THE CIA'S WAR against the Bush administration is one of the great untold stories of the past three years. It is, perhaps, the agency's most successful covert action of recent times. The CIA has used its budget to fund criticism of the administration by former Democratic officeholders. The agency allowed an employee, Michael Scheuer, to publish and promote a book containing classified information, as long as, in Scheuer's words, "the book was being used to bash the president." However, the agency's preferred weapon has been the leak. In one leak after another, generally to the New York Times or the Washington Post, CIA officials have sought to undermine America's foreign policy. Usually this is done by leaking reports or memos critical of administration policies or skeptical of their prospects. Through it all, our principal news outlets, which share the agency's agenda and profit from its torrent of leaks, have maintained a discreet silence about what should be a major scandal.

Recent events indicate that the CIA might even be willing to compromise the effectiveness of its own covert operations, if by doing so it can damage the Bush administration. The story began last May, when the New York Times outed an undercover CIA operation by identifying private companies that operated airlines for the agency. The Times fingered Aero Contractors Ltd., Pegasus Technologies, and Tepper Aviation as CIA-controlled entities. It described their aircraft and charted the routes they fly. Most significantly, the Times revealed one of the most secret uses to which these airlines were put [. . .]

The Times reported that its sources included "interviews with former C.I.A. officers and pilots." It seems difficult to believe that the information conveyed in those interviews was unclassified. But if the agency made any objection to the Times's disclosure, it has not been publicly recorded. And the agency's flood of leaks to the Times continued.

The other shoe dropped on November 2, when the Washington Post revealed, in a front-page story, the destinations to which many terrorists were transported by the CIA's formerly-secret airlines--a covert network of detention centers in Europe and Thailand [. . .]

The Post's story caused a sensation, as the "current and former intelligence officials" who leaked the classified information to the newspaper must have expected it would. The leakers evidently included officials from the highest levels of the CIA; the Post noted that the facilities' existence and location "are known to only a handful of officials in the United States and, usually, only to the president and a few top intelligence officers in each host country." Further, the paper said that it "is not publishing the names of the Eastern European countries involved in the covert program, at the request of senior U.S. officials." So this top-secret leak was apparently not a rogue operation. On the contrary, it appears to have been consistent with the agency's longstanding campaign against the Bush administration, which plainly has been sanctioned (if not perpetrated) by officials at the agency's highest levels.

Both the Post and the leaking officials knew that publication of the secret-prisons leak would damage American interests [. . .]

The damage foreseen by CIA leakers quickly came to pass. Anti-American elements in a number of European countries demanded investigations into the use of their countries' airports and air space by civilian airlines that are known or suspected CIA fronts. In Spain, the foreign minister testified before a parliamentary committee that no laws were broken in what allegedly were CIA-linked civilian landings in Majorca. But that site will be closed to the agency in the future [. . .]

The twin leaks to the Times and the Post have severely impaired the agency's ability to carry out renditions, transport prisoners, and maintain secret detention facilities. It is striking that top-level CIA officials are evidently willing to do serious damage to their own agency's capabilities and operations for the sake of harming the Bush administration and impeding administration policies with which they disagree.

The CIA is an agency in crisis. Perhaps, though, there is a ray of hope: the agency has referred the secret-prison leak to the Post to the Justice Department for investigation and possible criminal prosecution. It is a bitter irony that until now, the only one out of dozens of CIA-related leaks known to have resulted in a criminal investigation was the Valerie Plame disclosure, which was trivial in security terms, but unique in that it helped, rather than hurt, the Bush administration.

The Iraq war may help get the ball rolling. The four nations who meet in Northeast Asia — China, Russia, Japan, and Korea — have been watching our Iraq travails with cold eyes, and coming to their own conclusions.

Tokyo's blunt-speaking Governor Shintaro Ishihara recently voiced some of his own conclusions out loud:

If tension between the United States and China heightens, if each side pulls the trigger, though it may not be stretched to nuclear weapons, and the wider hostilities expand, I believe America cannot win as it has a civic society that must adhere to the value of respecting lives... U.S. ground forces, with the exception of the Marines, are extremely incompetent and would be unable to stem a Chinese conventional attack... China would not hesitate to use nuclear weapons against Asian and American cities — even at the risk of a massive U.S. retaliation... The U.S. military could not counter a wave of millions of Chinese soldiers prepared to die in any onslaught against U.S. forces. After 2,000 casualties the U.S. military would be forced to withdraw. Therefore, we need to consider other means to counter China. The step we should be taking against China, I believe, is economic containment.

Mr. Ishihara's views are probably those of most East Asian observers, and also of observers in nations like Australia and the Philippines. The logical consequence will be a quiet effort by these nations to build up their own militaries independent of the U.S. China will beef up her own forces when she sees this happening, and a merry old arms race will be under way. With Russia grimly conscious of her weakness in Siberia, the Chinese bumptious with economic prowess, post-Hiroshima pacifism going out of style fast in Japan, and North Korea gibbering off quietly in a corner, there is plenty of kindling here.

And Ishihara's main point is of course correct. Our squeamish, casualty-averse, punctiliously legalistic approach to conflict would not serve us well if push came to shove with China. Cao jian ren ming is the Chinese idiom: "To treat human life as so much straw." It is in that spirit we should expect the Chinese to fight, to take and inflict casualties. If the balloon goes up in Northeast Asia and we are such fools as to get involved, we shall learn some bitter lessons very fast.

CONSCRIPTING FACTS

A note in "The Week" memorializing the late Gen. William Westmoreland (August 8) states that Westmoreland "was leading an army of draftees against guerrillas who were the clients of nuclear superpowers." In fact, two thirds of Vietnam-era veterans volunteered for the military. Draftees made up only 25 percent of American forces in Vietnam and accounted for 30 percent of American combat deaths there. By comparison, 66 percent of the Americans who fought in World War II were conscripts.

The "army of draftees" canard is a commonly held myth about the Vietnam War, but not one that should have escaped the attention of NR's editors.

Scott Swett
Falls Church, Va.

As it happens, the most comprehensive and convincing case for the use of force in Iraq has been made by a government intellectual, Kenneth M. Pollack. From 1995 to 1996 and from 1999 to 2001, Pollack served in the Clinton Administration as director for Gulf affairs at the National Security Council; before that, he was a military analyst of the Persian Gulf region for the C.I.A. More effectively than Dick Cheney or Paul Wolfowitz or any other of the hawkish big thinkers in the Administration, Pollack, in his book "The Threatening Storm," presents in almost rueful terms the myriad reasons that an aggressive policy toward Iraq now is the least bad of our alternatives. As Bush did at the U.N., Pollack carefully describes the Stalinist character of Saddam's state: the pervasive use of torture to terrorize and subdue the citizenry and insure the loyalty of the Army and the security apparatus; the acts of genocide and ethnic cleansing; the use of chemical weapons on neighbors and his own citizens; the sponsorship of terrorist groups; the refusal to relinquish weapons of mass destruction despite the humanitarian and economic cost the Iraqis pay through international embargo. We are reminded, too, of Saddam's vision of himself as the modern Saladin, the modern Nebuchadnezzar II, who (after massacring the Kurds, invading Kuwait, and attacking the marsh Arabs of the south) vows to "liberate" Jerusalem, vanquish the United States, and rule over a united Arab world. Saddam is not a man of empty promises. His territorial aggression is a matter of record, his nuclear ambitions are clear.

