On My Mind: Saddam’s Sanitation Squad

By A.M. Rosenthal
The New York Times, 31 March 1998

The U.N. inspectors entered the room in one of Saddam Hussein’s “palaces.” What was in
this
room? What was its function? the inspectors asked the Iraqi monitors crowding around them.

“Office of the special security organization,” was the answer.

Then how come there is not a piece of paper, a document of any kind to be found here?
The
Iraqis just did not know.

The palaces are great compounds that include offices and warehouses of Saddam’s military,
weapon-production and security organizations. As part of a deal with U.N. Secretary General
Kofi Annan last month, Saddam gave inspectors permission to enter the compounds barred to
them for seven years. Nobody was crude enough to say that under the cease-fire agreement he
signed with the gulf war coalition in 1991, he had no right to keep them out for a day.

Now, in return for his act of grace and pending contracts, he knows Russia, France, China
and
the Muslim countries will push hard to lift the sanctions that have blocked his military growth.

I wonder how diplomats kept a straight face during the closed U.N. Security Council
meetings,
when they approved the deal Saddam had worked out with Mr. Annan. It bears the seeds of
destruction of the entire inspection system, which uncovered so much of Saddam’s weaponry of
mass destruction — but not all.

First, Saddam gets away penalty-free for having tied up the inspection system since last fall.
Bigger: the system is revised to his taste, with a small army of diplomats attached to inspect the
professional inspectors.

And, the kicker: When inspectors finally entered suspect sites he had had more time than he
needed to move out suspicious documents and materials, as he did in that “security” office.

It is almost funny, this charade, but not hugely. The inspectors had eliminated much of
Saddam’s chemical, biological and nuclear weaponry and were close to the rest.

They were looking mostly for documents — documents that could reveal Iraqi testing of
chemical and biological weapons on live humans, lead to missing warheads, disclose orders for
chemicals that make the chemicals that make people dead. So foiling inspection by sanitizing sites
and attaching non-inspectors to the inspection team were important to Saddam.

Sometimes inspectors tried to save face for the U.N. by saying, my, how cooperative the
Iraqis
had become.

The truth is that after a few days the Iraqis started whittling down even the Annan-Saddam
terms, designed to save the dictator’s dignity. Iraqis began skipping appointments, losing keys to
locked doors, protesting against taking this picture or that, pushing surveillance so tight it risks
accidents.

The inspectors are the system’s only remaining protection. They will not give Saddam the
clearance he needs to get sanctions lifted, unless he suddenly decides he does not want weapons
of mass destruction after all. But he has powerful friends at the U.N., and the U.S. so far has been
no pillar of constancy against Saddam.

Once again, Saddam with the help of U.N. allies like China, Russia and France has come out
way ahead. As he has in every self-made crisis since the end of the gulf war, he has gained
prestige by suckering the U.S.

This time Saddam & Co. made the world concentrate on his campaign against the
sanctions
instead of the core issue: that Saddam was and always will be a danger to world peace. He has
never forsworn the kind of aggression that brought the gulf war, never deigned to conceal his
plans to dominate the Middle East.

But Saddam’s growing power at the U.N. has focused some U.S. minds on the reality
America
faces — not inspection, not sanctions, but Saddam.

In an article for the Los Angeles Times syndicate, Henry Kissinger put it entirely straight
and
clear:

“After all that has passed between Saddam Hussein and the U.S. no deal is conceivable no
matter what Saddam does regarding inspection. The depth of this feeling must be understood by
foreign leaders pressing for accommodation …. If we cannot negotiate with Saddam we must try
to weaken or, if possible, to overthrow him. The outcome of any crisis with Saddam must be
viewed in terms of its impact on that objective.”