Gudrun Harrer. Dismantling the Iraqi Nuclear Programme: The Inspections of the International Atomic Energy Agency, 1991-1998. London: Routledge, 2013. 296 pp. $158.00 (cloth), ISBN 978-0-415-82839-0.
Reviewed by David Palkki (Air War College)
Published on H-War (April, 2018)
Commissioned by Margaret Sankey (Air University)
Gudrun Harrer, a lecturer in modern Middle Eastern history, politics, and culture at the University of Vienna, has written a superb book on the International Atomic Energy Agency’s (IAEA) weapon inspections in Iraq. The study is too detailed to be of interest to the general reader, and too narrow to be of interest to most students of international politics. It will, however, be of considerable importance to scholars, policymakers, and nonproliferation analysts who work on the IAEA, weapon inspections, or this particular period in Iraqi history. Indeed, for such individuals it should be required reading. Every research university’s library should have a copy of this book in its holdings.[1]
Harrer’s history draws insightfully from the IAEA’s internal Iraq Action Team reports, in particular the chief inspectors’ daily inspection field reports, to which she had privileged access. Among her more interesting insights deal with areas in which senior inspectors’ widely accepted public reports find only partial substantiation, and are sometimes contradicted, by descriptions in their internal IAEA daily reports. For instance, she points out, David Kay’s claim that an Iraqi vehicle drove an IAEA Land Rover “off the road” during the surprise inspection of the Falluja Military Transportation facility is nowhere to be found in his daily report. In this and other instances, she finds the daily reports more reliable. When information in the reports entered the public domain, she writes, the stories tended to “develop and change in order to fit the popular need” and became “subject to sensation-seeking changes” (pp. 6, 63-67)
Harrer presents arguments and evidence inconsistent with the widespread view that Saddam refused to disarm (and dismantle WMD programs) in an unambiguous manner because he wished to retain enough ambiguity about the status of Iraq’s WMD disarmament (and dismantlement) to deter various domestic and regional actors. She clearly views this monocausal explanation for Iraq’s ambiguous disarmament, which has become the conventional wisdom, as insufficient.[2]
From the author’s perspective, at least three other factors contributed to Iraq’s failure to disarm in a more transparent manner. Most of the ambiguity stemmed not from Saddam’s strategic design, she writes, but from Iraq’s atrocious failure to document its unilateral destruction of WMD in 1991 (p. 72). Second, in some instances Iraqis attempted to conceal WMD-related information for reasons of prestige and honor, having nothing to do with broader strategy. For instance, Iraqis tried to conceal information about the Engineering Design Center at Rashdiya, even when it no longer made any sense to do so. “‘Rationale’ in effect does not apply here,” she writes, since “Rashdiya had become an emotional point of resistance against the inspection regime” (p. 148).
Third, Iraq’s piecemeal approach to disarmament during the early years, “with few exceptions always admitting only what would have been discovered anyway,” decimated “the credibility of Iraq’s attempt to really come clean in the years 1996 to 1998.” Jafar Dhia Jafar, the head of Saddam’s nuclear weapons program, told Harrer that “in Arab Islamic culture the concept of the ‘confession box’ where ‘you go in and tell the whole story,’ is missing—the process is done in bits and pieces.” From this perspective, “cultural reasons” contributed to the disastrous Iraqi approach (p. 146). To my knowledge, Jafar is the first to suggest that Iraq’s failure to disarm in an acceptable manner stemmed, in part, from such a cultural misunderstanding.
This claim about cultural misunderstandings is only one of many instances in which the author draws on her interviews with former Iraqi nuclear scientists and engineers, as well as UN weapon inspectors, to introduce important arguments and evidence. To cite one example, Kay, who headed the Iraq Survey Group (ISG), told Harrer that ISG personnel discovered in Iraq “a complete set of the communications through all the various systems, which had been used over the years, both between New York [UN Headquarters] and Baghdad [the UN inspectors] and between Vienna [the IAEA] and Baghdad [the UN inspectors].” According to Kay, these were not communication intercepts. Rather, someone had photocopied highly compartmentalized UN documents and provided them to the Iraqis, beginning in 1991 and lasting for over a decade. UNSCOM and IAEA inspections had been deeply compromised. One captured Iraqi record revealed that Saddam and his lieutenants sometimes knew the site of future inspections before the inspection teams on the ground had even had time to assemble (p. 119).
This book provides the best account available of the IAEA inspections in Iraq, at least as seen by Saddam’s key nuclear scientists and engineers. The author’s privileged access to internal IAEA documents, and thoughtful treatment of these records, further sets this volume apart from earlier studies. I suspect that this book will hold up well with the passage of time.
Notes
[1]. This review reflects the views of the author and not necessarily those of the Air War College, the US Department of Defense, or any other entity.
[2]. The conventional wisdom has not been universally accepted. See, for instance, David D. Palkki and Shane Smith, “Contrasting Causal Mechanisms: Iraq and Libya,” in Sanctions, Statecraft, and Nuclear Proliferation, ed. Etel Solingen (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2012), 291-92.
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Citation:
David Palkki. Review of Harrer, Gudrun, Dismantling the Iraqi Nuclear Programme: The Inspections of the International Atomic Energy Agency, 1991-1998.
H-War, H-Net Reviews.
April, 2018.
URL: http://www.h-net.org/reviews/showrev.php?id=47302
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