Bush’s Myopia On Chemical Weapons Keeps Him From Seeing Handwriting On Arms Control Wall

(Washington, D.C.): Fresh from the closest encounter with the prospect of imminent chemical attack on U.S. and allied forces of any president since Roosevelt, George Bush effectively announced today that, in the future, the United States will be even less ready to deal with such a contingency than it was in the war with Iraq.

Simply put, the Bush Administration has become obsessed with its pursuit of a Chemical Weapons Convention (CWC) — an agreement fraudulently advertized as a "global, verifiable" ban on chemical weapons. In fact, the CWC will be neither global (perhaps as few as thirty-nine nations will be sufficient for it to enter into force) nor verifiable (no arrangement has yet been devised to ensure compliance with a CW ban).

Today’s White House statement provided fresh evidence of this dangerous obsession in announcing, among other commitments, the following:

"The United States will foreswear the use of chemical weapons (CW) for any reason, including retaliation in-kind with CW, against any state, effective when the CWC enters into force."

 

"The United States will drop its position that we must be allowed to keep two percent of our CW stockpile (500 tons [of chemical agent]) until all CW-capable states have joined the convention."

Such reckless concessions give rise to the possibility that the United States may, in due course, find itself faced with a bizarre and dangerous situation: Rogue nations like Iraq, Libya and North Korea with known chemical warfare programs may legally keep, indeed expand, their stockpiles of such weapons should they chose not to join the CWC. For its part, the U.S. would be enjoined from retaliating in-kind should it be attacked with CW and denied the capacity to do so. The Administration’s putative solution to such a danger — international trade sanctions on chemical weapons-related technology to non-signatories — is laughably inadequate to the task.

No less worrisome is the high probability that some nations will actually become signatories of the CWC but exploit its inherent verification limitations in order to preserve an illicit chemical capability. Under all foreseeable circumstances, the Chemical Weapons Convention will simply serve to ensure that only law-abiding nations like the United States are denied a CW stockpile.

The Center for Security Policy believes the United States is now perilously poised to repeat the mistakes of the 1972 Biological Weapons Convention. As with the CWC, the U.S. entered into this Convention because it did not wish to maintain the relevant military capability and thought it would be better off signing up other nations to a ban — even one that was wholly unverifiable and unenforceable. The result was graphically illustrated in the course of the war with Iraq: Notwithstanding the BW Convention, the enemy was equipped with lethal viruses and the United States was forced to rush hastily ginned up inadequately tested antidotes and less-than-effective defensive systems into the theater of operations. America had no option whatsoever to threaten in-kind retaliation.

No less vivid should be the Gulf war’s lesson concerning chemical weapons. With or without chemical arms control agreements, the United States will continue to confront adversaries equipped with CW. If it wishes to minimize the chances that it will be the victim of chemical attacks, the U.S. must retain a modest, but reliable, capability to respond to any such attack with chemical weapons. Naturally, it must also retain the right to do so under international law and domestic policy.

"One of President Bush’s senior subordinates today remarked at a White House press briefing that ‘Blessedly enough, the President wasn’t faced with the decision’ as to what to do if Iraq had used chemical weapons," said Frank J. Gaffney, Jr., the Center’s director. "Providence may have had something to do with it — but so probably did the prospect of devastating U.S. chemical retaliation. It is irresponsible to deny such a deterrent tool to future presidents who may, after all, face an even more formidable chemical threat than that posed last time by Saddam Hussein."