Here We Go Again: Clinton Presses Anew For Senate Approval Of Flawed, Unverifiable, Ineffective Chemical Weapons Treaty

(Washington, D.C.): In recent days,
the Clinton Administration has launched a
new campaign to secure Senate advice and
consent to ratification of the Chemical
Weapons Convention (CWC). Such a campaign
was made necessary by its decision last
September to withdraw the treaty from
scheduled Senate consideration, rather
than risk its certain defeat.

Now, sympathetic columnists like the Washington
Post‘s Mary McGrory have been
enlisted to hammer Senate Majority Leader
Trent Lott (R-MS) to
bring the CWC back to the Senate floor.
Retired flag officers like Admiral Elmo
Zumwalt are being trotted out to declare
that the military strongly supports this
Convention. And just yesterday, the
President used the occasion of the
receipt of the interim report of his
commission on Gulf War syndrome — which
may be related to widespread exposure of
U.S. servicemen and women to Iraqi
chemical weapons — to imply that
ratification of the CWC would
“protect the soldiers of the United
States and our allies in the future”
by “mak[ing] it harder for rogue
states to acquire chemical weapons in the
future.”

Senator Lott has responded to such
pressure by announcing yesterday that he
would ask the “appropriate committee
members and chairmen” to reopen
hearings on the treaty early in this
session with a view to seeing what can be
done to address the scourge of chemical
weapons and the threat they pose to world
peace. That decision puts the ball
squarely back, first and foremost, in the
court of Foreign Relations Committee
chairman Jesse Helms
(R-NC), whose opposition to the CWC was
critical to the treaty’s withdrawal from
consideration last fall.

Let the Debate Begin, Again

The Center for Security Policy
welcomes the prospect of new hearings
into the Chemical Weapons Convention,
presumably before not only Sen. Helms’
panel but also before the Armed Services,
Intelligence (under new management) and
perhaps other committees. With
the installation yesterday of new Members
comprising nearly one-fifth of the
Senate, there is clearly a need to review
the gravity of the problem posed by the
proliferation of chemical weapons and the
regrettable fact that this convention
will not only prove no real impediment to
such proliferation — it will probably
serve actually to exacerbate the
problem.

The Center looks forward to continuing
during such a review the educational role
it performed last year. As part of that
function, it is attaching for the
information of all Senators — and in
response to Adm. Zumwalt’s op.ed. in
Monday’s Washington Post — a href=”index.jsp?section=papers&code=97-D_05at”>letter sent to
Senator Lott on 6 September 1996 by 68
distinguished former senior civilian and
military officials, including notably
former Bush Administration Secretary of
Defense Richard Cheney. They
conclude authoritatively that the CWC
should be rejected in its present form
since it will not be global in its scope,
verifiable or effective. The Center is
confident that sufficient Senators will
reach a similar conclusion should the
Foreign Relations Committee decide to
report the treaty out for action by the
full Senate.