Experts question ambitious Syria chemical weapons agreement

Joseph said that a public declaration from Assad that he would destroy his chemical stockpiles “without any preconditions” was critical to “demonstrate to the Syrian military and bureaucracy that they must comply,” and that the immediate destruction of empty warheads and bombs “serves to reinforce that point.”

Another senior administration official, who spoke with the Times on condition of anonymity, agreed. If Assad does not put on “a big, demonstrable show” to prove to the Syrian military that he is “giving up the crown jewels,” the official said, “this isn’t going to work.”

“The history does not exactly create an incentive,” the senior administration official added, noting that Assad knows that Saddam Hussein and Colonel Qaddafi were both deposed, and that both were executed years after giving up their weapons.

Assad, so far, has said publicly that he would act in line with the Kerry-Lavrov agreementonly if the United States removed any threat of military action and stopped sending arms to the Syrian rebel groups.

Weapons experts noted that one key element which was missing from the Kerry-Lavrov agreement was the requirement that Assad should allow international inspectors to conduct extensive interviews with Syrian weapons officials, including members of the elite Unit 450 which controls the chemical arsenal.

During the past two years the Syrian regime has moved tons of chemical agents to locations well inside government-control area in order to prevent the rebels from gaining control over these weapons. This will help inspections because intelligences sources say that the Syrian now have far fewer chemical weapons depots.

Intelligence sources note, however, that Assad may have used the need to move the chemicals from one depot to anther to divert some of the agents to hidden locations. Israeli intelligence sources over the weekend also hinted that trucks carrying chemicals have been observed heading into Iraq, where the Iraqi government, on orders from Iran, may have been told to help the Syrian government hide some of its weapons from inspections.

The Times notes that even in the cases of Iraq and Libya, which cooperated in the destruction of their WMD arsenals, small stashes of chemical weapons have been found years later, apparently not out of any intentional deception but because they were forgotten or overlooked.

William Broad, the Times science writer, notes that there are two basic approaches to t destruction of chemical weapons: the quick and dirty, or the slow, safe, and costly.

In the immediate aftermath of the Second World War, the United States dumped Nazi Germany’s chemical stockpile into the Baltic Sea, and Japan’s chemical arsenal was thrown into the Pacific.

For its own chemical stockpile the United States has opted for the slow, safe, and costly method: the project to destroy all of the U.S. chemical weapons has been going on for twenty-eight years now and has cost more than $35 billion – and it is about only half over. The United States has built special furnaces and has created methods to react the material with water and other chemicals permanently to dismantle the toxic structures. It has built seven destruction plants, including at Johnston Atoll in the Pacific and the Aberdeen Proving Ground in Maryland, and is now building two more, at Richmond, Kentucky, and Pueblo, Colorado.

Charles Duelfer, a senior UN official in the elimination of Iraq’s chemical arsenal, said the Iraqi operation was a prime example of the quick-and-dirty approach.

“We gathered stuff from all over and destroyed it for under $10 million,” he recalled in an interview with the Times. Some leaky munitions were too dangerous to move, Duelfer said. “So we’d dig a pit, put in diesel fuel, and blow the stuff up.”

Saddam Hussein grew gradually more obstructionist, and by late 1998, seven years after the gulf war ended, he kicked the UN inspectors out of Iraq. The United States launched hundreds of cruise missiles in an effort to destroy what was left of the Iraqi stockpile, but the fact that there were no inspectors on the ground led the U.S. intelligence community to conclude that Iraq was, in Vice President’s Dick Cheney’s words in 2002, “reconstituting” its WMD capabilities. These estimates proved entirely wrong.

After the 2003 invasion of Iraq, Colonel Qaddafi contacted Britain and said he wanted to give up his nuclear and chemical weapons, and struck a deal with the United States and the United Kingdom to have the economic sanctions on Libya lifted in exchange for the destruction of the country’s WMD arsenal.

Two years after Qaddafi’s death, and ten years after the deal he struck with the United States and the United Kingdom, there are thousands of pounds of mustard blister agents still left to be destroyed.