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Developments

Iraq News, SEPTEMBER 29, 1998

The central focus of Iraq News is the tension between the considerable, proscribed WMD capabilities that Iraq is holding on to and its increasing stridency that it has complied with UNSCR 687 and it is time to lift sanctions. If you wish to receive Iraq News by email, a service which includes full-text of news reports not archived here, send your request to Laurie Mylroie .

I.   TURKEY TO SEND AMBASSADOR TO BAGHDAD, REUTERS, SEPT 26
II.  AZIZ TOOK TOUGH LINE WITH ANNAN, UN REPORT, SEPT 28
III. "THE LOGIC OF SHALLOW MEN," AL THAWRAH, SEPT 17
IV.  DAVID HIRST, "SADDAM NEARS END-GAME," GUARDIAN, SEPT 3, 1995
V.   URIEL DANN, "GETTING EVEN," NEW REPUBLIC, JUN 3, 1991
   This is the 55th day without weapons inspections in Iraq.
   In response to the US-brokered agreement between the KDP and PUK [see 
"Iraq News," Sept 20], Turkey announced, Sept 26, that it would upgrade 
ties with Baghdad and send an ambassador there. Previously, Turkey had 
been involved in US mediation between the Iraqi Kurds, but it did not 
participate in brokering the recent agreement.  
   An Iraqi delegation, headed by Tariq Aziz, arrived in NYC over the 
weekend.  The delegation included presidential adviser, Lt. Gen. Amir 
Al-Saadi, responsible for CBW, and Oil Minister, Gen. Amir Rashid, 
responsible for missiles.  Yesterday, Aziz met Kofi Annan in what was 
supposed to have been an attempt to end the impasse created by Iraq's 
blocking of UNSCOM inspections.  The meeting followed mediation last 
week by Annan's envoy, Prakash Shah, in which Annan/Shah used the 
provision of UNSCR 1194 calling for a "comprehensive review" of Iraq's 
compliance with the UNSC resolutions, to induce Baghdad to allow the 
resumption of weapons inspections.
   But it is not clear what Iraq really wants.   As AFP, Sept 19 
reported [see "Iraq News," Sept 20], presidential adviser, Gen. 
Al-Saadi, claimed to be "very satisfied" with the Annan/Shah proposal 
even as Tariq Aziz, in Al-Ittihad [UAE], Sept 25, called cooperation 
with UNSCOM useless.
  And Aziz was tough during yesterday's meeting, according to the UN 
Public Affairs', "UN Report," which explained, "Calling weapons 
inspections 'provocations,' Iraq's deputy prime minister September 28 
said that his government will not change its ban on inspections and 
instead, will press ahead for a lifting of sanctions. . .   Aziz said 
the comprehensive review of Iraq's compliance with the Security 
Council's Gulf war cease-fire demands is 'long overdue' and if conducted 
in an 'honest, objective professional' manner, it will result in a 
lifting of sanctions."  Aziz will meet Annan again on Friday for further 
talks.
  One reader, retired from DoD, is quite concerned about those talks.  
He wrote, "The Iraqis are playing footsie on what goes first, the review 
or the inspections.  Such placeholder issues are almost always resolved 
by stretching both into a simultaneous process:  The reviewers assemble, 
set an agenda and rules, start hearing briefings, etc., while the 
inspectors assemble, UNSCOM meets with Iraqi officials on modalities and 
developments over the last eight weeks, etc.  In other words, the UN 
caves, but says it didn't."
   Perhaps.  But Saddam may not believe he is likely to get what he 
wants, or at least not fast enough.  In "The Logic of Shallow Men," al 
Thawrah, Sept 17, an Iraqi journalist, Iman Ahmad, wrote mockingly of 
the US, specifically the Sept 16 testimony of Asst Sec State for NEA, 
Martin Indyk, before the House Nat'l Security Committee [see "Iraq 
News," Sept 14 for Indyk's Sept 9 Senate testimony].  
   Ahmad explained, "Indyk said that US Government policy aims to stop 
Iraq achieving its goals.  As he envisioned them  . . . these goals are: 
attracting attention to Iraq, sowing discord among members of the 
Security Council, gaining international support, and isolating the US. . 
. "  Ahmad denounced that as "false and absurd [and] not on the agenda 
of Iraqi decisionmakers. . . . Iraq has announced its demands and 
objectives, namely, gaining its legal rights in return for compliance 
