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Hussein overthrow could be risky, lawmakers told

Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein

WASHINGTON (CNN) -- Overthrowing Saddam Hussein could cause problems for the United States without strong evidence of an Iraqi connection to the September 11 terrorist attacks, House lawmakers were cautioned this week.

Without such evidence, one expert on Iraq told the House Subcommittee on the Middle East and South Asia, the United States could have trouble forming a coalition against Iraq's president.

At present there is only circumstantial evidence tying Hussein to the deadly strikes on the World Trade Center and Pentagon, and that's not enough, said Geoffrey Kemp, who spoke with lawmakers.

"Anti-Americanism in the Muslim world is intense and pervasive," said Kemp, who served in the first Reagan administration as senior director for the State Department's Bureau of Near Eastern Affairs. "There is no guarantee that any of Saddam's successors ... will be any less anti-American than Saddam or that they will disband their weapons of mass destruction programs.

"In the process, we could anticipate a severe backlash throughout the Muslim world," Kemp said.

'Master terrorist'

The House subcommittee has been scrutinizing Hussein's activities since United Nations weapons inspectors pulled out of Iraq three years ago ahead of U.S.-British air strikes. Iraqi officials say their nation has eliminated its weapons of mass destruction and the means to produce them, but lawmakers aren't convinced.

"There's no other way to fully and finally end the threat Iraq poses to our national security," Rep. Benjamin Gilman, R-New York, the subcommittee's chairman, said at a hearing Thursday. "While we are striking at other terrorists, we should end the regime of a master terrorist like Saddam."

Rep. Steve Chabot, R-Ohio, agreed. "If we're serious about ending, destroying, stopping international terrorism, we absolutely have to target Saddam Hussein," he said.

The United States should have ousted Hussein during the 1991 Gulf War, added Rep. Tom Lantos, D-California. Failing to topple Hussein 10 years ago was "one of the great policy mistakes of the end of the 20th century," he said.

Once the international coalition against terrorism has finished its job with suspected terrorist mastermind Osama bin Laden and his al Qaeda network, then "this nation and our willing allies will have to move on to get rid of Saddam Hussein and other similar regimes," Lantos said.

Iraq's weapons capability

Hussein's arsenal includes weapons of mass destruction, and possibly nuclear weapons, experts told the subcommittee.

Iraq, if pushed, could attack a neighboring state with an array of weaponry, "including nuclear, chemical and biological weapons," Kemp said.

Iraq has used chemical weapons before, said Charles Duelfer, who was a top official of UNSCOM, the weapons inspection group that monitored Iraq until pulling out three years ago. In its war against Iran, Iraq "survived and prevailed in that war because of their possession of weapons of mass destruction," he said. "One can only assume that they continue to harbor ambitions of having a full array of these weapons, including nuclear."

Iraq is just as capable of using biological weapons, said Gary Milhollin, director of the Wisconsin Project on Nuclear Arms Control. Iraq has "the strains, the equipment and the know-how necessary to make biological weapons," said Milhollin. The country, he warned, has "stocks of chemical agents" and a "workable nuclear design."

Quoting to weapons inspectors, Milhollin said Iraq needed about "15 to 16 kilograms of high enriched uranium" to complete a "successful" nuclear bomb.

"If Iraq could acquire that somehow on the international black market, I think we have to assume that Iraq could make a bomb within weeks -- months at the most," he said.