The New Republic December 21, 1998
SADDAM'S TRAP
Why we're doing exactly what he wants
By Scott Ritter
Sometime in the second week of December, inspectors from the United
Nations Special Commission (UNSCOM) will once again assemble in Iraq to
carry out surprise inspections of so-called "sensitive sites." These
are locations that Iraq claims are related to its national security,
dignity, and sovereignty; but that the inspectors believe house
documents and other material related to Iraq's production of weapons of
mass destruction. Unfettered access to such sites is critical not only
for verifying Iraq's compliance with its Security Council-mandated
disarmament obligations but also for the conduct of any meaningful
long-term monitoring of Iraqi compliance once such disarmament has been
achieved. As such, the coming inspections are not only a critical "test"
of Iraqi compliance with its recent decision to resume cooperation with
UNSCOM in the face of U.S. air strikes, but also a defining moment for
the future of UNSCOM and all multilateral disarmament efforts.
Yet, in a real sense, this exercise is a sham that will almost
certainly play right into Saddam Hussein's hands. Since Saddam has
blocked the inspectors from conducting any meaningful information-
gathering for the past four months, the targets of their "surprise"
inspections will most likely be drawn from a list of suspicious sites
dating to last summer. Today, surely, those facilities will be empty,
their contents having been moved to secret locations elsewhere. In
effect, Saddam will have managed to have his cake and eat it too. He
will have prevented the inspectors from gathering any real evidence
against him, while at the same time appearing to give them unfettered
access to sensitive sites.
As a member of UNSCOM since 1991, and its chief inspector responsible
for investigating Iraq's concealment mechanism from July 1995 until my
resignation on August 26, 1998, I know that this is hardly the first
time Saddam has pulled such tricks. In fact, they are at the heart of
his strategy for preserving his arsenal of weapons of mass destruction
and, eventually, getting rid of U.N. economic sanctions (which he has
largely succeeded in eluding anyway). Through skillful manipulation of
the situation on the ground in Iraq, international public opinion, and
rifts among the members of the Security Council, Saddam actually aims to
cap his comeback by getting UNSCOM to issue a clean bill of health. It
is an audacious plan, but it may succeed, thanks in no small part to the
mistakes of U.S. policymakers themselves.
If it succeeds, the consequences could be dire. The Baghdad regime--
strengthened by having retained the capability to produce weapons of
mass destruction and psychologically fortified by having outlasted the
world's sole remaining superpower--will rapidly restore its internal and
regional constituencies and reemerge as a force to be reckoned with.
Since his defeat in the Gulf war, Saddam has built up eight years' worth
of resentment and frustration that can only be released through renewed
efforts at territorial expansion through armed aggression and blackmail,
both economic and military.
Even today, Iraq is not nearly disarmed. UNSCOM lacks a full
declaration from Iraq concerning its prohibited capabilities, making any
absolute pronouncement about the extent of Iraq's retained proscribed
arsenal inherently tentative. But, based on highly credible
intelligence, UNSCOM suspects that Iraq still has biological agents like
anthrax, botulinum toxin, and clostridium perfringens in sufficient
quantity to fill several dozen bombs and ballistic missile warheads, as
well as the means to continue manufacturing these deadly agents. Iraq
probably retains several tons of the highly toxic VX substance, as well
as sarin nerve gas and mustard gas. This agent is stored in artillery
shells, bombs, and ballistic missile warheads. And Iraq retains
significant dual-use industrial infrastructure that can be used to
rapidly reconstitute large-scale chemical weapons production.
Meanwhile, Iraq has kept its entire nuclear weapons infrastructure
intact through dual-use companies that allow the nuclear-design teams to
conduct vital research and practical work on related technologies and
materials. Iraq still has components (high explosive lenses,
initiators, and neutron generators) for up to four nuclear devices minus
the fissile core (highly enriched uranium or plutonium), as well as the
means to produce these. Iraq has retained an operational long-range
ballistic missile force that includes approximately four mobile
launchers and a dozen missiles. And, under the guise of a permitted
short-range missile program, Iraq has developed the technology and
production means necessary for the rapid reconstitution of long-range
ballistic missile production.
Iraq supports its retained prohibited capabilities with an extensive
covert procurement network operated by Iraqi intelligence. While images
of starving Iraqi children are beamed around the world by American
television, Iraqi front companies have spent millions of dollars on
forbidden material related to all weapons categories--in direct
violation of existing sanctions and often under the cover of the
humanitarian "oil for food" program.
Finally, Iraqi security forces have kept critical documentation,
including the vital "cookbooks" that contain the step-by-step process to
make chemical agent, outline the procedures for producing weapons-grade
biological agent, detail the final design of the Iraqi nuclear weapon,
and provide the mechanical integration procedures for long-range
ballistic missiles.
These capabilities may seem paltry compared with what Iraq had before
the Gulf war. But they represent a vital "seed stock" that can and will
be used by Saddam Hussein to reconstitute his former arsenal. His
strategy for doing so has emerged over the past seven years of struggle
with UNSCOM. That struggle began almost as soon as the commission was
created to verity a declaration Iraq was supposed to provide to the
Security Council 15 days after the end of the Gulf war. A Security
Council resolution required Iraq to set forth the totality of its
proscribed arsenal, as well as all its components and the means of
producing it. But, instead of telling the truth, Iraq gave a radically
misleading and incomplete account. UNSCOM's original mandate, a
seemingly simple exercise in conventional arms control verification,
evolved into an endless game of cat and mouse.
