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Imad Khadduri, one of Iraq’s
leading nuclear scientists until 1998, persistently denies that
Iraq has an active nuclear weapons program in his new tell-all
book, Iraq’s Nuclear Mirage.
While
residing in Toronto, Canada, Imad Khadduri, one of Iraq’s
leading nuclear scientists, took to the airwaves, appearing on
Canadian, US, and Arab talk shows as a veritable source of
knowledge on Iraq’s nuclear aspirations. Despite his intimate
appraisal of Iraq’s nuclear program, where he dedicated 30
years of his professional life, many US stations shunned him,
fearing that his opinions would directly contradict remarks made
by US Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld and others in the
White House.
Five
months after the invasion and ‘liberation’ of Iraq, Khadduri
is publishing his memoirs – a dedicated look at his life and
the role he played in Iraq’s nuclear ambitions – using his
personal finances. The book, titled Iraq’s Nuclear Mirage,
directly contradicts every claim made by US and British
intelligence.
In
his Prologue, Khadduri says:
The
‘delusions’ of the claims to the existence of Iraqi nuclear
weapons, or an active program to produce them, after the 1991
war, had proven to be part of a devious and deceiving casus
belli for invading Iraq.
Upon
‘coming out’ in August 2002 when I first listened to
President Bush’s inaugural intent on waging pre-emptive war on
Iraq under the pretext of its weapons of mass destruction and
his emphasis on the nuclear weapons threat, I direly predicted
in the last paragraph of my first published article, “Iraq’s
nuclear non-capability”, that “Bush and Blair are pulling
their public by the nose, covering their hollow patriotic egging
on with once again shoddy Intelligence. But the two parading
emperors have no clothes.”
Khadduri
believes that the invasion of Iraq will prove as endemic to the
Iraqi people as September 11 has to the Americans. The first
chapter is appropriately titled The Rape of Strangled Iraq
and outlines in bloody and often gruesome detail the slow
decimation of Iraqi civil society since the end of the 1991 Gulf
War.
The
first part of the book focuses on Khadduri’s journeys through
childhood, adolescence, and his true coming of age as a student
in Michigan State University during the Vietnam War. At one
point, young Khadduri received death threats in the wake of his
storming of a pro-Israel fundraiser and appealing on the behalf
of dislocated Palestinian families. His passion for the
Palestinian and Arab struggle compelled him to abandon his PhD
studies and he soon found himself in a Palestinian Liberation
Organization (PLO) training camp in Jordan where Yasser Arafat
thought him too precious to waste on an ordinary battlefield. He
was ordered to return to Baghdad. He eventually grew disgruntled
with financial bungling in the PLO and promptly returned to his
PhD program.
Khadduri
first joined the Iraqi Nuclear program at Tuwaitha in 1968,
one year after Iraq first received a nuclear reactor from the
Soviet Union and thirteen years before the “genuine start of the
Iraqi nuclear weapons program… in 1981.” According to Khadduri,
it was only after the Israeli attack on the Osirak nuclear
reactor in Iraq that Saddam took a firm political decision to
acquire a nuclear bomb instead of just dreaming about it.
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Imad
Khadduri. Picture courtesy of Andrew
Wallace, Reuters photographer
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The
rest of the book details Khadduri’s involvement in getting the
nuclear weapons program off the ground, including purchasing
material and research in the US, which, in one way or another,
supplied the Iraqi program with vast amounts of usable nuclear
technology information.
Several
pages are also dedicated to debunking the claims made by another
Iraqi scientist, Khidhir Hamza, whose book, Saddam’s
Bombmaker, sensationalized Iraq’s weapons program and
falsified information to justify an invasion of Iraq.
I
first met Khadduri at the CBC television studios in Toronto last
March, when we were both giving separate interviews on the
impending war in Iraq. Khadduri agreed to give IslamOnline an
interview regarding his upcoming book, Iraq’s Nuclear
Mirage.
*
IslamOnline: Why are you writing a book, your memoirs, about
Iraq’s nuclear program?
-
Imad Khadduri: In September 2002, Bush and Blair spewed
glaring misinformation regarding Iraq’s nuclear weapons
program after the 1991 Gulf War. They cited Iraq’s
nuclear weapons program as reason for invading Iraq, and this
stirred me into a modest attempt to expose their deceits and
‘Intelligence’ lies.
I
also became aware of the neoconservative agenda and its roots in
the nineties and even earlier. This was coupled with my distaste
for the violence, materialism and vulgarity of the “American
Way of Life” that I experienced while studying for eight years
in the US during the sixties and living the Vietnam experience
there, inside the belly of the beast. All of these pieces
fell in place by the end of 2002 and prompted me to spell it
[sic] out in a book that was interlaced with my memoirs to
portray the roots of my commitments and present beliefs.
*
IOL: Why are you publishing it yourself?
-
IK: I found astounding obstacles to have it published
by American, Canadian or English publishers. The reasons spread
from the mundane “not intellectual enough” to an outright
and flagrant “you support the Palestinians and are opposed to
Israel.” I was fortunate to stumble upon a Canadian publishing
house that in fact encouraged writers to self-publish – Hushion
House Publishing Limited.
