This is not hyperventilation. The media aren’t trying to scare up ratings and the politicians aren’t creating bogeymen to increase defense spending; if anything, the threat posed by chemical, biological and, to a lesser extent, nuclear weapons has been badly underplayed. Our imaginations are running behind the technology, and our anxieties behind the reality of what should make us afraid.
It was hard not to feel some sympathy for George Bush last week. Opening his presidential library in College Station, Texas, he was suddenly peppered with questions about Saddam Hussein. In 1991 Bush had been right not to send his armies to Baghdad. That was not the point of the gulf war, and it would have left us an occupying power with major casualties. But when a triumphant Bush told a joint session of Congress on March 6, 1991, that “"[Saddam’s] ability to threaten mass destruction has itself been destroyed,’’ he was mistaken.
The reason Bush was wrong is that the U.S. military simply could not monitor every bathroom in Iraq. According to Daniel Goure, a former Pentagon official and WMD expert, that’s all the space required to make militarily significant quantities of poison gas: ““A two-bedroom apartment could take you through the whole process, from cooking up the stuff all the way to weaponization.’’ Saddam’s motives are unfathomable, but he certainly wouldn’t be expelling inspectors if he didn’t have something to hide. The optimists say he is within five years of launching anthrax or VX or smallpox Scud missiles into downtown Jerusalem; the pessimists say he’s within five weeks. The realists know one of his agents could open a spray canister and kill thousands today–in New York, if he wanted.
At the end of the gulf war, Saddam faded from the headlines. So it didn’t get much publicity in 1991 when he turned out to have more than 100 anthrax bombs. The U.S. military and later the United Nations special commission destroyed these and others but discovered that Iraq was developing weapons using botulism and a pleasant-sounding compound called gas gangrene. ““He had a Manhattan Project-type program capable of destroying the world three times over,’’ says Goure. But the world wasn’t paying attention. Beyond the irony of his remaining in power after Bush and Margaret Thatcher were gone, Saddam was largely forgotten in the West. Even when the United States hit him with cruise missiles, the public didn’t lock on to the story for long. Time passed. The bully licked his wounds. French business interests acted like Vichy collaborationists. No one much cared.
It won’t be easy to take him out. The United States invaded tiny Panama and still couldn’t get Manuel Noriega for weeks. But we need to try, because the only language Saddam has ever understood is force. ““He represents one of the most dangerous personality types we know,’’ says Jerrold Post, a psychiatrist at George Washington University who specializes in analyzing terrorists and dictators. Post diagnoses what he calls ““malignant narcissism,’’ a Hitler-like combination of extreme grandiosity, absence of conscience, aggression and paranoia. ““It’s very scary to hook that personality type up with WMD,’’ says Post. ““This is not a Soviet party secretary restrained by other bureaucrats.’’ Norman Schwarzkopf, who has nothing to prove, is also using that word ““scary.’’ After all these years, we still know little about Saddam beyond that he kills on whim and likes to see himself on CNN, yanking our chain.
Because we won the gulf war and the Scuds were duds, we didn’t get serious about WMD. We spend some money trying to help employ starving Russian scientists–that’s also what the Mir program is about–but not enough. Many of the scientists are still broke, and apparently making extra cash teaching Iran how to launch medium-range missiles. We are trying to improve emergency response to WMD in our major cities, but it’s slow going. Rep. Curt Weldon held hearings last week that showed the administration couldn’t even figure out which agency should take the lead in training local fire departments. Today’s civil defense is not the old duck-and-cover nonsense, for which we were overprepared, but all-too-real terrorist scenarios, for which the public has not been prepared at all. Tokyo, with the sarin gas in the subway, and New York, with the World Trade Center bombing, were both lucky.
And we glide through the decade blithely assuming our luck will hold. Congress just approved a billion dollars for chem-bio research, and the president and the National Security Council have for several years spent huge amounts of time on WMD issues. But the public focus is still episodic. We all know that our reveries will be interrupted soon enough, and our lives touched by some madman. But we aren’t yet ready to contemplate the consequences. Nothing big will change until something big happens.
