Did George W. Bush Threaten Saddam Hussein with Smallpox?
During the 2002–2003 selling of the imperialist Iraq War, the Bush administration, neoconservatives outside of government, and the media repeatedly intimated that Iraqi President Saddam Hussein had weaponized smallpox virus and was planning to use it against the American people. Even with the ongoing transmission of the related MPOX virus (formerly known as monkeypox), this history has been swept under the rug and mostly forgotten but for an excellent podcast series by Robbie Martin at Media Roots Radio.
Smallpox was only one of the multitude of the nuclear, biological, and chemical weapons the Bush administration proposed Iraq possessed. Nonetheless, sometimes referred to as the poor man’s nuclear weapon, it played a significant but forgotten role in heightening the fear and aggression felt by the American public after 9/11. Given that we now know Iraq had no Weapons of Mass Destruction (WMDs), what was the Bush administration’s angle with Smallpox and what implications does this history have for us today?
Smallpox is a disease caused by the Orthopoxvirus variola virus. It may have started as one strain, but by the mid-20th century split into the Variola major and Variola minor strains, each which had significantly different mortality rates. Variola is a brick-shaped DNA virus that is large enough (a few hundred nanometers) to just barely be seen with high-resolution light microscopes. The last wild case occurred in 1977 and the last laboratory acquired infection occurred in 1978. In 1979, Smallpox was declared the only intentionally eradicated disease in human history by the World Health Organization.
With a case fatality rate of over 30% for the easily transmitted Variola major strain, the virus was a scourge on the human race. The only two known remaining samples of the virus are located at World Health Organization designated repositories at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) Headquarters in Atlanta, Georgia, USA and at the State Research Center of Virology and Biotechnology VECTOR in Koltsovo, Russia. The scientific community has repeatedly called for the destruction of the final samples, but the US and Russia claim to want to keep samples for research in case undisclosed or forgotten stocks exist. These claims deserve skepticism.
In 2007, Edward Hammond of the now defunct Sunshine Project wrote an article, “Should the US and Russia destroy their stocks of smallpox virus?”, in the British Medical Journal. Hammond noted that the full genetic sequence of the virus has been known since 1994 and that in 2006 WHO experts wrote: “Sufficient sequence information on the virus was now available; no further research requiring access to live variola virus was considered essential.” They further note that both countries continued to conduct dangerous live virus research, with the US having published attempts to create a monkey model of the disease in 2004. From our experience in 2022, it is now obvious that samples from a new outbreak would become available within days to weeks given our experience with the closely related Orthopoxvirus monkeypox virus.
Also with the benefit of hindsight, it is now clear that the Bush administration’s claims and insinuations that Saddam had smallpox were lies just like all of their claims about Iraq having WMD. In March 2003, the United States and its coalition partners staged an illegal invasion of Iraq, bombed and occupied the country, tortured residents, and had free rein to search for WMDs for years. They could be presumed to be motivated to find them in order to justify the invasion to the public. On Sept. 21, 2003 the six member “Team Pox” search was called off six months after the invasion commenced. We can be confident that Iraq did not have weaponized smallpox.
To what end did Bush and his fellow war planners circulate these lies? The Bush/Neocon thesis that Iraq was an imminent threat to world peace, headed by a madman that harbors terrorists and would imminently use weapons of mass destruction, is no longer remotely plausible. Nor is it remotely plausible that they even believed it themselves. In light of what we know now, it is self-evident that they had been playing up fears that resulted from 9/11 to parlay them into public consent for an attack on an uninvolved country.
On February 5, 2003, Colin Powell made the case at the United Nations to attack Iraq by holding up a vial of white powder of fake anthrax. The Bush administration’s reasoning continually twisted and bounced between many different proposed weapons systems, biological, chemical, and nuclear, that were collectively called WMDs. The evidence for any one of these claims was thin. However, by bundling them all together and playing up the fear by filling the media with speculative attacks, perhaps the administration would be able to persuade Americans to go to war half-way around the world.
