Weapons, weapons everywhere, but not a vial of nerve gas or anthrax in sight. Six weeks after the fall of Baghdad, the U.S. occupiers of Iraq find themselves struggling with a unique, two-pronged challenge whose scope seemed to widen yesterday.

On the one hand, lawless Iraq is awash in deadly ordnance -- handguns, hunting rifles, shotguns, automatic AK-47s, hand grenades, shoulder-fired missiles and much else. In Baghdad alone, as part of its recently announced decommissioning drive, the U.S. military yesterday hauled away 58 tonnes of guns and ammunition.

That brought the total seized in the city to more than 4,870 tons -- just a part of what is on the streets, by most estimates.

In Washington, however, a far more elusive type of weapon was again drawing scrutiny: ousted president Saddam Hussein's supposedly formidable arsenal of biological and chemical arms, which, together with his alleged plans for a nuclear bomb, comprised the chief stated rationale for invading Iraq.

In his State of the Union address last year, U.S. President George W. Bush told the world that Mr. Hussein possessed 25,000 liters of anthrax -- "enough to kill several million people." The Iraqi dictator might also have 38,000 liters of botulinum toxin, Mr. Bush said, sufficient to wipe out several million more. Moreover, the President speculated, the regime might be concealing 500 tonnes of poison gas, together with "upwards of 30,000 munitions" capable of delivering it.

Yet despite a vigorous postwar hunt, no sign of the banned weapons has turned up, and senior Democratic senators took to the airwaves yesterday to suggest Mr. Bush's administration had either relied on flawed intelligence or deliberately misrepresented the Iraqi threat.

Joseph Biden, the top Democrat on the Senate foreign-relations committee, said the White House had "hyped" the risk posed by Iraq.

"We hyped nuclear, we hyped al-Qaeda, we hyped the ability to disperse and use these weapons," he told NBC television's Meet the Press.

Jay Rockefeller, the Senate intelligence committee's ranking Democrat, said on the same program that whether Iraq's weapons program was exaggerated or merely misunderstood, "in either case, it's a very bad outcome."

Republican Senator Pat Roberts, who heads the intelligence committee, predicted unconventional weapons will yet be found. But if they are not, he said, "basically, you have a real credibility problem."

Reflecting that worry, hundreds of U.S. weapons-hunters scouring Iraq -- their United Nations counterparts have not been allowed back in -- appear to be changing focus. After fruitlessly examining dozens of previously identified potential sites, the teams are now gathering their own intelligence through interviews with Iraqi scientists, factory workers and others.

One frustrated American officer told The Associated Press yesterday that the U.S. military originally anticipated finding caches of banned weapons so huge that the chief concern was whether there would be sufficient resources to destroy them.

"It never occurred to anyone, not even for 10 seconds, that we wouldn't find any," said a captain commanding a search team.

Locating the other type of weapon the U.S. wants to seize -- automatic rifles and anything larger -- is easier. Guns have long been popular in Iraq and Mr. Hussein's Baathist regime, unlike other police states, allowed citizens to own them.

Rounding up those guns, however, could prove a major headache for the administration. Under new regulations, most citizens will be allowed handguns, rifles and shotguns for their protection, but not military explosives or the ubiquitous AK-47 automatic assault rifle.

After June 14, possession of an unauthorized weapon will be a criminal offence.

© 2003 Bell Globemedia Interactive Inc

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