Unlike the President, Pollack dignifies all possible objections and what-ifs with answers. For example, he concedes that North Korea and Iran are, in some ways, even greater and more obvious threats than Iraq, but he carefully shows why the regional politics of northern Asia require a different tack and why Iran, with its more dynamic, grass-roots politics, is far likelier to undergo a homegrown revolution or reform than Iraq, where politics of any kind are not permitted.

The United States has been wrong, politically and morally, about Iraq more than once in the past; Washington has supported Saddam against Iran and overlooked some of his bloodiest adventures. The price of being wrong yet again could be incalculable. History will not easily excuse us if, by deciding not to decide, we defer a reckoning with an aggressive totalitarian leader who intends not only to develop weapons of mass destruction but also to use them.

Saddam's abdication, or a military coup, would be a godsend; his sudden conversion to the wisdom of disarmament almost as good. It is a fine thing to dream. But, assuming such dreams are not realized, a return to a hollow pursuit of containment will be the most dangerous option of all.

During the prelude to the war in Iraq, I remember watching Finkielkraut on television. A participant in a round-table discussion about American arrogance, Finkielkraut, head down, hands spiraling in circles was doing his utmost to show his fellow discussants that the real issue at stake was not American arrogance but civilization and the belief in civilization. As he proceeded, his frustration mounting with each befuddled reply from the other participants, he finally came to the clincher: America, he said, still knows how to do great things in the name of civilization; we Europeans have forgotten ourselves. This, in a nutshell, is Finkielkraut’s argument.

He has a lot to say, but it appears that France isn't ready to listen - that his France has already surrendered to a blinding, "false discourse" that conceals the stark truth of its situation. The things he is saying to us in the course of our conversation, he repeatedly emphasizes, are not things he can say in France anymore. It's impossible, perhaps even dangerous, to say these things in France now. [. . .]

"And then there are the lyrics of the rap songs. Very troubling lyrics. A real call to revolt. There's one called Dr. R., I think, who sings: `I piss on France, I piss on De Gaulle' and so on. These are very violent declarations of hatred for France. All of this hatred and violence is now coming out in the riots. To see them as a response to French racism is to be blind to a broader hatred: the hatred for the West, which is deemed guilty of all crimes. France is being exposed to this now."

In other words, as you see it, the riots aren't directed at France, but at the entire West?

"No, they are directed against France as a former colonial power, against France as a European country. Against France, with its Christian or Judeo-Christian tradition." [. . .]

The danger he wishes to stand up to today, in light of the riots, is the growing hatred for the West and its penetration into the French education system. [. . .]

"We are witness to an Islamic radicalization that must be explained in its entirety before we get to the French case, to a culture that, instead of dealing with its problems, searches for an external guilty party. It's easier to find an external guilty party. It's tempting to tell yourself that in France you're neglected, and to say, `Gimme, gimme.' It hasn't worked like that for anyone. It can't work."

Post-colonialmindset

But what appears to disturb Finkielkraut even more than this "hatred for the West," is what he sees as its internalization in the French education system, and the identification with it by French intellectuals. In his view, this identification and internalization - which are expressed in shows of understanding for the sources of the violence and in the post-colonial mindset that is permeating the education system - are threatening not only France as a whole, but the country's Jews, too, because they are creating an infrastructure for the new anti-Semitism.

"In the United States, too, we're witnessing an Islamization of the blacks. It was Louis Farrakhan, in America, who asserted for the first time that the Jews played a central role in creating slavery. And the main spokesman for this theology in France today is Dieudonne [a black stand-up artist, who caused an uproar with his anti-Semitic statements - D.M.]. Today he is the true patron of anti-Semitism in France, and not Le Pen's National Front. [. . .]

["]The same is true of slavery. It began long before the West. In fact, what sets the West apart when it comes to slavery is that it was the one to eliminate it. The elimination of slavery is a European and American thing. But this truth about slavery cannot be taught in schools. [. . .]

["]And I have been just horrified by these acts, which kept repeating themselves, and horrified even more by the understanding with which they were received in France. These people were treated like rebels, like revolutionaries. This is the worst thing that could happen to my country. And I'm very miserable because of it. Why? Because the only way to overcome it is to make them feel ashamed. Shame is the starting point of ethics. But instead of making them feel ashamed, we gave them legitimacy. They're `interesting.' They're `the wretched of the earth.'

"Imagine for a moment that they were whites, like in Rostock in Germany. Right away, everyone would have said: `Fascism won't be tolerated.' When an Arab torches a school, it's rebellion. When a white guy does it, it's fascism. I'm `color blind.' Evil is evil, no matter what color it is. And this evil, for the Jew that I am, is completely intolerable. [. . ."]

Finkielkraut, as his name indicates, is himself the child of an immigrant family: His parents came to France from Poland; their parents perished at Auschwitz. In recent years, his Judaism has become a central theme in his writing, too, especially since the start of the second intifada and the rise in anti-Semitism in France. He is one of the leaders of the struggle against anti-Semitism in France, and also one of the most prominent supporters of Israel and its policies, in the face of Israel's many critics in France.

His standing as a key spokesperson within the Jewish community in France has grown, particularly since he began hosting a weekly talk show on the JCR Jewish radio station, one of four Jewish stations in the country. On this program, Finkielkraut discusses current events; for the past two weeks, the riots in the suburbs were naturally the main topic. Because of his standing as one of the most widely heard Jewish intellectuals within France's Jewish community, his perspective on the events will certainly have an influence on the way in which they are perceived and understood among French Jewry - and perhaps also on the future of the relationship between the Jewish and Muslim communities. [. . .]

"But imagine that you're running a restaurant, and you're anti-racist, and you think that all people are equal, and you're also Jewish. In other words, talking about inequality between the races is a problem for you. And let's say that a young man from the suburbs comes in who wants to be a waiter. He talks the talk of the suburbs. You won't hire him for the job. It's very simple. You won't hire him because it's impossible. He has to represent you and that requires discipline and manners, and a certain way of speaking. And I can tell you that French whites who are imitating the code of behavior of the suburbs - and there is such a thing - will run into the same exact problem. The only way to fight discrimination is to restore the requirements, the educational seriousness. This is the only way. But you're not allowed to say that, either. I can't. It's common sense, but they prefer to propound the myth of `French racism.' It's not right.

