraq that, if the Iraqis used them, the Americans would retaliate with nuclear weapons. Yet it is hard to understand why, faced with his own impending destruction, Saddam should care about that.
Side by side with the fighting, the search for weapons of mass destruction continued unabated. But the weapons proved as elusive as Saddam himself.
First it was reported that the deadly chemical, ricin, had been found in a terrorist camp in northern Iraq. According to US intelligence officials, followers of Osama bin Laden had created a secret biological weapons laboratory inside the camp that was used to produce ricin and other poisons. There was concern that the ricin discovered during a police raid on a London apartment last January may have been produced there for the purpose of poisoning British troops, the officials said.
But British police said the ricin found in London had been made in Manchester. The connection between the Iraqi terrorist camp and Saddam was weakened by the fact that the camp was in Kurdish-controlled territory and manned by the Islamic radical group, Ansar al-Islam, sworn enemy of the Iraqi dictator.
More promising at first was a cache of dust-covered drums that might have contained toxic chemicals found at two sites close to Karbala, an agricultural warehouse and a military compound. But doubt was soon cast on the find. Rumsfeld was prudently noncommittal: Almost all first reports turn out to be wrong, he said. So was this one. The chemicals were harmless pesticides.
Then marine combat engineers said they had found evidence of an active nuclear weapons programme in an underground network of laboratories, warehouses and bombproof offices beneath the Tuwaitha nuclear research centre, south of Baghdad.
Copyright © 2003, The Scotsman Publications Ltd.
