Fallout from a failed CWC treaty ; Defective dealmaking

By: Frank Gaffney Jr.
The Washington Times, September 18, 1996

The Clinton administration’s decision
last Thursday to withdraw the Chemical
Weapons Convention (CWC) rather than risk
its certain defeat in the Senate marked
an important watershed on three scores.

First, those Americans who would have
been adversely affected by the treaty’s
myriad negative effects have received at
least a stay of execution, if not a
commuted sentence. Over the past three
weeks, this column has enumerated those
at risk, including the following:

• Troops who would not be
  adequately prepared for the
  abiding -indeed, growing threat
  of chemical warfare – due to an
  unwarranted sense that that
  danger has diminished.
• Thousands of American
  businesses, from breweries to
  cosmetics manufacturers, who
  would be obliged to submit to new
  reporting, regulatory and
  inspection requirements simply
  because they use various
  chemicals in their manufacturing
  processes.
• And the owners of literally any
  site in the United States who
  would find themselves the object
  of up to 84 continuous hours of a
  challenge inspection by a new
  U.N. bureaucracy acting without
  probable cause, a search warrant
  or due process.

It remains to be seen whether, as the
Clinton team would have us believe, this
treaty will be resuscitated in the next
session of Congress or if it has been
permanently sidetracked. To a
considerable degree the answer will be
determined by the other two momentous
developments that resulted from the CWC’s
de facto defeat: the emergence of a
formidable new leader in the Senate on
national security matters and the
apparent restoration of that institution
to the critical role envisioned for it by
the Founders of this Republic – namely,
as a quality control mechanism on
treaties like international arms control
agreements.

The new leader is Sen. Jon Kyl, a
freshman Republican from Arizona. Mr. Kyl
had earned the respect of his liberal
colleagues, to say nothing of his fellow
conservatives, even before the fight over
the Chemical Weapons Convention. He did
so by dint of his integrity, his
intelligence and determination and his
effectiveness as a legislator. These
qualities marked him as a man to watch
during his four terms in the House of
Representatives.

Many of those who thought they knew
the measure of this legislator were
nonetheless awed by the leadership
abilities he demonstrated in the fight
over the CWC. Not since Henry M.
“Scoop” Jackson – the single
most knowledgeable and effective
legislator on arms control matters in the
history of the Senate – left the scene
has a senator become such an authority on
a treaty’s implications for the national
security. And not since Scoop Jackson
skillfully derailed Jimmy Carter’s SALT
II Treaty has a member of the Senate
invested the time and personal capital
required to educate his colleagues about
those implications and to earn their
confidence in his judgment that the
accord in question should not be
ratified.

The self-effacing Mr. Kyl’s
achievement was largely accomplished
behind the scenes as he worked with
Majority Leader Trent Lott and Foreign
Relations Committee Chairman Jesse Helms
to map out and execute a multifaceted
campaign of educating the public,
soliciting inputs from the affected
industries, interacting with the press
and conducting personal meetings with
senators whose votes would be critical to
the outcome. In the end, this game plan
stymied the massive lobbying effort (by
some accounts estimated to have cost $5
million) mounted by a special interest,
the Chemical Manufacturers Association.
Mr. Kyl was even paid the ultimate
compliment – the acknowledgment by
several of his Democratic colleagues that
he had simply “blown away”
their efforts to sell the treaty.

By so doing, Mr. Kyl and the team he
assembled in the Senate have created the
opportunity for a third and surpassingly
important watershed development: The
re-emergence of an effective
check-and-balance on the conduct and
content of arms control diplomacy. In
recent years, the Senate has been reduced
to rubber-stamping treaties that promised
massive reductions in theater and
strategic nuclear forces. All too often,
responsible critics were not heard from
in the relevant committee hearings. Floor
debates were desultory and abbreviated
affairs, the outcome preordained by
senators who either believed that arms
control agreement were inherently good
things or that their flaws were
inconsequential (particularly in the
post-Cold War world).

This lack of careful oversight and
rigorous second-guessing invited
defective agreements like the Chemical
Weapons Convention. In fact, the CWC’s
drafters held the Senate in such low
regard that they actually wrote into the
treaty language that prohibited it from
amending the Convention in any way!
Confident that senators would not balk at
even that highhandedness, the Clinton
administration has conjured up still
further, dubious and unverifiable arms
control initiatives ranging from a
Comprehensive Test Ban to a landmine ban
to a fissile material cutoff. The
administration has even decided to
circumvent the Senate’s treaty-making
responsibilities altogether by adopting
sweeping changes to the 1972
Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty without
Senate advice or consent – indeed, in the
face of strenuous opposition by well more
than the one-third of its members needed
to block ratification.

It is very much to be hoped that,
with Mr. Kyl’s continuing leadership, all
of President Clinton’s disarmament
schemes will be subjected to the sort of
skeptical, rigorous review by the U.S.
Senate that they so clearly require. If
so, they may meet the same fate as the
Chemical Weapons Convention.
Alternatively, if future arms control
treaties are to avoid that outcome, they
will have to pass tests of verifiability,
equitableness and effectiveness – and
thus consistency with the national
interest – that the CWC simply could not
satisfy.

Frank J. Gaffney Jr. is the
director of the Center for Security
Policy and a columnist for The Washington
Times.