"We live today in an environment of a `perpetual war on racism' and the nature of this anti-racism also needs to be examined. Earlier, I heard someone on the radio who was opposed to Interior Minister Sarkozy's decision to expel anyone who doesn't have French citizenship and takes part in the riots and is arrested. And what did he say? That this was `ethnic cleansing.' During the war in Yugoslavia I fought against the ethnic cleansing of Muslims in Bosnia. Not a single French Muslim organization stood by our side. They bestirred themselves solely to support the Palestinians. And to talk about `ethnic cleansing' now? There was a single person killed in the riots. Actually, there were two [more], but it was an accident. They weren't being chased, but they fled to an electrical transformer even though the warning signs on it were huge.

"But I think that the lofty idea of `the war on racism' is gradually turning into a hideously false ideology. And this anti-racism will be for the 21st century what communism was for the 20th century. A source of violence. Today, Jews are attacked in the name of anti-racist discourse: the separation fence, `Zionism is racism.' [. . ."]

While many intellectuals perceive the latest events as deriving from insufficient openness to the "other," Finkielkraut actually sees them as proof that cultural openness is doomed to end in disaster. [. . .]

"This means that what we're seeing today is actually the failure of the `nice' post-republican model. But the problem with this model is that it is fueled by its own failures: Every fiasco is a reason to become even more extreme. The school will become even `nicer.' When really, given what we're seeing, greater strictness and more exacting standards are the minimum that we need to ask for. If not, before long we'll have `courses in crime.' [. . .]

"The problem is that they need to regard themselves as French. If the immigrants say `the French' when they're referring to the whites, then we're lost. If their identity is located somewhere else and they're only in France for utilitarian reasons, then we're lost. I have to admit that the Jews are also starting to use this phrase. I hear them saying `the French' and I can't stand it. I say to them, `If for you France is a utilitarian matter, but your identity is Judaism, then be honest with yourselves: You have Israel.' This is really a bigger problem: We're living in a post-national society in which for everyone the state is just utilitarian, a big insurance company. This is an extremely serious development.

"But if they have a French identity card, then they're French. And if not, they have the right to go. They say, `I'm not French. I live in France and I'm also in a bad economic state.' No one's holding them here. And this is precisely where the lie begins. Because if it were the neglect and poverty, then they would go somewhere else. But they know very well that anywhere else, and especially in the countries from whence they came, their situation would be worse, as far as rights and opportunities go." [. . .]

"This feeling, that they are not French, isn't something they get from school. In France, as you perhaps know, even children who are in the country illegally are still registered for school. There's something surprising, something paradoxical, here: The school could call the police, since the child is in France illegally. Yet the illegality isn't taken into account by the school. So there are schools and computers everywhere, too. But then the moment comes when an effort must be made. And the people that are fomenting the riots aren't prepared to make this effort. Ever.

"Take the language, for example. You say they are third generation. So why do they speak French the way they do? It's butchered French - the accent, the words, the syntax. Is it the school's fault? The teachers' fault?" [. . .]

"This problem is the problem of all the countries of Europe. In Holland, they've been confronting it since the murder of Theo van Gogh. The question isn't what is the best model of integration, but just what sort of integration can be achieved with people who hate you." [. . .]

"I don't know. I'm despairing. Because of the riots and because of their accompaniment by the media. The riots will subside, but what does this mean? There won't be a return to quiet. It will be a return to regular violence. So they'll stop because there is a curfew now, and the foreigners are afraid and the drug dealers also want the usual order restored. But they'll gain support and encouragement for their anti-republican violence from the repulsive discourse of self-criticism over their slavery and colonization. So that's it: There won't be a return to quiet, but a return to routine violence." [. . .]

"No, I've lost. As far as anything relating to the struggle over school is concerned, I've lost. It's interesting, because when I speak the way I'm speaking now, a lot of people agree with me. Very many. But there's something in France - a kind of denial whose origin lies in the bobo, in the sociologists and social workers - and no one dares say anything else. This struggle is lost. I've been left behind."

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

This book grew out of a film we made for the BBC television program Panorama, and we would like to thank Roger Bolton, Panorama's editor, for the encouragement and advice he gave us at that time, and for the understanding that he, and others at the BBC, have shown since.

Thanks are due to so many people who helped in the actual research of this book that we cannot list all of them here. Considerations of space aside, many felt free to talk only with a promise of anonymity.

Among those who can be mentioned, however, we must record our gratitude to the staff of the Public Record Office, the Imperial War Museum, Churchill College, Cambridge, the U.S. Army Public Affairs Department, Edgewood Arsenal, all of whom assisted with documents and advice. The Church of Scientology also made available to us documents they had unearthed in their campaign against chemical warfare. [. . . ]

Robert Harris wrote chapters one through five of this book; Jeremy Paxman wrote chapters six through ten. The authors collaborated on chapter eleven.

INTRODUCTION

A Higher Form of Killing was the first book either of us ever wrote. It was published in 1982, fared reasonably well, was translated into German, and duly passed into honorable obscurity about a decade ago. We never expected to return to the subject.

But chemical and biological weapons have assumed a horrible importance again. Indeed, they are probably more of a threat to the security of the world now than they were twenty years ago, when America's decision to develop a new generation of "binary" chemical weapons first prompted our interest in their history. Astonishingly, it seems likely that more people were killed by poison gas in the 1980s than in any decade since the First World War--as many as 20,000 in the Iran-Iraq War alone. A type of weapons which most military experts thought to be obsolete, and which three generations of arms negotiators have sought to outlaw, has made a comeback--and with a vengeance.

Chemical and biological weapons (CBW)--frequently, and not inaccurately, described as "the poor man's atomic bomb"--are instruments of mass destruction that were once within the reach only of the world's most sophisticated nations. But the proliferation of technology has now made them readily available to such secondary powers as Iraq, Iran, Syria, Libya, and North Korea. Indeed, Japanese terrorists have managed to manufacture one of the most deadly of all the nerve agents--sarin--in their own private facility. After the attacks on America of September 11, 2001, President George W. Bush declared that the world was "at war with terrorism." It is, regrettably, fairly likely that at some point in the course of this "war," the terrorists will try to strike back with at least one of the weapons described in this book. Five people have already died from weapons-grade anthrax poisoning in the United States. It is not, at the time of writing, clear where that anthrax came from, or who used it. But there are worryingly large quantities of weaponized anthrax in existence. The collapse of the Soviet Union, for example, has finally revealed the full extent of the Kremlin's CBW arsenal. It must be regarded as a serious possibility that some of this material has found its way into new hands. [. . . ]

Ever since the first gas attack during the First World War, man has attempted to come to terms with the impulse that led him to develop these weapons. The provisions of the Biological Warfare Convention of 1972, and, most recently, of the Chemical Warfare Convention of 1997, have done much to outlaw gas and germ warfare. Yet the specter, somehow, has never entirely gone away. Why this should be so is one of the recurrent themes of this book.

