Plagiarized UK Dossier and the Risks of War
Mr. Nicholas D. Kristof
The New York Times
229 West 43rd Street
New York, NY 10036-3959
Dear Mr. Kristof:
Your column this morning is excellent. Of course, for rhetorical reasons you may have given Secretary Powell rather too much credit for his "proof": the U.K. dossier seems to have been plagiarized from a dusty academic paper (down to a misplaced comma! -- see The Guardian); and Judith Miller, in an online forum, noted that George Tenet lowered his eyes from the camera when Powell came to the Al Qaeda accusations.
But you are right that the real question is not Powell's accusations but the risks of war.
In the online forum Wednesday, I tried to ask Ms. Miller whether eliminating Iraq would in fact reduce the risk of a 911 with weapons of mass destruction. Since she's a BW expert, I asked about the global stocks of biological weapons. She replied that there are illicit programs in twelve countries. Annihilating Iraq won't, in other words, deny terrorists access to these weapons. Indeed your outstanding work on the anthrax case shows that our own (unacknowledged) arsenal is a threat to us.
What are the risks that the U.S. will use "non-lethal" chemical weapons against Iraq? John Alexander, former head of the Joint Non-Lethal Weapons Directorate and author of Future War: Non-Lethal Weapons in Twenty-First-Century Warfare, particularly advocates the use of calmatives such as fentanyl (of Moscow theater fame) and ketamine to allow us to subdue Baghdad without its becoming a Grozny. According to Bill Mesler in the current Nation, the Pentagon even dubs these "weapons of mass protection." Dr. Matthew Meselson of Harvard points out that it is impossible to use calmatives safely for military purpose: if you have to put 100% to sleep quickly, for some it will be the sleep of death -- as Russian authorities found. Mesler suggests there have been tests on animal and perhaps human subjects. (There are strange echoes of Secretary Powell's speech here.)
The Nation article is unfortunately not available online, but one from the archives of Le Monde diplomatique is:
http://mondediplo.com/1999/12/09wright
An even more important question is the risk that we (or possibly Israel) will use nuclear weapons. It's easy to dismiss this as simply unthinkable, but there is too much evidence to rule it out. Please see William Arkin's recent articles in The Los Angeles Times as well as a confirming story in The Washington Times. [The latter source suggests the Bush administration wants this out, possibly for deterrence (but what happens then to the whole justification for war?), possibly to prepare opinion-makers.]
http://www.latimes.com/la-op-arkin26jan26,0,646789.story
Arkin quotes a document that posits a U.S. nuclear weapons strike even if Baghdad does not use chemical or biological weapons. (Of course, if we used fentanyl, the risk that Iraq would use chemical weapons would rise, as would our ability to accuse it of having done so.)
An even greater risk seems to me to lie in our contingency plans for North Korea. Secretary Powell told the Foreign Relations Committee we have "no intention to attack North Korea as a nation." That leaves open the threat of bombing. Striking Yongbyon alone would not be enough; you need to strike the regime so hard it is decapitated and cannot attack the South.
Is it responsible to discuss these risks? Is it responsible not to?
With best wishes,
David Keppel
Page created February 8, 2003 by Charlie Jenks