There are many proposed reasons that the neoconservatives in the administration wanted war: to shake off “Vietnam syndrome”, to force Saddam to price oil in USD (oil markets priced in USD help forms the basis of the world reserve currency), to make an example of Saddam (the US makes an example of someone about once every ten years), to bracket Iran between U.S. bases in Iraq and Afghanistan, to acquire strategic military bases that are within reach of Russia and China, to keep military Keynesianism going and prevent a destabilizing peace dividend, and for Bush Jr. to finish what Bush Sr. started during the Gulf War.
Thus, the most straightforward reason for Bush and company to incite fears of a smallpox attack would be to promote the drive to war. Smallpox would have played a similar rhetorical role to the 2001 Anthrax attacks or the proposed but never proven VX nerve gas and nuclear weapons programs. However, the play acting for a smallpox attack took on a very real dimension.
To reinforce the lie that Saddam was planning smallpox bioterrorism, the US administration planned a mass vaccination program using the live vaccinia virus, a shot that would kill between one or two in a million people and one in a thousand would need medical attention (immunocompromised people and people with common conditions such as eczema or atopic dermatitis were at heightened risk). CNN noted at the time: “…an estimated 300 to 350 people could die.” The CDC was coordinating with all fifty states to plan the voluntary administration of the smallpox vaccine to entire populations within a week. The plan was called voluntary but they note that: “anyone who refused to have the vaccine would be “closely monitored” by doctors” which could mean anything from leaving contact info to being forcibly quarantined. Initially, 500,000 first responders were to be vaccinated. Since there was no real smallpox threat, any of these injuries and deaths would be sustained with no benefit at all to those treated.
This plan intended to use the live vaccine formulation that was used before eradication was completed. The CDC, which still vaccinates some people that work with the virus, has instructions for administering it, which are very different from most any vaccine you may be familiar with if you are under 50 years old. It was only tolerated at the time because smallpox kills a third of those it infects and is highly transmissible. Over 100 million of these vaccines were stockpiled with more being sought with the goal being to have enough for every single American. The federal government was reported to have contracted with Acambis, Inc for $428 million dollars to provide the doses. States and the military were ordered to create plans to inoculate first responders and soldiers which would then be expanded to the civilian population at large.
Thousands of people were inoculated against smallpox before the program was iced. The program was ended due in part to outcry from the healthcare community who were suspicious of administering a vaccine with substantial risks and known dangers for an eradicated disease. Additionally, even in the relatively small number of people vaccinated compared with the entire population, adverse reactions and suspected deaths occurred. For a disease that doesn’t exist outside of secure laboratories, it’s hard to justify the death, disabling, or even temporary suffering of even a single person via vaccine injury.
After all, why should even a single person be injured for a fantasy scenario? The speed with which the government planned to administer the smallpox vaccine to almost the whole population, a week, is extremely fast. It would be so fast that no one would have time to understand whether a real outbreak was occurring or to learn of vaccine deaths or injuries until it was already done. Simultaneously, a successful rollout would initially appear to make the government look strong and competent. In reality, by January 2004 the military had administered 578,286 vaccinations, but the civilian arm fizzled with only 39,213 inoculations administered in part due to resistance by hospitals which would have had to take on the legal liabilities.
With the exception of the infamous smallpox blankets given to Native Americans by white settlers, or the bizarre still-unconvincingly solved anthrax attacks, actual bioterrorism is extremely rare. Reasons for its rarity include both the difficulty of weaponizing an organism and the certain backlash from the international community. However, I suspect the biggest reason no one deploys highly transmissible agents like smallpox is that they are impractical. As COVID-19 has made abundantly clear, a highly infectious agent deployed in a globalized world would quickly make its way back into the attacking country — a boomerang effect.
It’s this boomerang effect, paired with a few other elements of context, that induces me to ask whether President Bush was using the smallpox vaccination program to imply to Saddam Hussein that he was willing to use smallpox against Iraq. Look at the situation from Saddam’s perspective. With hindsight, we know that Iraq did not have any WMD whatsoever, let alone weaponized smallpox. Saddam, as president of Iraq, would have known that with certainty at the time and would naturally ask what the Americans had to gain by accusing him.