We have not rewritten or revised the ten chapters that form the bulk of A Higher Form of Killing. No doubt if we were embarking on it today, we would approach the subject differently. Here and there, new facts have come to light--for example about the extent of testing on human volunteers at Porton Down in the 1950s--but these have not substantially altered the story as we originally told it. And we would probably not have been quite so naive. Looking back, there is an occasional tone of astonished outrage in these pages which seems to belong to another era. This is no doubt partly because we were younger, but partly, also, because we assumed we were writing about weapons that were on their way to becoming obsolete. It never occurred to use that less than two years after this book appeared, Saddam Hussein would be using mustard gas to turn back waves of Iranian infantry, let alone that Iraq would end up filling Scud missiles with anthrax to fire at Israeli civilians.

Therefore, the brief eleventh chapter we have added, to sketch in the principal events of the past two decades, we have called "Full Circle." The world, it turns out, has not heard the last of those terrible weapons, which first made their appearance on a warm spring afternoon in France nearly ninety years ago.

Robert Harris,
Jeremy Paxman
December 2001

[. . . ]

ELEVEN
Full Circle

In the end, as the twentieth century drew to a close, it was not a new generation of weapons that the world had to worry about; it was the old.

In the spring of 1984, a familiar and terrible type of fatality began to reappear in the casualty lists of the latest Middle East war. A United Nations report described one typical victim, an Iranian soldier: "Sourab Norooz, age 24, exposed in [March 1984]* at Majnoon . . .* crepitation [a grating, crackling sound]* due to gas in the chest wall, probably resulting from gas gangrene . . .* The patient died that night." The symptomatology might have come straight from an autopsy report written by a surgeon of the Royal Army Medical Corps on the western front in 1917. Sourab Norooz's death was one of the first pieces of evidence from the Iran-Iraq War proving that Saddam Hussein was using mustard gas.

For twenty years, Iraq, under Saddam's leadership, has held up Caliban's mirror to the West. Almost every major chemical and biological weapon devised by the British, Germans, and Americans since the First World War has been tested, manufactured, and, in many cases, used, by a power that, in the 1970s, was regarded as no particular military threat to anyone. Every warning about the ease with which chemical and biological warfare (CBW) weapons could proliferate has been proved true by Saddam. Not only was the original technology he exploited Western; so were the ingredients he used. Through a network of front companies acting on behalf of the Iraqi State Enterprise for the Production of Pesticides (SEPP), the Iraqis bought all the plant, equipment, and chemicals they needed on the world market. An American company provided the blueprints for Iraq's first poison gas plant in 1978. By 1979, the factory--near Akashat, in the northwest of the country--had a production capacity of 2,000 tons a year. The protective suits used by its employees came from Britain. German and French companies were in the forefront of supplying the sophisticated equipment needed for three other factories: Salman Pak, Al Fallujah, and Samarra. One relatively small Dutch company, Melchamie, exported literally thousands of tons of precursor chemicals to SEPP. Sometimes the firms involved knew what was going on and turned a blind eye; often they were ignorant. As Richard Butler, subsequently the head of the U.N. Special Commission on Disarmanent [sic] (UNSCOM), explained, "the same fermenter used to make anthrax could be rinsed out and used to make beer, and the same equipment used to make the nerve agents sarin and tabun could be used to make aspirin tablets." By the time Western intelligence woke up to what was happening, in early 1984, it was already too late. Samarra alone, which covered a site of some twenty-five square kilometers, had become the largest chemical weapons facility in the world.

Iraq's use of chemical warfare (CW) was initially defensive and followed a classic tactical pattern. Facing superior numbers of Iranian infantry, advancing in waves, the Iraqi air force dropped airburst bombs, each containing 64 liters of mustard gas, to contaminate the maximum area of ground. Two separate Iranian offensives, in August and in November 1983, were dealt with by the use of mustard, killing or wounding more than 3,000 of the attacking troops. A further 2,500 were contaminated the following spring.

Mustard gas, however, was merely the beginning. On March 17, 1984, at Basra, Saddam achieved the dubious distinction, avoided even by Adolf Hitler, of becoming the first national leader in history to authorize the use of nerve gas on the battlefield. The agent used was, appropriately, the original Nazi discovery: tabun (GA). Major General Maher Abdul Rashid, commander of the Iraqi Third Corps near Basra, was unabashed about its employment: "If you gave me a pesticide to throw at these worms of insects [the Iranians]* to make them breathe and become exterminated, I'd use it." The Iraqis also made extensive use of sarin (GB) and, in May 1985, began a successful program to develop the heavy contaminant, VX. With its CW factories now beginning full-scale production, Iraq went on the offensive. The results were devastating. According to the U.S. State Department, "20,000 Iranian soldiers were killed in Iraqi chemical attacks from 1983-1988." In addition, an untold number of civilians--certainly hundreds, probably thousands--were gassed in an attack on the Kurdish village of Halabja in March 1988, during which the Iraqi air force dropped 100-liter canister bombs containing a "cocktail" of agents--mustard, sarin, tabun, VX--"clearly intended to complicate the task of treating the Halabja victims," according to one Western doctor who studied the atrocity.

Given that by 1988, Iraq had achieved roughly the level of technical sophistication in CW that the major powers had attained in the 1940s, it was perhaps not surprising that Saddam Hussein next embarked on a biological weapons program of a similar vintage. Like the British in the Second World War, the Iraqis were attracted by the possibilities of anthrax and botulinus toxin. Tests began in March 1988 using rockets and bombs against live animals--sheep, monkeys, and donkeys. These were successful and biological agents duly began to be manufactured on a large scale. At Salman Pak, equipment acquired from German companies was used to produce anthrax. Iraq has also admitted to producing 190 liters of concentrated ricin solution at the same facility. Botulinus toxin was produced at the al-Taji complex just north of Baghdad. An incapacitating agent called aflatoxin, which causes vomiting and internal bleeding, was manufactured at Baghdad's Agricultural and Water Research Center. But by far the largest biological warfare (BW) factory was at al-Hakam in the western desert. Here, between 1989 and 1990, half a million liters of BW agents were produced.

As with the Iraqi chemical weapons program, Western intelligence was slow to realize the scale of the threat posed. It was not until two months after the Iraqi invasion of Kuwait, in October 1990, that the Pentagon was warned that the Iraqi BW stockpile consisted of "at least one metric ton of dried anthrax and up to 15 kgs of botulinum toxin" (both huge underestimates, the former by a factor of 8, the latter by a factor of 1,000). On December 1, 1990, less than two months before the start of the Persian Gulf War, Iraq began arming its biological weapons in preparation for the coming struggle. This arsenal, by Iraq's subsequent admission, consisted of 166 aircraft bombs (50 loaded with anthrax, 100 with botulinus toxin, and 16 with aflatoxin) and 25 Scud B missile warheads (10 loaded with anthrax, 13 with botulinus toxin, and two with aflatoxin). On December 23, the weapons were dispersed to five different sites and held ready for use. Around this time, the Iraqis also experimented with spray tanks capable of releasing up to 2,000 liters of anthrax over a target area.

