Anthrax deaths turned attention toward Iraq

WASHINGTON - The news last week about Army scientist Bruce E. Ivins, the suspected anthrax killer who committed suicide just before he was scheduled to meet with the FBI, was treated as more of a mystery than a revelation, and the public reacted with more curiosity than outrage.

The case has an air of Agatha Christie about it - hints of a secret life behind an upright facade and clues like his therapist's handwritten notes calling him homicidal. It also has a Batman-style metaphor in Ivins's work as a juggler.

But the FBI seems quite confident that the 62-year-old Ivins was the culprit in the 2001 anthrax deaths.

If so, he was responsible for more than the murders of five people: He's guilty of turning the attention of the United States away from Afghanistan and toward Iraq, a strategic shift that many people now consider disastrous on two fronts.

The significance of the anthrax attacks in shaping US policy in the wake of the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks has largely been forgotten. Enough time has passed since the frenzied days of October 2001 that unmasking the anthrax killer no longer seems to be of urgent importance. The attacks long ago stopped, and the sense of fear that enveloped the country in those days - with media personalities gulping the antibiotic Cipro to protect themselves - receded.

But the slowly unfolding attacks - seven separate letters containing the deadly powder were sent to politicians and news organizations over a period of 21 days - greatly amplified the fears of average Americans just weeks after the 9/11 attacks.

Were it not for the anthrax attacks, most people would have assumed that the United States faced just one enemy - the global terrorist network Al Qaeda - with a base in Afghanistan and Islamist allies in some other countries.

The anthrax attacks suggested something different: That Al Qaeda's strike on New York and Washington had emboldened numerous enemies of the United States to launch attacks of their own with various methods, some as stealthy as sending biological weapons through the mail.

The Bush administration didn't need much prompting to turn its attention from Afghanistan to Iraq, according to the many insider accounts published since then. The president, who was otherwise somewhat ignorant of the world, was well-briefed on the Iraqi threat dating from Saddam Hussein's attempt to assassinate his father. In addition, many of the president's neoconservative advisers had long believed that the "secular" Iraq would be a good place to implant democratic values.

When the anthrax attacks occurred, Iraq was immediately fingered by some experts and many neoconservative hawks as a possible source; ABC News quoted three unnamed government sources as saying the powder in the letters matched the type produced in Iraq.

Even though most serious analysts were highly skeptical that the tainted letters came from Hussein, the mere possibility that Iraq could have maintained a stockpile of anthrax was enough to convince many people that it was a looming threat.

It's impossible to know how much, if at all, this speculation influenced the Bush administration's subsequent decision to confront Iraq. Perhaps Iraq was so much on the minds of Bush and Vice President Dick Cheney that no other trigger was needed.

But to many others in Congress, the media, and the general public, the anthrax attacks made the administration's later arguments seem more credible: If an enemy of the United States could start killing people by sending powder through the mail, there might indeed be a justification for more precipitous action.

In the end, of course, there was no anthrax found in Iraq - and no weapons of mass destruction of any sort.

Meanwhile, Ivins continued his biodefense work at Fort Detrick, Md. The low-key father of two didn't come under serious suspicion until the last two years, when the FBI placed him under surveillance. Until then, he had actually helped in the investigation of the attacks. He helped test the anthrax samples sent by the killer and, in a bizarre incident, worked as a Red Cross volunteer helping to bring refreshments to investigators who drained a lake near Fort Detrick for evidence.

Back in March 2003, he and several colleagues received the Defense Department's highest civilian honor for producing a possible anthrax vaccine. That very month, US troops were launching their mission in Iraq.

If he was, indeed, the anthrax killer, the invasion, not the vaccine, was Ivins's most significant legacy.

Peter S. Canellos is the Globe's Washington bureau chief. National Perspective is his weekly analysis of events in the capital and beyond.