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STATEMENT
OF
RICHARD PERLE
FELLOW, AMERICAN ENTERPRISE INSTITUTE
BEFORE
THE
HOUSE ARMED SERVICES COMMITTEE
UNITED STATES HOUSE OF REPRESENTATIVES
SEPTEMBER
26, 2002
Mr.
Chairman,
I
wish to thank you for including me in today's
hearing. As we confront issues of war and peace,
our country is strongest when the Congress and
the executive branch act in concert.
In all the talk of the need for a
coalition to confront Saddam Hussein, the
coalition that matters most is to be found here
in Washington, at opposite ends of Pennsylvania
Avenue.
The
President, Secretary Powell, Secretary Rumsfeld
and British Prime Minister Blair have all spoken
in recent days about the urgency of dealing with
the threat posed to the American people, and
others, by Saddam Hussein.
In what may well be the most important
speech of his presidency, President Bush has
argued eloquently and persuasively to the United
Nations in New York that Saddam's open
defiance of the United Nations, and his scornful
refusal to heed its many injunctions, is a
challenge to the credibility of the U.N itself.
And he has rightly asked the United
Nations to approve a Security Council Resolution
that would force Saddam to choose between full
compliance with the many resolutions he has
scorned and violated and action to remove his
regime from power.
Saddam's,
response-calculating, deceitful and
disingenuous-moves only slightly in the
direction of U.N. inspections of Iraqi
territory-and not at all toward the
disarmament that is what really matters.
The statement issued in his name that he
will accept inspections unconditionally is
anything but unconditional: it is hedged as to
the allowable types of inspection and the rules
under which inspections would be conducted. As I understand it, Saddam is demanding an inspection regime
in which advance notification is required and in
which certain places are off limits to the
inspectors, who would be limited in number,
mobility and armament.
Even
from a government whose cooperation we could
count on, these conditions would be
unacceptable.
But from Saddam Hussein, who has gone to
enormous lengths to conceal his weapons program
from previous international inspectors and
continues to lie about them now, the sort of
inspection regime that Kofi Annan has negotiated
with Saddam would be a farce.
What
would a robust inspection regime look like?
It would, at a minimum, include tens of
thousand inspectors with Americans in key
leadership and decision-making roles distributed
throughout Iraq, possessing an independent
capability to move anywhere from dispersed bases
to any site in the country without prior
notification or approval, the right to interview
any Iraqi or Iraqi resident together with his
family at safe locations outside Iraq,
appropriate self-defense capabilities for the
inspectors so they could overcome efforts to
impede them, and the like.
But
Iraq is a very large country.
My own view is that even with a large and
intrusive force it is simply not possible to
devise an inspection regime on territory
controlled by Saddam Hussein that could be
effective in locating, much less eliminating,
his weapons of mass-destruction.
In any case, the inspection regime known
as Unmovic doesn't even come close: Its size,
organization, management and resources are all
hopelessly inadequate for the daunting task of
inspecting a country the size of France against
Saddam's determined program of concealment,
deception and lying. The simple truth is that
the inspectors will never find anything the
location of which has not been discovered
through intelligence operations. Unless we can
obtain information, from defectors or by
technical means, that points the inspectors to
specific sites, we are most unlikely to find
what we are looking for.
We
know, Mr. Chairman, that Saddam lies about his
program to acquire nuclear, chemical and
biological weapons. We know that he has used the years during which no inspectors
were in Iraq to move everything of interest,
with the result that the database we once
possessed, inadequate though it was, has been
destroyed.
We know all of this yet I sometimes think
there are those at the United Nations who treat
the issue not as a matter of life and death, but
rather more like a game of pin the tail on the
donkey or an Easter egg hunt on a sunny Sunday.
The
bottom line is this: Saddam is better at hiding
than we are at finding.
And this is not a game.
If he eludes us and continues to refine,
perfect and expand his arsenal of chemical and
biological weapons, the danger to us, already
great, will only grow.
If he achieves his holy grail and
acquires one or more nuclear weapons there is no
way of knowing what predatory policies he will
pursue.
Let
us suppose that in the end a robust inspection
arrangement is put in place and after a year or
two it has found nothing.
Could we conclude from the failure to
unearth illegal activity that none existed?
Of course not.
All we would know is that we had failed
to find what we were looking for, not that it
was not there to be found.
And where would that leave us?
Would we be safer-or even more gravely
imperiled?
There would be a predictable clamor to
end the inspection regime and, if they were
still in place, to lift the sanctions.
Saddam would claim not only that he was
in compliance with the U.N. resolutions
concerning inspections, but that he had been
truthful all along.
There are those who would believe him.
Given
what we now know about Saddam's weaponry, his
lies, his concealment, we would be fools to
accept inspections, even an inspection regime
far more ambition than anything the U.N.
contemplates, as a substitute for disarmament.
That
is why, Mr. Chairman, the President is right to
demand that the United Nations promptly resolve
that Saddam comply with the full range of United
Nations resolutions concerning Iraq or face an
American led enforcement action.
I
have returned last night from Europe where the
issues before you are being widely discussed.
Perhaps the most frequently asked
question put to me by various Europeans is,
"why now?"
What is it about the current situation
that has made action to deal with Saddam urgent?
My answer is that we are already
perilously late. We should have acted long
ago-and we should certainly have acted when
Saddam expelled the inspectors in 1998.
Our myopic forbearance has given him four
years to expand his arsenal without
interference, four years to hide things and make
them mobile, four years to render the
international community feckless and its
principal institution, the United Nations,
irrelevant.
We
can, of course, choose to defer action, to
wait-and hope for the best.
That is what Tony Blair's predecessors
did in the 1930's. That is what we did with
respect to Osama Bin Laden.
We
waited. We
watched. We
knew about the training camps, the fanatical
incitement, and the history of acts of terror.
We knew about the Cole and the embassies
in Africa.
We waited too long and 3,000 innocent
civilians were murdered. If we wait, if we play
hide-and-seek with Saddam Hussein, there is
every reason to expect that he will expand his
arsenal further, that he will cross the nuclear
divide and become a nuclear power.
I
urge this committee, Mr. Chairman, to support
the President's determination to act before it
is too late.
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