A Deadly Silence On Iraq

By: Jim Hoagland
The Washington Post, November 8, 1996

Rolf Ekeus and his courageous band of United Nations arms
inspectors say it regularly and authoritatively: Saddam Hussein
continues to hide missiles and chemical weapons in the Iraqi
desert. Saddam continues to lie about Iraq’s other weapons of
mass destruction, and obstructs with impunity U.N. efforts to
find out the full truth.

There is no mystery about what Saddam is doing, and Ekeus is
close to figuring out exactly how he does it. The mystery is why
the world acts so unconcerned about this deadly race against the
clock, which suddenly ticks in Saddam’s favor as international
support for sanctions against Iraq weakens.

Iraq is important. It is the one country that the
international community, through U.N. resolutions, has explicitly
forbidden to develop weapons of mass destruction and to repress
its own population. If the American president and other world
leaders cannot build on that consensus and get Iraq right, they
are not likely to get anything important right.

Just as the dismemberment of Ethiopia showed the impotence of
the League of Nations and doomed that organization, failure in
Iraq will fatally compromise the United Nations’ authority.

That failure now looms. It is predictable, and therefore
preventable. But the world’s responsible powers sit by in
silence, apparently distracted by domestic elections, economic
problems at home or Boris Yeltsin’s heart bypass operation.

Buoyed by his humiliating defeat of the CIA in northern Iraq
in September, Saddam has now mounted a major push to wriggle free
from U.N. control. Washington’s weak response to the CIA defeat
has encouraged Baghdad in the belief that the world is wearying
of confronting Saddam and can be outwaited.

The Iraqi dictator is backtracking on the oil-for-food deal
negotiated between Iraq and the U.N. this summer. In what one
U.N. diplomat privately describes as “show stoppers,”
Iraq is now demanding effective control over U.N. inspectors who
were to monitor distribution of food and medicine inside Iraq and
over the funds generated by the limited oil sales the deal would
allow.

The new Iraqi demands block badly needed relief for Iraq’s
suffering civilians. Saddam’s political aims are for him more
important than feeding his people: The oil sales were intended
also to fund the U.N. Special Commission on weapons of mass
destruction, which has become the most important lever of
international control over Saddam’s murderous ambitions.

Without the oil sales, the Special Commission will run out of
operating money in January unless new sources of funding are
found for its $ 3 million monthly budget.

Moreover, throughout this year the Iraqi army has ignored,
harassed and usually refused to cooperate with the Special
Commission’s inspectors, who are tasked to discover and report
whether Iraq is living up to its promises to rid itself of
atomic, biological and chemical weapons, and the missiles that
could deliver those weapons of mass destruction to neighboring
countries.

The Iraqi resistance to inspections blatantly violates the
U.N. resolutions that establish the cease-fire that ended the
gulf war in 1991. The world community’s response? Mild verbal
reproof of Baghdad, and no action.

This unfolding crisis is laid out in spare, clear prose in an
alarming report submitted to the U.N. Security Council in
mid-October by Ekeus, the former Swedish diplomat who is the
executive chairman of the Special Commission.

Over the past six months Ekeus has focused the inspections on
what he calls “the structure of evasion and
concealment” the Iraqis have used to hide at least a dozen
Scud missiles, an unknown number of crude chemical warheads and
material for “a full-scale biological warfare program,
including weaponization.”

Ekeus’s effort to penetrate Saddam’s weapons concealment
program has brought his inspectors eyeball-to-eyeball with
special Iraqi Republican Guard units that run these illegal
operations. They were recently seen moving what they said were
“concrete pillars,” but which, Ekeus noted “by
their dimensions and shape, resembled Scud missiles.” The
“pillars” disappeared.

Ekeus’s refusal to shade the truth about Iraq has been a
vital factor in keeping U.N. economic sanctions in place and
thereby keeping Saddam from significantly rebuilding a deadly
arsenal of unconventional weapons.

Washington needs to reaffirm quickly and publicly its
political and financial support for the Special Commission, and
to promise that Iraqi interference with inspections will now be
met with U.S.-led military reprisals. It is no longer the time to
“contain” Saddam but to confront him head-on over his
attempt to undermine a valuable and effective U.N. agency that
has kept his plans for mass murder in check.