There were some obvious motives. The Bush administration used the fear invoked to shift public funds to their friends and the biodefense industry. They used smallpox as an element of the justification for invasion to Americans and the international community (though they emphasized other agents at the UN). However, it was strange for Bush to actually initiate a mass vaccination program that would inevitably cost American lives. Surely there would be political backlash after people started getting injured or dying? What would be the point of actually doing it?
At first, it would have the effect of making the average American feel they have “skin in the game” by participating in war preparations. However, actually implementing the program also has another effect: making Americans immune to smallpox. The attenuation or elimination of the boomerang effect turns a weakness into a strength. With an effective vaccine, a bioweapon turns from a fickle and chaotic option into a superior weapon; a kind of Round-Up weed killer that only kills enemy humans (and other collateral unvaccinated populations).
As Maj. Leon A. Fox of the U.S. Army Medical Corps. wrote in “Bacterial Warfare” (1933):
“The important question, then, is how are these agents to be introduced into the bodies of the enemy to produce casualties? In addition, any proposal for the deliberate use of pathogenic organisms as a means of warfare will have to consider the question of how to produce a destructive epidemic in the forces of an opponent and at the same time protect one’s own forces from invasion by the virulent organisms in question. Certainly at the present time we know of no disease producing micro-organisms that will respect uniform or insignia, and the use of bacteria in warfare for the destruction of opposing forces will have to be predicated upon the successful prior immunization or the complete isolation of the forces employing the disease-producing organisms…”
Iraqi intelligence would know they did not have smallpox samples, but the fact that the United States does is on Wikipedia. Regardless of what the Bush administration actually was planning to do, they would be safe in assuming Iraq would interpret this fact pattern as a potential threat. After all, even if U.S. civilians were not vaccinated, many soldiers were.
At that time, the Bush administration was pursuing a campaign directed at putting every conceivable point of pressure on Saddam while simultaneously backing him into a corner with unreasonable terms so that an invasion would be necessary. This culminated in Bush’s televised 48-hour pre-invasion demand for Saddam to step down and leave the country or face invasion. It’s now known that for weeks, the Iraqi government had sought peace but was rebuffed: “All these offers had at bottom the same thing — that Saddam would stay in power, and that was unacceptable to the administration…” CIA’s former head of counter-terrorism, Vincent Cannistraro said as reported by the Guardian in November 2003.
The fact that the U.S. smallpox vaccination program was wound down before mass vaccination of civilians actually proceeded makes me think that it was used as only a threat. However, the Bush era was filled with egregious crimes and lies. It’s difficult, but not impossible, to imagine that there could be some circumstances that would have triggered an attack if they could actually pull off mass vaccination — and that attack would of course be blamed on Saddam. With high speed mass vaccination plans in place, a declared outbreak would go a long way towards overcoming any resistance and getting Americans immunized.
For example, infected U.S. soldiers, allied soldiers, or prisoners near the Iraqi border could be used to both initiate a cluster and blame Saddam. Depending on the circumstances, the soldiers could be quarantined or sent on a scouting mission to be arrested by unsuspecting Iraqi troops. The infections of U.S. troops or prisoners could be blamed on their Iraqi captors, and transmission blamed on an unsanitary prison. In the media environment of the time, I suspect there would be little skepticism of this presentation.
This attack would redound to the benefit of U.S. war plans as international outrage and disarray in the Iraqi government and society and would pave the way for invasion by a pre-vaccinated army. The level of reaction within Iraq to smallpox would make COVID-19 look like peanuts if it achieved community spread. The main reason not to do it would be the lack of vaccination in the rest of the world, but that doesn’t seem to be a problem for the US government during the real COVID-19 pandemic where we refused to share our vaccines openly.
