Unfinished Business

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However sanguine officials sound in public, in private the pressure is rising. The Pentagon dispatched an entire brigade--3,000 troops--to the search and offered $200,000 bounties for any weapons of mass destruction (WMD) uncovered. Local officers were authorized to make payments of $2,500 on the spot. "The White House is screaming, 'Find me some WMD,'" says a State Department official, adding that the task is one of many suddenly facing the department. Members of the Administration must feel a new bond with Blix, since they are now the ones arguing that these things take time.

Even the hard-liners concede that they have confirmed absolutely nothing so far. Soldiers rooting around with rifles and test kits stumble on something suspicious, and it's an instant headline. But barrels of nerve agent have turned out to be pesticide; tip-offs about weapons sites have gone nowhere; the buried or mobile bioweapons labs have so far failed to surface. A senior Pentagon official says U.S. forces have been to several "promising" sites in southern Iraq and have come up empty. "It's there, but it's well hidden," a second Defense official insists. "It will take time to discover and verify because they took time--and effort--to hide it." Some officials now question whether huge stockpiles will ever be found: it's easy to hide a liter of anthrax, but not the factory-size facility needed to produce it.

The failure to turn up anything to date raises two possibilities, neither one good, says Joseph Cirincione, chief of the Non-Proliferation Project at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace in Washington. "It may be that there aren't as many weapons as the President said, in which case we have a major intelligence failure, a huge embarrassment for the President and a huge blow to U.S. credibility--and that's the good news," he says. "The other option is that there are as many weapons as the President feared, and they're no longer under anyone's control."

That second possibility underscores the urgency of the hunt. The prime rationale for the war was to prevent the proliferation of such weapons. Since every other government facility has been pillaged, there's no reason to believe such marketable weapons are secure. "It's not that no one knows where they are," Cirincione says. "It's that we don't know where they are." Iraqi detainees like al-Saadi and al-Ani are not likely to talk for fear of being prosecuted for war crimes. Both have been saying, as an intelligence official put it, "Weapons of mass destruction? What weapons of mass destruction? We have no stinking weapons for you." But everyone else, down to the janitors, is expected to cooperate once fear of reprisal is removed.

Then there is the political problem. The longer the hunt takes, the Pentagon concedes, the more likely it is that skeptics will charge that whatever is eventually found was planted by the U.S. In an interview with Der Spiegel, Blix said the information the U.S. provided to his teams before the war was "pathetic." So it was not surprising when he said last week, "I think that at some stage they would like to have some credible international verification of what they find," suggesting that if the U.S. ever does uncover something, it will have to call for inspections on itself.

--WHO'S IN CHARGE?