Truth and consequences for Saddam

At his press conference last Thursday, President Bush reiterated a
commitment he has made repeatedly in recent months: Saddam Hussein will not
be allowed to have weapons of mass destruction, WMD.

As the president put it, "The primary goal is to make it clear to
Saddam that we expect him to be a peaceful neighbor in the region and we
expect him not to develop weapons of mass destruction. And if we find him
doing so, there will be a consequence."

Unfortunately, there is now compelling evidence that Saddam not only
is developing WMD, but that he has some. More worrisome still, it appears
his arsenal includes more than just chemical and biological arms. Dreadful
as these are, the Butcher of Baghdad may also have acquired atomic and
perhaps even thermonuclear weapons, as well.

It has been universally recognized that, given the well-established
state of Iraq's chemical and biological weapons programs before Operation
Desert Storm and the international inspections that followed it, Saddam
could resume production of various toxic chemical agents and strains of
lethal viruses in fairly short order once he forced the withdrawal of
inspectors with a mandate to conduct intrusive on-site monitoring. (This
actually was the best-case assessment; given the comprehensive secretiveness
and inveterate deviousness of the Iraqi regime, it is entirely possible that
its covert programs in these areas were actually never suspended.)

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Of even greater concern, however, was the prospect that -- left to
his own devices -- Saddam would quickly reconstitute his bid to build at
least crude atomic weapons. If a report in the London Sunday Times is
accurate, however, Saddam already has as many as three such weapons and
perhaps as many as three of the far more powerful thermonuclear ones.

The Times article, entitled "Was this Saddam's Bomb?" draws upon a
wealth of circumstantial evidence and debriefings of Iraqi defectors by
investigative reporter Gwynne Roberts. It features heretofore unpublished
-- and alarming -- revelations by a man going under the alias of "Leone" who
is described as "a military engineer who was a member of the Iraqi Atomic
Energy Commission. Simultaneously ... he worked for the Republican Palace in
Baghdad."

According to Leone, the Iraqi despot had more than one nuclear
program. As the Times put it: "After [Iraq's] defeat in the ensuing Gulf
war, UN arms inspectors discovered an Iraqi crash program to build a nuclear
bomb, known as PC3. But, according to Leone, they missed the most successful
part of the programme. [Leone said,] 'They thought they had stopped the
Iraqis from building the bomb, but they overlooked the military organization
code-named Group Four. This department is a comprehensive section that was
involved in assembling the bomb from the beginning to the end. It was also
involved in developing launching systems, missile programs, preparing
uranium, purchasing it on the black market, smuggling it back into Iraq.'"

Roberts was able to get confirmation of key parts of Leone's story
from other sources -- including scientists who had also been involved in
Saddam's closely guarded WMD programs who managed to escape with their
lives from Iraq. They validated his claim that in the years prior to the
Gulf War, Saddam Hussein acquired perhaps as much as 50 kilograms of highly
enriched uranium from South Africa via Brazil. His cadre of Western-trained
physicists then secretly used some of this material to fashion a relatively
unsophisticated Hiroshima-style "gun-type" atomic device. It was placed in
a natural tunnel near Lake Rezazza some 150 kilometers southwest of Baghdad
and, on Sept. 9, 1989, it was exploded, unleashing a force equivalent
to approximately 10,000 tons of TNT.

The Iraqis went to extraordinary lengths to conceal preparations for
and evidence of this underground test. For example, the sorts of
above-ground activity that might have been detected by spy satellites were
masked as part of an agricultural project. The explosion itself was
"decoupled" so as to reduce the chances that even nearby seismic monitoring
stations would pick up and recognize the resulting tremor, which registered
2.7 on the Richter scale. And political prisoners were given the deadly job
of cleaning up the radioactive residue of the test; they were subsequently
liquidated by Saddam's security forces as were all external signs of and
access to the tunnel.

These revelations have a number of profound implications. For one
thing, they strongly suggest that Saddam is already in possession of
radiological, atomic and perhaps nuclear weapons. He may also have the
capability to deliver such weapons -- either by aircraft or perhaps via
ballistic missile -- to targets perhaps as far away as Israel and American
troops or population centers in Saudi Arabia or Kuwait (whose liberation
from Iraqi occupation occurred 10 years ago this week).

For another, Leone's charges validate President Bush's opposition to
the fatally flawed Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty, which was rejected by a
majority of the U.S. Senate in October 1999. As National Security Adviser
Condoleezza Rice put it on Thursday, "The President made clear when he was
running for President that he did not believe that the Comprehensive Test
Ban treaty furthered the non-proliferation goals that we do think are
extremely important because it was not verifiable, because it didn't include
certain parties, and because it certainly did nothing about the states that
we are most concerned about. ..." Any further thought of resuscitating this
treaty should now be moot.

Finally, these revelations -- taken together with other evidence
that Saddam is back in the weapons of mass destruction business -- oblige
Mr. Bush to make good his threat that there will be "consequences."
Fortunately, many of his senior advisers (including Secretary of Defense
Donald Rumsfeld, Deputy Secretary of Defense-designate Paul Wolfowitz,
Deputy Secretary of State-designate Richard Armitage, Under Secretary of
State-designate John Bolton, Under Secretary of Defense-designate Dov
Zakheim and a number of others said to be under consideration for top posts --
notably, Zalmay Khalilzad, Jeffrey Gedmin and Douglas Feith) have
developed a blue-print for such consequences.

Specifically, in a Feb. 19, 1998, open letter to President Clinton, they called for the United States, among other things, to: "recognize a provisional government of Iraq based on the principles and leaders of the Iraqi National Congress (INC) that is representative of all
the peoples of Iraq"; "restore and enhance the safe haven in northern Iraq
to allow the provisional government to extend its authority there and
establish a zone in southern Iraq from which Saddam's ground forces would
also be excluded"; and "lift sanctions in liberated areas." In short, we
must now help with the liberation of Iraq.

For, as a practical matter, the only hope for effectively addressing
Saddam's determination to stay in the WMD business is to put him and his
ruling clique permanently out of business. Mr. Bush is putting into place
the team with a plan to do it. There isn't a moment to lose in effecting
these "consequences."