with its commitments.  Iraq wants the sanctions to be lifted . . .  It 
wants to eliminate the injustice and protect its people, sovereignty, 
and territory from the ongoing aggression to which Indyk and his like 
want no end. . . [Iraq] cannot allow the slow annihilation and 
starvation of its people as well as the continued destruction of its 
economic, social and cultural institutions. . . As long as the Security 
Council remains incapable of protecting the countries that adhere to its 
resolutions, especially those that destroy people's rights to live and 
progress, Iraq has no choice but to exercise its most fundamental right 
to self defense.  That was precisely Iraq's objective when it suspended 
UNSCOM's work."
   But how would Iraq exercise its "fundamental right to self-defense"? 
A month after the Aug 95 defection of Hussein Kamil, the experienced UK 
journalist, David Hirst, spoke with a high-ranking defector to Iraqi 
Kurdistan.  That defector had come to the attention of "Iraq News" 
nearly a year before.  In Sept, 94, Saddam gave a speech in which he 
said that if the Iraqi people were hungry and starving, they should say 
so, and he would open the "storehouses of the universe" to feed them.  
Hearing that statement, the defector predicted that Saddam would try to 
invade Kuwait--which he soon did. 
   Writing in Sept 95 of the revelations precipitated by Kamil's 
defection and the shock with which they were first received, Hirst 
wrote, "If Iraq has remaining chemical or biological weapons, or even 
delivery systems on the scale Mr. Ekeus has suggested to a startled UN, 
the possible consequences are horrifying.  For there is no question that 
President Saddam is now entering his end game, and that he will use 
every available means either to avert his doom or to make it a worthy 
climax for his 17 years of misrule.  He will do his utmost to ensure 
those means include any remaining stock of unconventional weapons. 'One 
thing you can be sure of,' according to a former-high ranking Saddam 
adviser who has defected to north Iraq, 'he won't deprive himself of his 
last sources of power-especially now. . . Saddam is not going to give up 
something for nothing,' said his former adviser, who forecasts that he 
will use whatever weapons he still has to bargain over sanctions.  If he 
fails, he will use them for blackmail and brinksmanship instead.  He has 
always regretted giving up his Western 'guests,' the human shields he 
distributed among strategic targets, as the US-led armies assembled for 
Desert Storm.  He will not make the same mistake again.  There will come 
a point, the adviser said, when conciliation exhausted, he swings back 
to confrontation. 'The end game will take place over Kuwait and the 
Gulf,' according to his adviser . . . These vital, Western-protected 
oil-producing regions are where he always felt his strategic 
opportunities lay, and it is there, should he fail, that he would exert 
his most sweeping vengeance."
  Some four years before, the late Uriel Dann, professor of history at 
Tel Aviv University, in a remarkable article in The New Republic, Jun 3, 
1991, wrote similarly, "In post-Persian Gulf war analysis, one critical 
point has not been stressed sufficiently.  This is Saddam Hussein's 
personality and its significance for the future so long as he is in 
Baghdad. . .  Saddam Hussein does not forget and forgive.  His foes 
brought him close to perdition and then let him off, being weak fools as 
he had always known, though their weakness and foolishness turned out 
differently than he had foreseen.  He will strive to exact revenge as 
long as there is life in his body.  He will smirk and conciliate and 
retreat and whine and apply for fairness and generosity.  He will also 
make sure that within his home base it remains understood that he has 
not changed and will never change . . . The day will come when he will 
hit--we do not know with what weapons, nor does he now know himself.  
And when he does hit he may, by the grace of God, miscalculate as he has 
miscalculated in the past.  But even so the innocent will pay by the 
millions.  This must never be put out of mind:  Saddam Hussein, from now 
on lives for revenge. "