The Handwriting on the Iraqi Wall
(Washington, D.C.): “Curiouser and curiouser.” That’s how Alice described the
ever-more-bizarre situations she found herself in while visiting Lewis Carroll’s Wonderland. The
same could
be said of the increasingly surreal drama involving Saddam Hussein and American responses to his
malevolence.
Let’s Be Clear
To be sure, the central character of this drama could hardly be more apparent. In fact, the
handwriting is on the wall for those willing to see it: Saddam is not going to get rid of
his
weapons of mass destruction (WMD). Period. As long as his regime remains a going
concern,
so will Iraq’s covert nuclear, chemical and biological weapons programs and its effort to build
long-range ballistic missiles with which to deliver them.
This is the unmistakable import of the six-month update supplied last week by UN
Special
Commission (UNSCOM) Chairman Richard Butler. As the New York
Times put it on 17
April, Amb. Butler reported to the Security Council that “Iraq is no closer to meeting the
requirements for the lifting of sanctions than it was last fall, when Baghdad began to
disrupt efforts to locate and destroy its remaining weapons of mass destruction.”
This sorry state of affairs is, as the Communists loved to say, “no accident, Comrade.”
Consider
the characterization offered by Butler’s deputy, Charles Duelfer, of the
condition in which UN
inspectors found Iraq’s so-called “Presidential sites” — those facilities Saddam declared were
critical to Iraqi “national security, sovereignty and dignity” and that he assented to open to UN
inspection only after Secretary General Kofi Annan re-enacted Neville
Chamberlain’s notorious
self-abasement and appeasement of Hitler at Munich:
- “It was clearly apparent that all sites had undergone extensive evacuation. In all the
sites outside of Baghdad, for example, there were no documents and no computers.
The buildings were largely empty.”
In other words, Saddam’s regime made a mockery of these
inspections. It then added
insult to injury by subjecting the inspectors (pursuant to the Annan-brokered deal) to interference
from accompanying diplomats, thereby compounding the obstructionism routinely practiced by
the UN teams’ legions of Iraqi escorts.
To put it bluntly, the Secretary General — and all those who indulged in the delusion
that his
intervention would do more than postpone the day of reckoning — have been had.
Saddam
has proven yet again to be anything but the sort of man with whom, as Mr. Annan blithely put it
last February, we “can do business.”
In fact, Mr. Butler said as much in his latest report, albeit cloaked in the
understated parlance of
diplomacy:
- “A major consequence of the four-month crisis authored by Iraq has been that
virtually no progress in verifying disarmament has been able to be reported. If
that is what Iraq intended by the crisis, then, in large measure, it could be said to
have been successful.”
Curiouser and Curiouser
This is where things start getting curiouser. At the same time that UNSCOM is
reporting that
Iraqi concealment, deception and related activities are preventing it from declaring
Saddam’s regime to be compliant with its obligation to eliminate chemical and biological
weapons and longer-range missiles, another UN agency is giving Iraq a clean bill of
health.
According to Sunday’s New York Times, the International Atomic Energy
Agency (IAEA)
declared two weeks ago that:
- “Iraq had successfully compiled a ‘full, final and complete’ account of its past nuclear
weapons programs. It also said that ‘the agency’s ongoing monitoring and verification
activities carried out since October 1997 have not revealed indications of the existence
in Iraq of prohibited equipment or materials or of the conduct of prohibited activity.'”
It perhaps should come as no surprise that an international organization that
was
completely duped about Saddam Hussein’s nuclear weapons program before Operation
Desert Storm is now persuaded that no news is good news. (Former UN inspector
David
Kay recalls how a key Iraqi physicist delighted in revealing that he learned everything he
needed
to know about misleading the IAEA while serving as one of its inspectors.) No one else should
be under any illusions, however. The Iraqi despot remains just as determined to realize
his
nuclear ambitions as he is to preserve his other weapons of mass destruction programs.
Even Arms Control Enthusiasts Seem to Get It
Curiously, this reality is evident even to some who tend to place great faith in
international
regimes and organizations to control the proliferation of WMD. For example, Sunday’s
Times cited expressions of concern about the IAEA’s conclusion by such paragons of
arms
control orthodoxy as the Bulletin of Atomic Scientists, the Henry L.
Stimson Center and the
Nuclear Control Institute. To their credit, these organizations now appear
seized with the
conviction that a closed, totalitarian nation like Iraq that has enjoyed access to relevant
know-how and technology can never safely be considered a truly nuclear-free zone.
The Bottom Line
Obviously, the only hope actually to remove the danger posed by Saddam’s nuclear
and
other WMD programs is to remove Saddam and his clique from power. Neither the
perpetuation of international sanctions nor an indefinite continuation of the most intrusive
imaginable inspection regime — to say nothing of UN agencies granting Saddam’s Iraq
unwarranted “Good Housekeeping Seals of Approval” and the easing of sanctions they will
inevitably induce — will do the trick. The attached editorial from
today’s Jerusalem Post
recommends an alternative strategy long endorsed by the Center for Security Policy:
Assist and
empower the anti-Saddam opposition, under the leadership of the broadly based,
democratic Iraqi National Congress (INC), in order to bring about an Iraq that the INC
has pledged will be genuinely free of chemical, biological and nuclear
weapons.(1)
It is curious that the Clinton Administration refuses to grasp this reality. Still curiouser,
though, is
the fact that neither the Administration nor the editorial boards of the New York
Times and the
Washington Post (which have within recent days warned of the danger posed by
Saddam’s
abiding WMD capabilities) nor the arms controllers comprehend another, related point: It is
vastly easier for a determined adversary like Saddam to conceal chemical and biological weapons
programs than it is a nuclear one.
Recall that all of the above engaged in fatuous overselling of the Chemical Weapons
Convention
(CWC) — a treaty that cannot and will not rid the world of chemical arms.
Clinton announced in his 1998 State of the Union address that he was dispatching negotiators to
add verification provisions to the utterly unverifiable 1972 Biological Weapons Convention
(BWC). The New York Times and Washington Post have run a
succession of op.ed. articles
and/or editorials in favor of such a step. And most, if not all, arm control enthusiasts are thrilled
with the idea.(3)
Like it or not, if the present, relatively comprehensive on-site inspections are unable
to catch
Iraqi cheating, there is no chance that covert weapons programs elsewhere will be found
out by the inspections and other monitoring called for in the CWC or the “enhanced”
BWC. To the contrary, these well-intentioned measures are doomed to prove
counterproductive
as they encourage American policy-makers and others to misread the proliferation handwriting on
the wall — and to eschew the sorts of steps at home and abroad necessary to reduce the danger it
portends.
– 30 –
1. See the Center’s Decision Brief entitled
‘Serious Consequences’: If Clinton Means It,
Here’s the Alternative to His Failed Strategy of ‘Containing’ Saddam (
February 1998).
2. See the Center’s The Case Against the Chemical Weapons
Convention: ‘Truth or Consequences’: Center Analyses on the CWC Debate
3. See Clinton Legacy Watch # 20: More Evidence of
the Mounting Biological Warfare
Threat and the Inadequate U.S. Response (No. 98-D
44, 10 March 1998).
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