The Western response was immediate, and betrayed the coalition's rising anxiety. Four days after the Iraqi deployment, the United States announced that it would begin vaccinating all its troops in Saudi Arabia. The following day, Britain followed suit. On January 9, the U.S. secretary of state, James Baker, met the Iraqi foreign minister, Tariq Aziz, and handed him a letter warning that "if the conflict involves your use of chemical or biological weapons against our forces, the American people will demand vengeance. We have the means to exact it." Baker subsequently explained that he "purposely left the impression that the use of chemical or biological agents by Iraq would invite nuclear retaliation."

Just as Hitler's failure to use chemical weapons in the Second World War is to some extent a mystery, so we still cannot be sure why Saddam Hussein decided against using his CBW arsenal in the Gulf conflict. That he had the munitions prepared is beyond dispute. Apart from the Scuds loaded with biological warheads, Iraq is known to have had another thirty Scuds chemically armed, principally with sarin. After the war, the United Nations destroyed a total of 38,000 munitions either loaded with, or capable of being loaded with, CW agents. Had Saddam authorized the use of biologically armed Scuds against Israel, the effects upon a densely populated area would have been appalling. According to a Pentagon report, given "ideal weather conditions and an effective dispersal mechanism," a single Scud warhead leaded with botulinus could theoretically contaminate an area of 3,700 square kilometers. To put that figure in proportion, the "primary lethal area" of a Hiroshima-sized atom bomb is ten square kilometers. Even if the agent had not been properly dispersed--indeed, even if it had not been dispersed at all--the psychological impact would still have been immense.

The best guess must be that Saddam did, indeed, fear nuclear retaliation, either from the United States, or--more likely--from Israel. But deterrence cuts both ways. The strategic analyst Avigdor Haselkorn has made a compelling argument that the real reason the United States failed to pursue its advantage at the end of the Gulf War and advance on Baghdad was its fear that Saddam, if cornered, would have had nothing to lose by reaching for a weapon of last resort. He might have used CBW against coalition forces. More likely, he would have made a chemical or biological missile strike against Israel, courting a nuclear response that, even if it destroyed him, would at least have given him the satisfaction of knowing that the whole of the Middle East was his funeral pyre.

If this analysis is correct, then Saddam Hussein's current determination to preserve his arsenal of poisons becomes much more understandable. CBW may already have saved his regime twice--first, in the 1980s, in his war against the numerically superior Iranians; second, in the 1990s, in his war against the numerically superior Western coalition. Why not a third time? The unsettling truth is that much of Iraq's CBW arsenal remains intact. "In Desert Storm," according to General Charles Horner, U.S. air commander during the Gulf War, "Saddam Hussein had more chemical weapons than I could bomb. . . .* I could not have begun to take out all of his chemical storage--there are just not enough sorties in the day." Not one of Iraq's chemical and biological missile warheads was destroyed by coalition bombing. After the war, the U.N. weapons inspectors' attempts even to locate, let alone eradicate, Saddam's stockpiles of gas and germs, were consistently frustrated, and finally ended in August 1998 when Iraq withdrew all cooperation from the U.N. team. Since then, it may be regarded as almost certain that Iraq has continued to develop CBW, possibly even to the extent of experimenting on prisoners held at the Abu Ghraib prison in Baghdad. According to Richard Butler:

Iraqi defectors we'd interviewed told us that Iraq tested biological agents on Iranian soldiers taken prisoner during the Iran-Iraq war of the 1980s, as well as on the Abu Ghraib inmates during 1994 and 1995. To this day, the full facts are obscure. But when we sent an inspection team early in 1998 to the prison to search for the documentary evidence, all the inmate files were there except those covering the two crucial years. And when Iraq realized what we were looking for, it abruptly terminated the whole inspection.

This is Saddam Hussein's regime: cruel, lying, intimidating, and determined to retain weapons of mass destruction--weapons capable of killing thousands, even millions, at a single blow.

In Butler's view, "it would be foolish in the extreme" not to assume that Saddam has spent the past three and a half years "adding to the chemical and biological warfare weapons he concealed during the UNSCOM inspection period."

Nineteen ninety-one was an annus horribilis for Western intelligence with regard to biological weapons. They were forced to accept that they had been caught completely by surprise by the scale of the Iraqi BW effort--a program on which Saddam is estimated to have spent $100 million. [. . . ]

There is no doubting the seriousness of the South African effort. Team members have testified that they were given carte blanche by the government to examine all types of unconventional weapons of mass destruction. Front companies had been set up to acquire scientific information from around the world. South Africans were said to have visited Saddam Hussein's mustard gas factory. Fortunately, much of the evidence that emerged about Project Coast demonstrated that its sinister intent was allied to dramatic incompetence. Nevertheless, British and American intelligence agencies were sufficiently alarmed about the knowledge carried in the head of the project's leader that they achieved the astonishing feat of persuading President Mandela to keep him on the government payroll. Both London and Washington had discovered that this individual was making visits to Libya, which was believed to be trying to develop its own biological warfare program.

The image of a footloose, amoral scientist, skilled in developing weapons of mass destruction and prepared to sell himself to the highest bidder, is usually the stuff of airport thrillers. But in this case, reality has kept pace with fiction. The collapse of the Soviet Union left hundreds of scientists involved in its biological weapons program surplus to requirements. Some were re-employed in legitimate civilian industries. Some were paid a pension by the Americans in return for their discretion. But as the plants at which they worked rusted away, others found that curious visitors began calling. American diplomats were warned in 1997 that Iranian delegations had offered biologists new careers developing a biological warfare capability in the Islamic republic. Most seem to have declined the invitations. Others, whose salaries had not been paid for months, apparently found the lure of a steady income irresistible. The Soviet defector Ken Alibek believes that mercenary biologists could have taken smallpox to Iran, Iraq, Libya, Syria, North Korea, India, Israel, or Pakistan.

The last twenty years have not been an entirely gloomy story. In 1997, the Chemical Weapons convention (CWC) finally came into force--the latest and by far the most determined attempt in history to stamp out poison gas. To date, 174 nations, including the United States, Britain, Russia, and China, have undertaken "never under any circumstances to develop, produce, otherwise acquire, stockpile or retain chemical weapons," and never to use them. The CWC has 200 inspectors charged with verifying that the rules are being observed.

Unfortunately, the CWC has not been signed by a number of those countries--Iraq, Syria, Libya, North Korea--that give the world community the most cause for concern. And one state that has signed--Iran--nevertheless continues to develop a chemical warfare capability.

