BOB DOLE ADVISES SENATE COLLEAGUES TO ‘PASS UP’ ILLUSORY C.W.C. IF NOT GLOBAL, VERIFIABLE, CONSTITUTIONAL

(Washington, D.C.): As the United
States Senate prepares to vote on the
Chemical Weapons Convention (CWC), perhaps
as early as tomorrow, a very
important basis for judging the treaty
has been provided by one of the
institution’s most respected past
leaders: Senator Robert Dole. In a letter
dated today and sent to the CWC’s
foremost opponent in the Senate — Mr.
Dole’s successor as Majority Leader, Sen.
Trent Lott — the Republican
presidential nominee made clear that he
would not support a Chemical
Weapons Convention that is “not
effectively verifiable and genuinely
global.”

In this connection, Senator Dole
wrote:

“I am sure that I
share with all my former colleagues
— on both sides of the aisle — a
strong aversion to chemical weapons.
They are horrible, and there should
be no doubt that I am unequivocally
opposed to their use, production or
stockpiling. Their widespread use
during World War I provoked an outcry
which resulted in the Geneva Protocol
of 1925 which bans the use of
chemical weapons in war.
Unfortunately, the Geneva Protocol
has not prevented all use of chemical
weapons, and we have been reminded
just in the last week of the dangers
presented by tyrants such as Saddam
Hussein.

“In fact, Saddam Hussein used
chemical weapons in the Iran-Iraq war
and against his own Kurdish
population in the North. And, lest
anyone think this is no concern of
ours, there is a distinct possibility
that American troops were exposed to
Saddam’s chemical weapons during the
Gulf War. The United States needs and
wants a treaty which effectively
banishes chemical weapons from every
point on earth. To achieve this goal,
a treaty must be effectively
verifiable and genuinely global —
encompassing all countries that
possess, or could possess, chemical
weapons. If the Chemical
Weapons Convention now before you
achieves this goal, I will support
it. If it does not, I
believe we should pass up illusory
arms control measures. As
President, I would work to achieve a
treaty which really does the job
instead of making promises of
enhanced security which will not be
achieved.

“I supported the START I,
START II, INF, and CFE Treaties
because these agreements met three
simple criteria established by
President Reagan: effective
verification, real reductions and
stability. In evaluating the Chemical
Weapons Convention, I suggest
you apply these same criteria,
adapted to these particular weapons
and to the post-Cold War multi-polar
world. Thus, I have three concerns.
First, effective verification: do we
have high confidence that our
intelligence will detect violations?
Second, real reductions, in this case
down to zero: will the treaty
eliminate chemical weapons? Third,
stability: will the treaty be truly
global or will countries like Iraq,
Iran, Syria, Libya and North Korea
still be able to destabilize others
with the threat of chemical weapons?

“Furthermore, I believe it
is important that the Senate insures
that the implementation of this
treaty recognize and safeguard
American Constitutional protections
against unwarranted searches.”

“It is my understanding that
the Senate will have the opportunity
to address these matters in debate
and, perhaps, in amending the
Resolution of Ratification. It is my
hope that President Clinton will
assist you in resolving them. If we
can work together, we can achieve a
treaty which truly enhances American
security.” (Emphasis added.)

The CWC’s Proponents
Concede That It Will Not Be
Verifiable, Global or Effective in
Ridding the World of Poison Gas

Importantly, the answer to whether
Senator Dole’s eminently reasonable
standard for evaluating the Chemical
Weapons Convention has been satisfied can
be found in recent admissions by, of
all people, the treaty’s leading
proponents. For example, in an
editorial in yesterday’s editions, the Washington
Post acknowledged the
following points:

• “With the end of the Cold
  War, it is not the
  disciplined Soviet Union but the
  unruly rogue states
  that threaten American security,
  and their chemical-war
  preparations are conspicuously
  beyond the reach of the new
  treaty.”
• “It is true that [chemical]
  weapons can be hatched in
  conditions beyond even the
  intrusive inspections foreseen in
  the treaty….”
• “There is a risk
  that the treaty’s ‘chemicals for
  peace’ industrial-sharing
  provisions could nourish local
  aptitudes for chemicals for war,
  as the old ‘atoms for peace’
  program fed nuclear proliferation;
  awareness and vigilance are
  indicated.”

