In March 2003, British forces invaded Iraq. The conquest was swift, but the war continues. Over 100 of our servicemen and an unknown (but large) number of Iraqis have been killed. Many more on both sides have been injured. There is no imminent prospect of military disengagement.
Just over three years on, the Metropolitan Police, working with MI5, mounted an assault in Forest Gate, east London. Two hundred and fifty officers took part in the raid, many of them from firearms units. Despite the fact that no armed resistance was offered, a man was shot.
Both of these massive operations incurred substantial costs. As a result of Iraq, the British and American forces are short of troops for other places. The Iranians know themselves to be safe should they decide to develop nuclear weapons. The oppressors of Darfur feel happy that they are likely to be left alone. As for the raid in Forest Gate, 250 coppers for one raid equates to a lot of man-hours. Within a fixed police budget, something will have to give—resources wasted on massive showpiece operations will knock on into slower 999 responses, fewer uniforms visible on other streets, tiresome youths not rousted as often as respectable citizens might like them to be.
But there is another similarity between Iraq and Forest Gate. Both operations were mounted in order to neutralise a perceived threat from chemical weapons. Many MPs would probably claim that they only voted to invade Iraq on the basis of the famous "dodgy dossier," a product of the British intelligence community. The only vaguely solid claim made in the dossier was that Saddam had battlefield chemical systems ready to go. The Forest Gate assault was ordered on similar grounds: that tenuous intelligence indicated a possibility of terrorist chemical attack.
As it happens, the intelligence community got it wrong in both Iraq and Forest Gate. But that isn't really the issue. The problem is that in both cases the danger was absurdly overblown, and that wasn't the fault of the intelligence community. It was, in the end, the fault of the public and the media. The threat presented by chemical weapons was hugely exaggerated in both cases, and in neither case was it questioned.
Chemical weapons are, we tend to assume, "weapons of mass destruction," and thus the near-equivalent to nuclear bombs. And military or police operations like Iraq and Forest Gate would be reasonable enough if this were actually true. But it's not. Chemical weapons aren't just much less powerful than nukes: they are actually somewhat less deadly on average than conventional explosives.
Consider this: in 1995, a full five litres of sarin was released in the Tokyo subway by a team of ten terrorists. Sarin is a powerful and deadly nerve agent. The attack took place in confined spaces, amid the insane crowding of the Tokyo rush hour. The episode could reasonably be described as close to a worst-case scenario. Had the Japanese authorities been informed of the plot in advance, their analysis would have suggested a potential for casualties in four or five figures. And yet the actual death toll in 1995 was only 12.
Twelve dead is awful, of course. But it is rather less than one might expect had the Aum Shinrikyo cultists used simpler methods. Two of the London 7/7 bombers killed more people than that on their own; in the case of Germaine Lindsay more than twice as many. The police claimed that their response in Forest Gate was proportionate to the potential threat. So if 250 police are required to deal with a threat of chemical attack, should we be planning to use 500 or more officers against an ordinary bomber?
Actually, it's worse than that. People of evil intent don't even need to use ordinary explosives to pile up more corpses than the Tokyo chemical attackers could. Thomas Hamilton at Dunblane in 1996 killed more people than all the 7/7 suicide bombers except Lindsay. He did that with handguns, weapons which are quite freely available in some parts of London. The 9/11 hijackers didn't even need pistols: they killed thousands armed with nothing more than knives. So we might expect to see the entire Metropolitan force deployed every time a disaffected Muslim buys a gun, or even a kitchen knife. But we don't. In fact, badly needed firearms officers are pulled out of gun-plagued areas to chase chemical will-o'-the-wisps in Forest Gate. People get shot unnecessarily as a result, and ordinary Muslims may become disaffected Muslims. Not being fools, these disaffected Muslims won't spend years trying to make sarin; they'll mix up some nice simple acetone peroxide like the 7/7 bombers. Or they might choose to buy guns, from backstreet arms dealers that the police seem unable to suppress.