Proliferation of chemical and biological weapons is now perhaps the most urgent problem facing Western military planners. Apart from Iraq--which stands in an appalling category of its own as far as CBW is concerned--the quartet of Iran, Syria, Libya, and North Korea now appear to be cooperating in what Avigdor Haselkorn calls a Club MAD for the development of weapons of mass destruction. Iranian oil wealth has helped enable North Korea to develop a sophisticated long-range missile program. Tehran has also provided Syria with financial assistance to enable it to threaten Israel by buying North Korean Scuds. Libya has expressed a desire to buy North Korean missiles with a range of 1,000 kilometers. All four countries have CBW programs in various stages of development. North Korea is believed to have a stockpile of 300 to 1,000 tons of CW agents, including nerve gases, and also to be experimenting with anthrax, cholera, bubonic plague, and smallpox. Syria is producing chemical weapons at three sites, has employed cyanide against a rebellion by Sunni Muslims in 1982 (according to Amnesty International) and is "pursuing the development" of biological weapons. Iran--which made limited use of mustard and cyanide gases in its war with Iraq--has continued to develop chemical weapons, has a BW manufacturing capability, and is alleged to have stocks of anthrax and botulinus. Libya used chemical weapons against troops from Chad in 1987, has an underground CW production facility, and appears to be trying to acquire the means to manufacture biological agents.

All four countries have a reputation for sponsoring terrorism, and it is this that is now most exercising governments around the world. [. . . ]

The most frightening aspect of all these attacks--apart from the sheer malice and contempt for human life that inspired them--is the relative ease with which they were mounted. And yet the perpetrators, essentially, were amateurs. If professionally trained terrorists, backed by the resources of a CBW-capable state, were to mount similar attacks, the results could be devastating. "We don't consider it a crime if we tried to have nuclear, biological, and chemical weapons," declared Osama bin Laden in 1999, and there have been intelligence reports that the Al-Qaeda organization has acquired botulinus toxin from a laboratory in the Czech Republic, paying $7,500 a vial. Anthrax "in some form" is also said to have been obtained from an Indonesian pharmaceutical company. One of the hijackers who helped carry out the suicide attacks of September 11 is known to have inquired about purchasing a cropdusting aircraft--a perfect means of dispersing chemical and biological agents over a target population. A terrorist who was infected with smallpox, and who sought contact with as many people as possible before succumbing to the disease, would be the ultimate walking suicide bomb. In one simulated exercise, undertaken by officials in Washington in 1999, the progress of smallpox was tracked as it spread through an unvaccinated American population. Within two months, 15,000 people were dead; within a year, the figure was 80 million.

In the autumn of 2001, delegates gathered in Geneva to try once again to wrestle with the problem of how to control biological weapons. The Biological Warfare Convention (BWC) of 1972, which had been intended to ban biological warfare, is now thirty years old. Unlike the agreements designed to control chemical weapons, the BWC contains no provisions for outside inspections to check that countries are complying. That it does not is largely the fault of the United States. As late as July 2001, long after United Nations inspectors has uncovered the full scale of Iraqi biological warfare capacity and less than three months before the outbreak of anthrax terrorism, America was arguing that to insist upon verification arrangements would be to expose it unfairly to prying foreigners.

The picture in 2002 is in some respects more worrying than it was in 1972. [. . . ]

As for the traditional problem with biological weapons--how to deliver them--there are signs that that, too, may be nearer a solution. The Soviet Union considered the delivery problem nearly solved, with intercontinental missiles capable of scattering independently targetable biowarheads over numerous cities. Saddam Hussein developed--but mercifully never used--his "great equalizer" of biological missile warheads. The British Defense Ministry concluded at the start of the twenty-first century that well within thirty years rogue states would have missiles capable of reaching the United Kingdom carrying chemical or biological--or nuclear--warheads. In the end, the protection against biological weapons remains much what it has always been. Generals don't like them. Their effects are generally highly unpredictable. And--at least until a new, discriminating superbug is developed--the threat of nuclear retaliation must be supposed to be sufficiently awesome to deter most potential aggressors.

But deterrence rests upon rationality, and a lunatic may not care about the consequences of his actions. In the end, the only way to ensure disarmament is somehow to enforce it. That demands, first, a proper arms control regime, with provisions to allow international inspectors to call, unannounced, at any time. The United States's record in obstructing attempts to create such a system--born of rivalry between government departments, commercial pressure, and political arrogance--has not served it well. Enforcement also means, secondly, that those states that won't comply must somehow be placed in quarantine, must be constantly monitored, and prevented, as far as possible, from developing these terrible weapons of mass destruction.

Stating the aim is easy enough. But how is it to be achieved? By diplomacy? By sanctions? By military force? These promise to be the dominating questions in world politics over the coming months and years, as the international community continues its long struggle to eradicate what Fritz Haber called "a higher form of killing."

In the past our politicians offered us dreams of a better world. Now they promise to protect us from nightmares.

The most frightening of these is the threat of an international terror network. But just as the dreams were not true, neither are these nightmares.

In a new series, the Power of Nightmares explores how the idea that we are threatened by a hidden and organised terrorist network is an illusion.

It is a myth that has spread unquestioned through politics, the security services and the international media.

Since about that time, war had been literally continuous, though strictly speaking it had not always been the same war. For several months during his childhood there had been confused street fighting in London itself, some of which he remembered vividly. But to trace out the history of the whole period, to say who was fighting whom at any given moment, would have been utterly impossible, since no written record, and no spoken word, ever made mention of any other alignment than the existing one. At this moment, for example, in 1984 (if it was 1984), Oceania was at war with Eurasia and in alliance with Eastasia. In no public or private utterance was it ever admitted that the three powers had at any time been grouped along different lines. Actually, as Winston well knew, it was only four years since Oceania had been at war with Eastasia and in alliance with Eurasia. But that was merely a piece of furtive knowledge which he happened to possess because his memory was not satisfactorily under control. Officially the change of partners had never happened. Oceania was at war with Eurasia: therefore Oceania had always been at war with Eurasia. The enemy of the moment always represented absolute evil, and it followed that any past or future agreement with him was impossible.

The frightening thing, he reflected for the ten thousandth time as he forced his shoulders painfully backward (with hands on hips, they were gyrating their bodies from the waist, an exercise that was supposed to be good for the back muscles) -- the frightening thing was that it might all be true. If the Party could thrust its hand into the past and say of this or that event, it never happened -- that, surely, was more terrifying than mere torture and death?

The Party said that Oceania had never been in alliance with Eurasia. He, Winston Smith, knew that Oceania had been in alliance with Eurasia as short a time as four years ago. But where did that knowledge exist? Only in his own consciousness, which in any case must soon be annihilated. And if all others accepted the lie which the Party imposed -if all records told the same tale -- then the lie passed into history and became truth. 'Who controls the past,' ran the Party slogan, 'controls the future: who controls the present controls the past.' And yet the past, though of its nature alterable, never had been altered. Whatever was true now was true from everlasting to everlasting. It was quite simple. All that was needed was an unending series of victories over your own memory. 'Reality control', they called it: in Newspeak, 'doublethink'[.]

Orwell began supporting himself by writing book reviews for the New English Weekly until 1940. During World War II he was a member of the Home Guard and in 1941 began work for the BBC Eastern Service, mostly working on programmes to gain Indian and East Asian support for Britain's war efforts. He was well aware that he was shaping propaganda, and wrote that he felt like "an orange that's been trodden on by a very dirty boot".

