Bipartisan Initiative to Liberate Iraq Offers Effective alternative to Clinton’s Unraveling Containment ‘Strategy’

Needed: Similar ‘Adult Supervision’ on
Kosovo

(Washington, D.C.): On Tuesday, Senate Majority Leader Trent Lott and a substantial
number of
the Senate’s most thoughtful security policy practitioners on both sides of the aisle href=”#N_1_”>⁽¹⁾ introduced
S.2525, the “Iraq Liberation Act of 1998.” This measure offers not only a hope for finally
replacing the failed Clinton policy of attempting to “keep Saddam in his box” with one that
actually has a chance of ending the threat posed by the ruthless Iraqi dictator. It also suggests a
model for constructive congressional action where another Administration failure is about to
metastasize — Kosovo.

A Blueprint for Removing Saddam

As Senator Lott put it in introducing S. 2525: “The Iraq Liberation Act of 1998 has four
major
components:

• “First, it calls for a policy to seek the removal of the Saddam Hussein
  regime.
• “Second, it authorizes the President to provide $2 million for
  broadcasting and $97 million in
  military aid to Iraqi opposition forces. The President is given the
  discretion to designate the
  recipients of this assistance. The military aid authority is similar to that used to support
  anti-narcotics operations in South America and to train and equip the Bosnian army.
• “Third, it renews congressional calls for an international tribunal to try Saddam Hussein and
  other Iraqi officials for war crimes. This will be a crucial step in delegitimizing
  his reign of
  terror.
• “Finally, the bill looks toward post-Saddam Iraq and calls for a
  comprehensive response to
  the challenges of rebuilding the country devastated by decades of Saddam
  Hussein’s rule.”

Specific Actions

In its broad outline, the bipartisan “Iraq Liberation Act” conforms to the
recommendations
offered in February 1998 by a distinguished group of Democrats and Republicans led by former
Congressman Steven Solarz and former Assistant Secretary of
Defense Richard Perle.
Specifically, 40 former senior government officials and other prominent individuals urged — in a
letter issued under the banner of the Committee for Peace and Security in the Gulf
— that the
United States urgently take (among others) the following steps:

• Recognize a provisional government of Iraq based on the principles
  and leaders of the Iraqi
  National Congress (INC) that is representative of all the peoples of Iraq.
• Restore and enhance the safe haven in northern Iraq to allow the
  provisional government to
  extend its authority there and establish a zone in southern Iraq from which
  Saddam’s ground
  forces would also be excluded.
• Lift sanctions in liberated areas. Sanctions are instruments of war against
  Saddam’s regime,
  but they should be quickly lifted on those who have freed themselves from it. Also, the oil
  resources and products of the liberated areas should help fund the provisional government’s
  insurrection and humanitarian relief for the people of liberated Iraq.
• Release frozen Iraqi assets — which amount to $1.6 billion in the United
  States and Britain
  alone — to the control of the provisional government to fund its insurrection. This could be
  done gradually and so long as the provisional government continues to promote a democratic
  Iraq.
• Facilitate broadcasts from U.S. transmitters immediately and establish a
  Radio Free Iraq.
• Help expand liberated areas of Iraq by assisting the provisional
  government’s offensive
  against Saddam Hussein’s regime logistically and through other means.
• Remove any vestiges of Saddam’s claim to ‘legitimacy’ by, among other things, bringing a
  war
  crimes indictment against the dictator and his lieutenants and challenging Saddam’s
  credentials to fill the Iraqi seat at the United Nations.
• Launch a systematic air campaign against the pillars of his power — the
  Republican Guard
  divisions which prop him up and the military infrastructure that sustains him.
• Position U.S. ground force equipment in the region so that, as a last
  resort, we have the
  capacity to protect and assist the anti-Saddam forces in the northern and southern parts of
  Iraq.

Of these recommendations, the first one may be the most important: the rest of these
recommendations should be undertaken in conjunction with the “principles and leaders of the Iraqi
National Congress.” It would be a terrible mistake, in the event S.2525 becomes law,
were
the President to decide to exercise the discretion it affords him to “designate the recipients
of this assistance” by once again squandering it on compromised, unrepresentative and/or
ineffectual opposition groups, instead of the INC.