Similarly, former National Security
Adviser Brent Scowcroft
and former Under Secretary of State Arnold
Kanter have just issued an
analysis under the banner of the Forum
for International Policy. It notes, in
part:

• “The Chemical Weapons
  Convention does suffer from a
  number of defects. Some are
  inherent in the problem it is
  addressing: the same basic
  ingredients of many chemical
  weapons also have numerous,
  vitally important legitimate
  uses. As a result, a foolproof
  ban on the capability to
  manufacture chemical weapons
  would require the virtual
  dismantling of the global
  chemical industry. (Even
  then, the possibility of
  clandestine chemical weapons
  laboratories and factories would
  remain.)”
• “Other shortcomings, not
  only are of our own making, but
  were conscious and deliberate.
  For example, critics have
  (correctly) noted that while
  the CWC includes the most
  intrusive inspections ever
  included in an arms control
  agreement, various limitations on
  so-called ‘challenge inspections’
  would make it easier for chemical
  weapons cheaters to escape
  detection….”
• “There are other problems as
  well. Some are simply
  bizarre. For example, the Clinton
  Administration has interpreted
  the CWC as prohibiting the use of
  tear gas to drive off
  non-combatants who might be
  threatening a downed pilot.
  Under this interpretation, if the
  United States ratifies the CWC,
  it would have to use guns and
  bullets rather than tear gas in
  such scenarios (at least unless
  and until other types [of]
  effective non-lethal weapons
  become part of our
  arsenal.)”

It must be noted that such new
non-lethal weapons would have to be
non-chemically based. Also, the
interpretation of which Messrs. Scowcroft
and Kanter are properly critical is
contained in the Lugar Resolution of
Ratification that the Senate will be
considering shortly.

“Some problems are
serious. Russia, which has the
world’s largest stock of chemical
weapons (and which still may not
have revealed the full extent of
its stockpile and program), has
failed to implement an earlier
U.S.-Soviet bilateral agreement
to destroy most of the two
countries’ chemical weapons
inventories. As a
result, the United States is
being denied the kind of direct,
comprehensive monitoring of the
Russian stockpile and its
destruction which might not be
available to it under the CWC.
Now Russia is hinting that it
will not…ratify the CWC unless
it gets special consideration,
indicating it needs more time to
implement the agreement, and more
financial and technical
assistance in destroying its
existing chemical weapons.”

A Judgment Call

To be sure, both the Post and
the two senior Bush Administration
officials conclude that these admitted
problems do not outweigh the perceived
benefits of the treaty. That
conclusion is not shared,
however, by another senior Bush
Administration official — former
Secretary of Defense Dick Cheney.
To the contrary, Secretary Cheney has
joined a large group of prominent
national security experts — including
such distinguished former Cabinet
officers as Secretaries of Defense Caspar
Weinberger and Donald
Rumsfeld, Secretary of State Alexander
Haig, Attorney General Ed
Meese, Secretary of Energy John
Herrington, UN Ambassador Jeane
Kirkpatrick, National Security
Advisor William Clark
and a dozen senior retired military
officers, including two former members of
the Joint Chiefs of Staff (Gen.
P.X. Kelley and Gen.
Merrill McPeak) — in
determining that “the
national security benefits of the
Chemical Weapons Convention clearly do
not outweigh its considerable
costs.”

In the final analysis, such a
netting-out comes down to a somewhat
subjective — albeit strategically and
financially momentous — judgment call.
And that is precisely the sort of
function the United States Senate is
supposed to perform with respect to
treaties under the our Constitution.

The Bottom Line

Participants on both sides of this
debate are to be commended for having, to
date at least, conducted the debate on
the Chemical Weapons Convention in a
manner befitting such a solemn Senate
responsibility. With its long, if not
always happy, experience with past Senate
deliberations on arms control agreements,
the Center has been delighted that the
present one has remained remarkably
focussed on the substantive issues.

In particular, it is a credit to both
the CWC’s proponents and its critics that
this debate will begin — and
hopefully be conducted throughout —
in a climate characterized by
civility and seriousness that accurately
reflects both sides’ shared abhorrence of
chemical weapons and that allows a
reasoned debate about whether, on net,
this treaty meets the sort of test for
ratification helpfully offered by Senator
Dole. The Center believes it does not.

– 30 –