I
found self-publishing to be not a complicated affair. Bill
Hushion was a mentor, as far as self-publishing is
concerned. After reading my manuscript, it took him 5 phone
calls to set the whole affair up. Springhead Publishing is
simply myself, named after the street I live on, and as
suggested by Bill. I opened a Sole Proprietor Business,
named Imad Khadduri, in accordance with Canadian laws,
just to promote this. The process took 20 minutes and cost $60
(Canadian). The ISBN was free, the bar code cost $11 (CAD) and
the Canadian Cataloging was free; and all garnered within 24
hours of applying. I did have, upon Bill’s recommendation, an excellent
book designer, Fortunato.
I would send him edited versions worked on late at night and he
would be at his office 4 am and ready for me by 8-9 am the next
morning. Besides, he is a master of the art.
Bill
also directed me to an excellent and prompt printing
house. It took them two weeks to provide the final proof and
to print the book. The total cost, for a 240-page book, is about
$12,000.
*
IOL: How was your life impacted by the 1990/91 Gulf War? How did
the war affect your family and the Iraqi people?
-
IK: The economic degradation quickly settled on most Iraqi
families, except for Saddam’s close circle and the newly
get-rich-fast merchants [war profiteers] after the Gulf War.
Before that, we would not have thought much of buying groceries,
food and daily needs. After the war, the exponential inflation
and limited government salary forced us to resort to
money-pinching and to carry wads of currency to buy even the
meager amounts of groceries.
The
social life was also impacted. Whereas before we would not think
twice about accepting visitors to our home or simply dropping by
to visit our friends at their homes, the expense incurred from
such visits impacted our social visitations after the war.
Nevertheless, we strived to be as social as possible despite the
economic constraint. This also impacted the cost of private
tutors for our children [as we were trying] to maintain the
demanding standards of the secondary schools. We still
assigned a private English tutor to my two eldest for the last
three years of our stay in Baghdad in order to prepare them for
university, which ended up to be in Canada. The wage of the
English instructor alone was about 20% of my government salary.
There were other teachers for the final Baccalaureate, a very
demanding set of final high school examinations throughout Iraq.
The small computer shop that we ran for eight years helped our
income to cover such costs.
*
IOL: How are you affected by the carnage in Iraq now?
-
IK: Deeply saddened and repulsed by the American violence.
But for my commitment to support my children to complete
their university education here in Canada that I had intended
for decades, I would be back in Iraq to help in its
construction.
*
IOL: What challenges face Iraq now?
-
IK: The first priority is to get rid of the occupation, then
to start building Iraq again, which will take several
generations to bear fruit.
*
IOL: Do you think Bremer can do an effective job?
-
IK: No way is he capable of understanding how to deal with
the Iraqi tragedy.
*
IOL: What challenges affect the Christian community in Iraq?
-
IK: Unless radical Muslim factions prevail, I believe that
the Iraqi culture and traditions are compassionate and
accepting of all religions there, and there are many.
*
IOL: As a Catholic Iraqi, could you tell me a bit about the
Christian community in Iraq?
-
IK: The Iraqi Christian community has existed in Iraq since
the time of Christ. The oldest monasteries were established in
Iraq a few decades after Christ. Tikrit itself had many
monasteries. Their dialect reflects their Christian origins; and
there are sites there of the old monasteries. There are also
some 2000-year-old monasteries near Baghdad, in Salman Pack, the
site near the-still standing Persian arch of Ctesiphon. Arab
Christian tribes were roaming the Iraqi desert centuries
before the arrival of Islam to Iraq. I named my son Tammam after
a well-known and notable Iraqi Christian poet, Abu Tammam, who
lived in Iraq before the arrival of Islam there.
*
IOL: Why did you choose nuclear science? What was the
national view of nuclear science in Iraq?
-
IK: I had an excellent physics teacher in high school. He
was an Egyptian by the name of Alfred Nasri. He passed away
here in Toronto three years ago. His effective teaching
mannerisms persuaded me to continue my education in physics.
Coupled with that was my relatively high grades upon
graduating from high school as well as the prestige, at the
time, of specializing in nuclear physics. This resonated well
with our ambitions, at the time, to catch up with the West. Then
there was one prominent and famous Iraqi physicist, Abdul
Jabbar Abdallah, who was at Baghdad University. He graduated at
the US and was well-respected throughout the Middle East.
*
IOL: When you aren’t thinking in terms of nuclear physics or
disputing the Bush administration, what are some of your
hobbies?
-
IK: Reading, listening to good music and informing friends
and contacts, via email, of my perspective on what is happening
in Iraq.
*
IOL: How about favorite films, books, music?
-
IK: I favor Cuban, Iranian and good American films that deal
with social issues. As for music, I have a special open ear for traditional
Arabic music and few famous Arabic singers, such as Um
Kalthoum, as well as Iraqi local singers, such as
Nathim Al-Ghazali, and Beduin singers like Abu Gaishi Muttlaq
Al-Farhan and Saadi Al-Hadithi, in addition to traditional
home-party songs from Mosul. I also enjoy most western classical
music such as Bach, Beethoven and Villa Lobos. I always listen
to Darwish classical Iranian music while I work on the Internet.
For
more information, visit Imad Khadduri’s website: http://www.iraqsnuclearmirage.com/
Firas
Al-Atraqchi is a Canadian journalist of Iraqi heritage.
Holding an MA in Journalism and Mass Communication, he has
eleven years of experience covering Middle East issues, oil and
gas markets, and the telecom industry. You can reach him at firascape@hotmail.com
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