Kennedy was shot dead in 1968 at Los Angeles' Ambassador Hotel by Sirhan Sirhan, a 25-year-old Palestinian immigrant who said he felt betrayed by Kennedy's support for Israel in the 1967 Mideast war. At the time, Kennedy was a Democratic senator and a presidential candidate.

The Kennedy assassin is serving a life sentence in a California state prison. His lawyers have suggested that if he was released from prison he could return to the Palestinian territories. Sirhan has been denied parole 10 times and prosecutors say his return to the West Bank could further enflame the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.

Saddam's 500-ton Uranium Stockpile

Thanks to Leakgate Special Counsel Patrick Fitzgerald's decision to indict "Scooter" Libby last week, Bush administration accuser Joe Wilson is once again the toast of Washington, D.C. - recycling the fifteen minutes of fame he first purchased in July 2003 with the claim that Bush lied about Iraq's plan to acquire uranium from Niger.

Why was Bush's uranium claim so important? Because if true, the mere attempt by the Iraqi dictator to acquire uranium would show that he had clear and incontrovertible plans to restart his nuclear program.

Maybe that's why the press seldom discusses the fact that Saddam already had a staggeringly large stockpile of uranium - 500 tons, to be exact.

And if his mere intention to acquire uranium was enough to justify fears of Saddam's nuclear ambition, what would the average person deduce from that fact that he'd already stockpiled a huge quantity of the bombmaking fuel?

In its May 22, 2004 edition, the New York Times confirmed a myriad of reports on Saddam's nuclear fuel stockpile - and revealed a chilling detail unknown to weapons inspectors before the war: that Saddam had begun to partially enrich his uranium stash.

The Times noted:

"The repository, at Tuwaitha, a centerpiece of Saddam Hussein's nuclear weapons program, . . . . holds more than 500 tons of uranium . . . . Some 1.8 tons is classified as low-enriched uranium."

Thomas B. Cochran, director of the nuclear program at the Natural Resources Defense Council, told the Times that "the low-enriched version could be useful to a nation with nuclear ambitions."

"A country like Iran," Mr. Cochran said, "could convert that into weapons-grade material with a lot fewer centrifuges than would be required with natural uranium."

The paper conceded that while Saddam's nearly 2 tons of partially enriched uranium was "a more potent form" of the nuclear fuel, it was "still not sufficient for a weapon.
Consulted about the low-enriched uranium discovery, however, Ivan Oelrich, a physicist at the Federation of American Scientists, told the Associated Press that if it was of the 3 percent to 5 percent level of enrichment common in fuel for commercial power reactors, the 1.8 tons could be used to produce enough highly enriched uranium to make a single nuclear bomb.

Luckily, Iraq didn't have even the small number of centrifuges necessary to get the job done.

Or did it?

The physicist tapped by Saddam to run his centrifuge program says that after the first Gulf War, the program was largely dismantled. But it wasn't destroyed.

In fact, according to what he wrote in his 2004 book, "The Bomb in My Garden," Dr. Mahdi Obeidi told U.S. interrogators: "Saddam kept funding the IAEC [Iraq Atomic Energy Commission] from 1991 ... until the war in 2003."

"I was developing the centrifuge for the weapons" right through 1997, he revealed.

And after that, Dr. Obeidi said, Saddam ordered him under penalty of death to keep the technology available to resume Iraq's nuke program at a moment's notice.

Dr. Obeidi said he buried "the full set of blueprints, designs - everything to restart the centrifuge program - along with some critical components of the centrifuge" under the garden of his Baghdad home.

"I had to maintain the program to the bitter end," he explained. All the while the Iraqi physicist was aware that he held the key to Saddam's continuing nuclear ambitions.

"The centrifuge is the single most dangerous piece of nuclear technology," Dr. Obeidi said in his book. "With advances in centrifuge technology, it is now possible to conceal a uranium enrichment program inside a single warehouse."

Consider: 500 tons of yellowcake stored at Saddam's old nuclear weapons plant, where he'd managed to partially enrich 1.8 tons. And the equipment and blueprints that could enrich enough uranium to make a bomb stored away for safekeeping. And all of it at the Iraqi dictator's disposal.

If the average American were aware of these undisputed facts, the debate over Iraq's weapons of mass destruction would have been decided long ago - in President Bush's favor.

One more detail that Mr. Wilson and his media backers don't like to discuss: the reason Niger was such a likely candidate for Saddam's uranium shopping spree.

Responding to the firestorm that erupted after Wilson's July 2003 column, Prime Minister Tony Blair told reporters:

"In case people should think that the whole idea of a link between Iraq and Niger was some invention, in the 1980s we know for sure that Iraq purchased round about 270 tons of uranium from Niger."

SPIEGEL: One of those troubling conflicts the world is concerned about is taking place in Iraq. In February 2003 in Munich, Germany's Foreign Minister Joschka Fischer confronted you on your case for the Iraq war by saying: "I am not convinced." Do you believe you have convinced the world that you were right on Iraq?

Rumsfeld: Oh, I wouldn't think so. It is hard for people to become convinced of something they don't want to be convinced of. If one looks at Afghanistan first and thinks about it four years ago: Al-Qaida was there, the Taliban was running the country, women couldn't go out, kids couldn't fly kites, they were killing people in the soccer stadium instead of playing soccer. Look at it today: Of course they have the narcotics and problems of corruption, but they have an elected president, the constitution is a purely Afghan constitution, they have a parliament, they have provincial elections, the refugees have returned, internally displaced people have gone home, the economy is growing at a good rate. It is a considerable success story but it's largely unnoticed.
Now, go to Iraq. I don't think that people are convinced there either. I doubt that they will be in two, three or four years. Fischer was so adamant in his position. On the other hand, I think it was a renowned Middle East scholar who said, that things are not good in Iraq, but they've never been better.

SPIEGEL: Today even a majority of Americans are opposed to the war in Iraq. What went wrong?

Rumsfeld: In Iraq, a couple of years ago, there were mass-graves in that country; they are going to be talked about in the trial of Saddam Hussein. Today they have a constitution, it's an Iraqi constitution; it's theirs. They are going to have an election on December 15th. Clearly, the Iraqi people are engaging in a political process. They are arguing, tugging and pulling. Even the Sunnis admit that they made a terrible mistake not participating and now they are leaning forward. There has been more participation registered on their part. Sunnis, Shiites and Kurds are all going to be engaged in the election process between now and December 15th. I think you'll see a successful election.

SPIEGEL: On a daily basis, though, there are terrorist attacks. Over 2,000 US soldiers have now been killed.

Rumsfeld: We thought there would be a spike in incidents prior to the October 15th referendum. There wasn't. There could be in December, however. But, increasingly, the pressure being put on the terrorists and the insurgents is working. They are capturing or killing large numbers of senior al-Qaida and Zarqawi-type people. Lately we put in a tip line, so that Iraqis can call in anonymously. They don't get any money for it, but they can call and say "Look, down the street two doors, there are some guys making bombs." And the number of tips being called in is increasing. The Iraqi security forces are being killed in high numbers by the insurgents and at a certain moment the Iraqis are not going to like it any more. It's their country.