Time for an Above-board Approach

According to today’s Wall Street Journal, the Clinton Administration will try
today to persuade
Senators that it would be better to pursue initiatives along these lines covertly, rather than on an
overt basis. The arguments against doing so go beyond the obvious one that it is
generally
preferable for a democratic society to state clearly its objectives and to marshal its
resources to accomplish them. This is particularly true in the case of Iraq where mixed
signals
about the U.S. attitude towards Saddam Hussein’s continued tenure have only served to
demoralize America’s allies, undermine confidence in U.S. leadership and embolden the Iraqi
despot to new acts of defiance. The last include his suppression of opposition forces operating
nominally under U.S. air cover in northern Iraq and his continuing effort to rebuild and conceal his
prohibited weapons of mass destruction program, to the point of shutting down the UN inspection
regime.

The danger posed by Saddam’s ongoing weapons of mass destruction programs was put in
sharp
relief in a front-page news article in yesterday’s Washington Post. According to the
Post, “Iraq
[has] built and…maintained three or four ‘implosion devices’ that lack only cores of enriched
uranium to make 20-kiloton nuclear weapons.” While the UN inspectors were unable to say
whether Saddam has obtained the plutonium or highly enriched uranium needed to make such
weapons operational, given the active black market in these materials, it would be foolish to
assume they will not soon achieve that status — if they have not already done so.

It is important to note that the Post article indicates the UN told the
United States government
twice about the existence of these implosion devices, once in 1996 and again in
1997. And
yet, the International Atomic Energy Agency⁽²⁾ has been
trying for months, with tacit if not
explicit U.S. support, to declare Baghdad “in compliance” with the cease-fire resolution’s
requirement that Iraq be nuclear-free.

The Ritter Revelations

The argument for a legislatively mandated, overt policy aimed at removing Saddam from
power is
even stronger in light of the evidence provided by former UN inspector Scott Ritter that
the
Clinton Administration has in other ways deliberately undermined its declared
commitment to find and destroy all of Saddam’s weapons of mass destruction. In an
interview published in the Israeli newspaper Ha’aretz on 29 September 1998, Mr.
Ritter revealed
how the U.S. interfered with efforts to “break the code” on Saddam’s massive program for
concealing such residual capabilities:.

“I finally came up with the solution. I broke the code. We untied the Gordian knot.
We figured it out. We had the problem solved and now we just need to go do the
job. It took us three years, but we solved the problem.

“But the U.S. didn’t let us. Not only didn’t they let us, they won’t let us —
because to go do it ratchets it up to the ultimate level of confrontation. Because
there’s no way Iraq will allow us to inspect the people who need to be inspected.
We’re talking about the people closest to Saddam Hussein. We’re talking about
the security forces, the personal security forces of Saddam, we’re talking about
the family of Saddam. These are the people doing concealment.”

Ritter goes on in the interview to describe the enormous contribution
Israel has made to
UNSCOM’s effort to penetrate and defeat Saddam’s “shell game” with the inspectors: “I can
honestly say that if it weren’t for Israel, the Special Commission would not have been able to
carry out the anti-concealment effort.” He hastened to add: “We cracked the code, not Israel.
Israel was not in the lead on this, but I can say that UNSCOM could not have solved this
problem without the help of Israel. It’s absolutely essential. We could not have done
what we
did. We couldn’t even come close without the help of Israel.” href=”#N_3_”>⁽³⁾

Such behavior underscores the principal reason for pursuing the removal of Saddam on
a
primarily overt basis: The Clinton Administration cannot be trusted to pursue this
end
aggressively and effectively in a program that is undertaken entirely outside public
scrutiny. This point has been brought home repeatedly by people who, like Scott Ritter,
have
had first-hand experience with the fecklessness, double-dealing and counter-productiveness that
has characterized successive CIA-run covert operations in and aimed at Saddam’s Iraq. href=”#N_4_”>⁽⁴⁾

Meanwhile Back in Kosovo

Even as Congress is coming to grips with the need to legislate a fundamental change in the
object
and conduct of U.S. policy toward Iraq, the Clinton Administration appears poised to compound
the mistakes of another failed policy: Its preposterous investment in Slobodan Milosevic — the
principal instigator and premier war criminal in Serbia’s aggression against its neighbors for much
of this decade — whom President Clinton and his special envoy, Richard Holbrooke, once cast as
a statesman and peacemaker for his role in cutting the odious Dayton deal. href=”#N_5_”>⁽⁵⁾

It would be an enormous strategic error for the United States to compound its present folly of
having ground forces in Bosnia (at the staggering annual cost of some $2 billion, virtually all of
which is taken out of the Defense Department’s hide) by deploying U.S.-led NATO peacekeepers
to Kosovo. More symptomatic relief of humanitarian tragedies (especially
that purchased at
the extremely high price entailed in what amount to permanent deployments of American
forces) will not address the underlying cause of this catastrophe: Milosevic and his racist,
genocidal policies.