Going back to the global picture, the threat of nuclear weapons in the hands of unstable or fanatical regimes is real and terrifying, and rightly informs much of our foreign policy. But it is wildly unreasonable to act as though chemical weapons are in the same league, particularly on the battlefield, where they are even less effective than in crowded tunnels. Most military experts doubt whether weapons filled with nerve gas would ever inflict significantly more casualties than ones using the same weight of normal explosive, even against unprotected personnel. They might do so under certain conditions, but the increase in deadliness wouldn't be large. In the case of attacks on people with basic protective equipment and training—any modern army, for instance, or the civilian population of Britain during the second world war—there is no doubt at all. Under these circumstances, chemical weapons are far less deadly than ordinary explosives. On the few occasions where chemicals have been used in action, the results have borne this out.
It was possible to make persuasive arguments both for and against the removal of Saddam Hussein's regime, but chemical weapons should not have figured in the debate. The dodgy dossier should not have changed anyone's mind, though apparently it did. If the conquest of Iraq was a mistake—as it increasingly seems to have been—it would still have been so even if there had been chemical rockets parked in every Iraqi barracks. As long as the hysteria over chemical weapons persists, the western democracies will continue to focus their resources on the wrong targets, both at home and abroad.
The blame for this curious mass delusion lies in several places. Some might see a sinister neocon plan at work. The idea that all "weapons of mass destruction" are one and the same is often thought to have emanated from the American right. By frightening western voters, the linguistic sleight of hand which transformed chemical weaponry from a mainly historical curiosity to a fearful destroyer of civilisations has permitted a lot of military adventurism.
That said, the panic is probably fuelled as much from Hollywood as from Washington. We have all seen action movies in which the world is saved from one doomsday device or another, and chemical weapons are portrayed as equivalent to nukes. Occasionally they are claimed to be even more dangerous than any nuke: in the James Bond film "Moonraker," for example, a handful of quite small chemical devices are deemed to be sufficient to wipe out human life on earth. Scriptwriters, directors and actors—often political liberals—have done at least as much to create the background to Iraq and Forest Gate as any rightwing hawk.
So what's the answer? In short, we should remove the term "WMD" from our lexicon. There is no such thing as a WMD; there are nuclear weapons and other weapons. We should classify weaponry as either nuclear or not that big a problem, with the latter class including both chemical and biological systems. (Biologicals are a tiger made of even thinner paper than the chemical beastie.)
In future, if we believe that an inimical regime might be about to acquire genuine nuclear weapons, we might reasonably consider invasion. (Please, no foolishness about "dirty bombs." If it isn't a nuke, it isn't a nuke.) A prolonged, no-win military quagmire is a lot better than nuclear war, and might be preferable to a world full of untouchable nuclear-armed unsavoury regimes—even where these regimes are reasonably solid and not threatening to us.
Similarly, if terrorists were ever to plot a nuclear detonation in London, any reasonable citizen would not just tolerate but demand a massive police and security response. That isn't really conceivable at the moment, but with the onward march of technology it could happen fairly soon, especially if the nuclear club does keep getting bigger.
On the other hand, if anyone ever again attempts to justify a huge, costly, almost certainly counterproductive commitment of finite security resources purely on grounds of chemical threat, that person should be ignored. Or at the very least, we might pause to compare the postulated chemical threat to the rather greater dangers we have lived with quite comfortably for decades, from ordinary bombs and guns.
Even such a collective mental adjustment might not be enough to calm everyone down, given the climate of modern public discourse in Britain—which at the moment seems to be focused on kitchen knives. Perhaps we must resign ourselves nowadays to constant undignified panicking. But if we really must panic all the time, let's at least panic about more reasonable things. By all means, let's indulge in a bit of knife hysteria. It would be more sensible to worry about slipping and breaking one's neck in the bath, but no matter. At least it isn't quite as foolish as a fear of chemical weapons.
