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U.S. Plans to Employ Hundreds of Iraq's Weapons Scientists

Paul Basken

Bloomberg News

December 18, 2003

The Bush administration plans to create jobs for hundreds of Iraqi weapons scientists to keep Saddam Hussein's arms experts from working for terrorists or unfriendly governments.

``This is a program to put people to work to give them more productive uses of their expertise, their intelligence and their energy,'' U.S. State Department spokesman Richard Boucher said in Washington.

The U.S. plans to establish an Iraqi International Center for Science and Industry in Baghdad using an initial budget of $2 million for its first two years, Boucher said.

The Bush administration announced the job creation proposal while continuing to fend off criticism about its failure to find any of the Iraqi chemical and biological weapons that it cited as justification for the war to topple Hussein's regime. The employment program is not an attempt to further that hunt, Boucher said.

David Kay, who is leading the U.S. search for weapons of mass destruction in Iraq, told the Bush administration he plans to leave before the group's work is finished, the Washington Post reported today, citing unidentified military and intelligence officials.

The idea to employ Iraqi scientists, similar to the U.S.- funded program in Russia for employing former Soviet weapons scientists, was welcomed by arms experts as a critical step toward reducing the threat posed by postwar Iraq. Some said the U.S. should have initiated the effort sooner.

``There is already some certainty of some scientists fleeing to states not of proliferation concern like Jordan,'' and the United Arab Emirates, said Michael Roston, an analyst with the Russian-American Nuclear Security Advisory Council, a Washington policy study group.

More Funding

The Bush administration intends to seek more government funding to increase the budget of the Iraqi science center to $20 million, while using money from other sources such as private industry contracts to raise additional funds for salaries and operations, Boucher said.

The types of jobs that will be made available to the scientists have not yet been identified, though Boucher said one initial plan involves a desalination project.

While the scientists also have not yet been fully identified, the U.S. estimates there ``probably hundreds of scientists'' available, Boucher said. The U.S. has anecdotal reports of some Iraqi arms experts fleeing for jobs outside the country, but has no firm data on how many, he said.

The State Department also is working on a separate proposal, to create a ``Science, Technology and Engineering Mentorship Initiative for Iraq,'' to forge links between U.S. and Iraqi scientific communities through a grant system based on research and development ideas proposed by Iraqis, according draft documents that describe the plan.