While there is no proof of this concept, such as an admission by a Bush administration official, it’s still alarming how closely matched to a real biological attack their plans were. Bioweapons are socially unacceptable and illegal. Given the international condemnation associated with a bioweapon attack and the domestic unpopularity a government would encounter, it wouldn’t be possible to perform a mass vaccination campaign with the explicit stated goal of making it possible to attack Iraq.
Instead, a specious threat would be inflated. Citizens would be asked to get vaccinated to protect themselves and the nation from attack. Only then would conditions be ripe for actually conducting one. This is precisely what the Bush administration did. They were never able to point to direct evidence of smallpox in Saddam’s arsenal. Instead, allusions were made to missing stockpiles in ex-soviet republics, loose scientists, and the possibility that Iraq took a sample back before it was eradicated. In other words, entirely specious, especially with the benefit of hindsight.
It’s worth thinking about the technical prerequisites for a bioweapon attack to be effective.
- A preferably hard-to-manufacture / easy to deploy vaccine. This way the vaccine can be tightly controlled by one side.
- The vaccine must be highly effective so that the boomerang effect is all but eliminated.
- The biological agent would ideally be an organism that develops superior vaccine immunity but less durable post-infection immunity so that the vaccine can be used in negotiations indefinitely.
- The agent can be tailored to be transmissible or non-transmissible depending on the operation.
- Plausible deniability: the disease causing agent should ideally pre-exist in nature so that the origin of the attack becomes muddy.
If these conditions are met, you can imagine an agent could be deployed in the field during combat with your own soldiers able to walk breezily into contaminated areas while chaos and death meet the enemy at every turn. In effect, the vaccine becomes the super soldier serum. It sounds a lot like the kind of blue sky idea DARPA would fund if it weren’t illegal under the 1972 Biological Weapons Convention. It has an alien and inhuman feeling, similar to the use of exotic materials like depleted uranium by US soldiers against Fallujah (which suffers from high birth defects to this day). In fact, we do have a massive “biodefense” industry focused on producing vaccines against many different diseases that could potentially be used as weapons.
With this logic, we can see that having a high quality cheap vaccine with advanced technology is a prerequisite to using a highly efficient weapon. As we can see with the real-life COVID-19 pandemic, actually achieving these technical elements is biologically difficult and the social conditions are also difficult to achieve — a third of Americans won’t take a very safe vaccine even with a million of their countrymen dead.
Another legacy of the Iraq War era smallpox vaccination plan was the passage of the Countermeasures Injury Compensation Program (CICP) under the 2005 PREP Act, which COVID-19 falls under. This program allows vaccine manufacturers to avoid liability if they injure patients for designated organisms. Ordinarily, compensation for injury is handled under the National Vaccine Injury Compensation Program (VICP) which grants more rights to the patient.
The neoliberal idea for CICP was to encourage manufacturers to produce quickly without concern for liability in an emergency, but to do so at the risk of the population at large by limiting their ability to sue and the amounts available. While probably not the main reason vaccine uptake has been so poor, it is a real concern, especially early on in 2021 when very limited data were available. The CICP designation has been an anti-vaccine talking point during our real pandemic. An alternative program could have involved nationalization of vaccine manufacture in emergencies (to ensure production was not restricted by profitability) with a promise of full compensation and health care for anyone injured. That could have gone a long way towards improving trust in the COVID-19 vaccine.
Did George W. Bush threaten the Iraqis with a smallpox attack? It may seem like an unanswerable question given how easy it is to flip the interpretation of the same set of facts. However, I expect that there is evidence out there that can confirm or deny some of this story. While it will be a long time before U.S. government documents are declassified, it might still be possible to ascertain the reaction of Iraqi society, media, government, and military to the accusations of Iraqi weaponized smallpox by the Bush administration. It would be a point in this theory’s favor if it could be shown that one or more of these bodies did sense a threat from the Americans. However, this author cannot read Arabic or Kurdish and so is not currently able to conduct this research.
Thanks to Robbie Martin for getting me interested in the 2002–2003 smallpox hysteria (forgotten though I lived through it) and the biodefense industry via his extensive coverage on Media Roots Radio.
