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Katrina and Iraqi WMD: The High Stakes of an Uncertain Event (WMD Iceberg Post #3)

It’s become fashionable of late to blame the aftermath of Katrina on the use of National Guard troops in the Iraq war, and by implication the war itself. To do so, of course, one has to discredit the rationale for the war, and that means setting up and knocking down the usual strawmen. Paradoxical as it may seem to some, the strongest justification for the war was the disarmament rationale involving WMD. As a matter of course, that rationale has neither adequately been defended nor satisfactorily been rebutted.

Two basic mantras here are that “No WMD were found,” and “Iraq was never a threat to us,” both now so axiomatic that they furnish the grounds for the sort of casual throwaway sarcasm one sees in this post by Gene Healy at Liberty & Power. That makes it time to revisit Iraq WMD for the nth time squared. Doing so, oddly enough, allows us to achieve some clarity about the aftermath of Katrina, something I'll get to at the end. (This will take several posts.)

Let's start with an elementary question: if Iraq represented a threat to us (the U.S.), how so and in what way? Consider three pieces of testimonial evidence answering that question.

In a little-noticed and hard-to-access article in London’s Guardian, the British WMD expert David Kelly put the issue about as succinctly as anyone has. Kelly was a member of the United Nations Special Commission ( UNSCOM) on the disarmament of Iraq.

Perhaps the real threat from Iraq today comes from covert use of such weapons [WMD] against troops or by terrorists against civilian targets worldwide. The link with al-Qaeda is disputed, but is, in any case, not the principal terrorist link of concern. Iraq has long trained and supported terrorist activities and is quite capable of initiating such activity using its security services. (David Kelly, “Only Regime Change Will Avert the Threat,” Guardian, published posthumously Aug. 31, 2003, but written just prior to the Iraq war).

As the title of the article makes clear, Kelly counseled military action as the only effective method of ensuring Iraqi disarmament.

Essentially the same claim was made by Rolf Ekeus, in a little-noticed article in The Washington Post. Ekeus was Chairman of UNSCOM from 1991-1998:

The real chemical warfare threat from Iraq has had two components. One has been the capability to bring potent chemical agents to the battlefield to be used against a poorly equipped and poorly trained enemy. The other is the chance that Iraqi chemical weapons specialists would sign up with terrorist networks such as al Qaeda -- with which they are likely to have far more affinity than do the unemployed Russian scientists the United States worries about.

In this context the remnants of Iraq's biological weapons program, and specifically its now-unemployed specialists, constitute a potential threat of much the same magnitude. While biological weapons are not easily adapted for battlefield use, they are potentially the more devastating as a means for massive terrorist onslaught on civilian targets.

Ekeus sharply criticized the idea that "discovery of Iraqi WMD" ought to be equated with discovery of stockpiles of WMD. By Ekeus's terms and definitions--and he would know, wouldn't he?--the mantra about "No Iraqi WMD" is simply false. In the relevant sense identified in the article, the final report of the Iraq Survey Group shows (a) that WMD were found, and (b) that the jury is out on Iraq's biological weapons program.

Being a huge fan of the “blockquote” function, let me quote one more little-discussed passage, this time from Richard Butler’s book The Greatest Threat: Iraq, Weapons of Mass Destruction and the Growing Crisis of Global Security, written in 2000, a full year before 9/11, i.e., before the idea of a suicide-terrorist attack had gained wide currency in political discourse. Butler, like Ekeus, was a Chairman of UNSCOM. On p. xix of his book, he lays out the following hypothetical scenario:

A hit squad from somewhere in the Middle East travels to New York City carrying a one-liter bottle filled with one of the several chemical weapons agents we have long known Saddam Hussein to be developing. Using a simpler sprayer (like one that a gardener or house painter might own), they diffuse contents into the air over Times Square on a Saturday night or into the main concourse at Grand Central Station at 5:30 pm on a weekday evening. Hundreds, maybe thousands of people die agonizing deaths as a result. Because of their own handling of the substance and the strategic concern to maintain ambiguity over the source of the attack, the terrorists may have to be prepared to die themselves.

Obviously, the world would erupt in almost unprecedented horror and outrage. A search for the perpetrators would be launched. Identifying them, dead or alive, on the ground in New York may prove difficult, but even if their identities became known quickly, it may not be clear whom they preresented or, above all, who provided them the deadly weapon. Answering this question beyond a reasonable doubt might not be easy.

In retrospect, this passage should strike us somewhat naive and understated. Much of it is entirely plausible, even prescient. The exception is the assumption that such an event would be followed by a worldwide "eruption of unprecedented horror and outrage." Butler hadn't, alas, counted on the likes of Thierry Messan, George Galloway or the post 9/11-revelers in Jenin.

I cite these passages at length because they share the following characteristics:

1. All three come from recognized authorities on the subject of WMD.

2. All three writers had extensive experience in and knowledge of specifically Iraqi WMD.

3. All three recognize the distinct possibility that Iraq might use (or distribute for use) WMD in a terrorist attack on the United States.

4. All three agree that such an attack, though not “imminent,” was entirely plausible.

5. None of the three can be accused of having any great partisan affiliation with the Republican Party, neo-conservatism, or the Bush Administration.

I take it as established that if three experts of this caliber agree on a claim requiring expertise of just the sort they have, we ought to give defeasible credence to their claim--viz., if Iraq had WMD, there were plausible reasons for thinking that those WMD could be used against us. It wasn't clear whether they had WMD. Nor was it clear that if they did, they certainly would use them against us. What we are talking about, then, is an uncertain event--perhaps one of low likelihood--involving a high-stakes outcome. The question is: confronting the probability of such an event, how large an investment should you make to stave it off?

The disarmament rationale for war against Iraq implies that we were justified in going to war (a huge investment) to stave off a catastrophic event (an Iraqi WMD attack) of uncertain but definitely positive probability.

A similar argument could be made about preparations for Katrina: we would have been justified in building better levees for New Orleans at admittedly huge expense, in anticipation for an unprecedented event (a Category 4+ hurricane) of disastrous proportions (look at New Orleans now), despite the fact that no such event had taken place in 200 years--and despite the absence of evidence that such an event was definitely going to happen. Such evidence as existed for the possibility of such an event antedated the event by years, and consisted of educated thought-experiments on par with Richard Butler's, expressed in places like National Geographic and Scientific American. There was no hard evidence that such an event would take place until it was too late to do anything about it.

"Defeasible credence" means that claims can be rebutted by arguments so weighty that we would put their testimony aside. What, it’s worth asking, are those arguments about Iraqi WMD, and how good are they? I'll take a few of them on in the next few posts. The parallels with Katrina should prove as enlightening as they are depressing.

Posted on Saturday, September 17, 2005 at 12:32 PM | Comments (0) | Return

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