The same can be said of air strikes if, as is this Administration’s wont, they are
superficial,
fleeting and disconnected from a larger strategic plan. This sort of abuse of American
power
is worse even than the empty threats the Administration has been making against Milosevic in
recent days: If manned aircraft are used in this fashion, pilots will be put at risk for little
perceptible benefit. Irrespective of whether cruise missiles or bombers are used, moreover, there
will be considerable outlay involved. In the absence of any serious purpose — other than
the
expedient one of being seen as doing something — air strikes will be wasteful at best
and
counterproductive at worst.

The Bottom Line

The program now advancing in the Congress to topple the Butcher of Baghdad is as
laudable as it is long-overdue. It should be adopted in both houses at once and sent to
the
President before Congress recesses.

A similar initiative needs to be developed and executed to bring about the downfall
of the
Butcher of Belgrade. The latter should involve most immediately an effort
to counteract the diet
of hateful propaganda upon which Milosevic and his ruling clique rely to foment support among
Serbs and to justify genocide against those at hand who are not ethnic Serbs. Targeted, sustained
and effective air strikes — when combined with a package of synergistic political, economic and
military measures aimed at empowering Milosevic’s opposition akin to those now being proposed
for the foes of Saddam Hussein and his ruling clique — offer the best hope for avoiding a greater
humanitarian tragedy and possibly a wider war in the Balkans.

– 30 –

1. The original cosponsors of Sen. Lott bill’s are: Republican
Senators Senator Jesse Helms of
North Carolina, Richard Shelby of Alabama, Sam
Brownback of Kansas and John McCain
and Jon Kyl of Arizona and Democrats Bob Kerrey of
Nebraska and Joseph Lieberman of
Connecticut. House sponsors of the counterpart measure include the Chairmen of the House
International Relations Committee, and Select Committee on Technology Transfers to China,
Reps. Benjamin Gilman (R-NY) and Chris Cox,
respectively.

2. The IAEA is, of course, the same multilateral bureaucracy that has
repeatedly been snookered
by the likes of Saddam Hussein into certifying, in country after country, that no nuclear weapons
program exists — when, in fact, it often does.

3. It is stupefying that an Administration which has shown itself to be
utterly indifferent to the
dangers of sharing sensitive intelligence information with potential adversaries (see, for example,
the Center’s Decision Brief entitled The Clinton Security
Clearance Melt-Down: ‘No-Gate’
Demonstrates ‘It’s the People, Stupid’ (No. 94-D
32, 25 March 1994)) could launch a formal
FBI investigation of Mr. Ritter for securing valuable data about Iraq that was garnered by
the
Israelis! This investigation — and the leak of its existence for the purpose of discrediting
this
distinguished veteran of Operation Desert Storm — is all the more outrageous since, according to
Major Ritter, every interaction with the Israelis was authorized by the Executive Chairman of
UNSCOM and approved by the United States.

4. See the Center’s Decision Briefs entitled
Clinton ‘Legacy’ Watch # 3: Saddam Lives to
Fight Another Day (No. 97-D 106, 28 July
1997), Father of a Free Iraq? Iraqi National
Congress’ Chalabi Details a Program for Liberating His Country From Saddam
(No. 98-P 39,
4 March 1998) and ‘Serious Consequences’: If Clinton Means It, Here’s the
Alternative to His
Failed Strategy of ‘Containing’ Saddam (No. 98-D
33, 24 February 1998).

5. See Glaspie Redux in the Balkans: As With
Saddam, Appeasing — Rather than Resisting —
Milosevic is a Formula for Wider War (No. 98-D
45, 11 March 1998) and ‘What’s Wrong With
This Picture?’ Even The ‘Office For Securing Clinton’s Election’ Cannot Obscure His
Failure in Bosnia (No. 96-D 102, 25
October 1996) and an op-ed which appeared in the 9/16/1998
edition of the Washington Times authored by the Center for Security Policy’s
director, Frank J.
Gaffney, and entitled “Wrong Man, Wrong Job.”