SPIEGEL: Who are the insurgents primarily fighting against: the US or the Iraqi government?

Rumsfeld: The insurgents are not fighting the coalition, the insurgents are fighting the Iraqi security forces, they are fighting the Iraqi government that's been elected by the Iraqi people. Much to the disappointment of some people, I suspect that we are going to find in the months ahead that the process will work and that Iraq will become an important country with water resources, with intelligent people, with oil in a critical part of the world, that will have a more democratic system than its neighbors for the benefit of the region and the world.

SPIEGEL: But why are you losing public support at home?

Rumsfeld: That's always been true with wars. Go back and look at history. My Lord, Harry Truman who did a wonderful job as president -- even you might admit that. He contributed to the post World War II world structure and he left office with 23 percent approval rating.

SPIEGEL: Popularity, in other words, is not a reliable indicator?

Rumsfeld: My Lord, if you get up in the morning in a leadership position and you start chasing popularity polls! The center of gravity in the war in Iraq is not in Iraq. We are not going to lose battles; we're not going to lose skirmishes. Look, the places being fought are your country's public (editor's note: Germany) and our country's public and you (editor's note: the media) are the people that are affecting that. Over time, we'll get it right.

SPIEGEL: Should the US administration have acted differently to get the Sunnis involved in the process of building peace and democracy?

Rumsfeld: The critical task is to make all elements feel they are part of it. The way that country operated under Saddam Hussein was, if you didn't behave you got killed, you got thrown into prison, your family got killed. That's what held it together. Repression works. Now, with the constitution they are trying to fashion a piece of paper that will substitute for repression, that they can look at and say, "That's going to protect me." It's a big leap of faith to do that. The Sunnis were the minority that benefited from the regime of Saddam Hussein. They obviously concluded that they're going to lose out. They need to find a way to be confident, that, even though they are a minority, they'd be treated fairly and they'd be a part of it. It's taking them time to get there. Quite honestly the Sunni neighbors have not been anywhere near helpful. Maybe, because they were less enamored of a representative democratic system than some of the rest of us.

SPIEGEL: Which countries are you talking about?

Rumsfeld: Oh, just some of the Sunni neighbors.... Now they see that they have to keep the Sunnis in the game. So, I think it's coming. It is their country, it's not our country. They are going to have to find their way to it and it's a bumpy road. Democracy is a tough business. The suggestion, that there are some geniuses who could say "Oh, let's do it that way!" and having it a nice, smooth path is outrageous. History doesn't work that way. Look how long it took Germany after World War II to get itself on the right track.

SPIEGEL: Aren't you afraid that you will end up with a fundamentalist Iraq?

Rumsfeld: Anything is possible. It's their country and they are going to do what they do. But it would be a mistake and I don't think it will happen. Sure, I worry about lots of things. I sit down and make lists of all the terrible things that could happen.

SPIEGEL: You really do that?

Rumsfeld: You bet your life I do it and I've always done it. What can we do to prevent the worst from happening? Or if it does happen and it's out of our control, how can we mitigate it?

SPIEGEL: You once wrote in a memo: Are we losing or winning the war on terrorism? Have you come any closer to an answer?

Rumsfeld: I wrote a memo in October 2003 and I sent it to Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Dick Myers. I could see the data as to the numbers of people that we were capturing and killing. What I could not see were the number of people that were entering the business, going through the madrassas schools, being trained by people, receiving monetary contributions and being taught how to be a suicide-bomber. Those people are determined. They want to re-establish a caliphate. They want to knock off the moderate Muslim regimes. Where are we today with it? It is a very hard thing to know the answer, but there are a lot of very good signs, for example the number of senior people that continue to be tracked. It's a fact that Osama bin Laden has not been out on video for a hell of a long time. Maybe he's getting shy but he never was before.

SPIEGEL: Syria -- and Syrian leader Bashar al-Assad -- is under international pressure because of its alleged role in the assassination of the former Lebanese Prime Minister Hariri. Could Syria follow the Libyan path -- that of coming clear with its past and trying to engage with the Western world?

Rumsfeld: This is clearly something that is possible and certainly desirable. I am trying to climb inside the head of an individual like (Libyan leader Moammar) Gadhafi and figure out what would cause him to do that? There were some significant things that happened: The exposure of the A.Q. Khan (editor's note: the scientist behind the Pakistani nuclear weapons program who was found to have sold nuclear weapons technology to Libya among other countries) network, the adverse effects of being labeled a terrorist state, the persistence of the concern about the Pan Am aircraft that was shot down over Lockerbie, Scotland.
You look at Kim Jong Il -- what might cause him to take a different path? In the case of Syria, I used to meet with (Bashar al-Assad's) father (editor's note: former Syrian leader Hafez al-Assad) and I could pretty well put myself in his shoes and look at what the world looked like through his eyes. Today, it is a bit different. His son is now in power. What the dynamic would be that might cause him to decide to steer a different course is harder to know.

SPIEGEL: In the end Gadhafi came clean and was able to survive as the dictator of Libya. Maybe Bashar al-Assad too could survive?

Rumsfeld: If you look at history, there are lots of examples of how that could happen. One thing we know about authoritarian regimes is that they are highly centralised -- to use a euphemism for a few other words we could have selected. The goal as leader is to perpetuate the regime when you get up in the morning. It becomes if not an obsession, then a very high priority. Before a shifting of course can take place, they have to have concluded that doing so will perpetuate the regime.

SPIEGEL: How concerned are you about Iran?

Rumsfeld: All of us have to be concerned when a country that important, large and wealthy is disconnected from the normal interactions with the rest of the world. They obviously have certain ambitions, powers and military capabilities ...

SPIEGEL: ...and nuclear ambitions...

Rumsfeld: That's apparently what France, Germany, the UK and the International Atomic Energy Agency have concluded. Everyone wants to have the Iranians as part of the world community, but they aren't yet. Therefore there's less predictability and more danger.

SPIEGEL: The US is trying to make the case in the United Nations Security Council.

Rumsfeld: I would not say that. I thought France, Germany and the UK were working on that problem.

SPIEGEL: What kind of sanctions are we talking about?

Rumsfeld: I'm not talking about sanctions. I thought you, and the U.K. and France were.

SPIEGEL: You aren't?

Rumsfeld: I'm not talking about sanctions. You've got the lead. Well, lead!

SPIEGEL: You mean the Europeans.

Rumsfeld: Sure. My Goodness, Iran is your neighbour. We don't have to do everything!

SPIEGEL: We are in the middle of regime change in Germany...

Rumsfeld: ... that's hardly the phrase I would have selected.
…………….
SPIEGEL: Mr. Secretary, thank you very much for this interview.