One by one, we managed to tear down Iraq's lies, the biggest of which
was its March 1992 claim that it had destroyed all of its proscribed
weapons and capabilities unilaterally, without international
supervision. Iraq maintained it somehow undertook this considerable
task without keeping any records to verity it. Iraq also expected us to
accept this disarmament by declaration at face value. But, for more
than six years, we refused to do so, reworking the available evidence
until we had exposed the failed logic of that claim and almost every
other one the Iraqis made.
Unfortunately, we received precious little support. Every six
months, UNSCOM's executive chairman, first Rolf Ekeus and then Richard
Butler, would report our findings to the Security Council. But, instead
of reaching the obvious conclusion that Iraq was violating its
obligations to the council, the council kept sending us back to obtain
even more specific evidence. For instance, one of Iraq's false claims
was that it had never had a biological weapons program. However, we
were able to find shipping invoices showing that Iraq had received
several dozen tons of growth material used for biological products that
Iraq could not account for. It seemed pretty damning--but not damning
enough for the Security Council, which encouraged us to find evidence of
the biological weapons program itself. When, after considerable effort,
we were able to do so, Iraq conceded that it had indeed once had such a
program but claimed that the program was no longer active. Once again,
rather than finding Iraq in noncompliance, the Security Council
essentially directed us to disprove this latest lie.
Eventually we realized that this game could go on indefinitely. And
so by 1995 we shifted the focus of our investigation to finding direct
evidence not of Iraq's weapons programs themselves but of the fact that
Iraq was deliberately concealing them from us. For this we needed
documents: documents setting out the production records of the secret
facilities and weapons dismantled by Iraq and hidden away, documents
about the alleged unilateral destruction, documents setting forth the
methods used by Iraq to conceal its weapons and capabilities from the
inspection teams. And, if Iraq did not want to provide these documents
willingly, then we would have to ferret them out.
Beginning in 1994, we sat for hours listening to high-level Iraqi
defectors describe relevant Iraqi documents--who wrote them, who they
were distributed to, how they were stored, how they were hidden. We
confirmed much of this information through a carefully constructed
international intelligence support network. But when we went into Iraq
to find these documents we were stopped at gunpoint. We watched
helplessly as Iraqi security forces shuttled records from one site to
another, with sedans leaving known document-storage sites for sanctuary
in so-called "presidential facilities." Over and over again our
inspection teams were confronted with empty shelves and missing file
folders. But we persisted. Finally, Iraq decided to take more drastic
action.
In January of this year, we embarked on an effort to expose Iraq's
use of biological and chemical agents on live human test subjects. (This
effort had two goals: First, to find evidence of the program itself,
and, second, to force Iraq to try to conceal this evidence--a campaign
that we, in turn, would attempt to document.) We had received credible
intelligence that 95 political prisoners had been transferred from the
Abu Ghraib Prison to a site in western Iraq, where they had been
subjected to lethal testing under the supervision of a special unit from
the Military Industrial Commission, under Saddam's personal authority.
But, just as we began moving in on facilities housing documents that
would support our contention (for instance, transfer records of the
prisoners), Iraq woke up to the danger and ceased all cooperation with
us.
Iraq's official justification for doing so was that the United States
and Britain were dominating the inspection process. Later Iraq added the
complaint that we were seeking to inspect sites vital to its sovereignty
and national security, including so-called "presidential sites." As it
had during a previous episode of Iraqi intransi-gence several months
earlier, the United States threatened military action. But at the last
minute U.N. Secretary-General Kofi Annan averted war by brokering a
compromise solution embodied in the Memorandum of Understanding of
February 23.
This memorandum indeed forestalled the conflict, but it failed to
resolve any of the underlying issues. Instead, it created a two-way
trap. On the one hand, it boxed the Iraqis in, committing them to
provide us with unfettered access to all sites. But it also backed the
United States into an apparent guarantee of military action in the event
that Iraq failed to comply. The only way forward was total Iraqi
compliance.
Or so it seemed. By the time we returned to Iraq on March 5, Saddam
had shuffled his documents and material into new hidden locations,
challenging us to a fresh game of hide-and-seek. The secretary-general,
the Security Council, and the United States all urged us to conduct a
quick test of Iraq's compliance, so, later that month, we dispatched a
team of inspectors to Iraq. And Iraq, in accordance with Kofi Annan's
agreement, allowed us into facilities that had previously been off
limits. But, naturally, Iraq had carefully purged the sites of any
incriminating evidence. And so we dutifully inspected these sanitized
facilities, establishing the precedent of unfettered access but finding
nothing related to weapons-making.
Fortunately, we also had a secret up our sleeves. For nearly a
year, we had been developing information on the man in charge of Iraq's
concealment effort: Saddam Hussein's presidential secretary, Abid Hamid
Mahmoud, who is considered by many to be one of the most powerful men in
Iraq, perhaps second only to Saddam himself. Senior defectors had long
talked about the immense secrets kept under Mahmoud's personal
protection. But his proximity to Saddam had kept us at bay. In March we
finally achieved the breakthrough we had been looking for: evidence that
Mahmoud had directed elements of Saddam's bodyguards, the Special
Security Organization, to remove documents from facilities to be
inspected. Now, we finally had the information we needed to act.
We returned to New York in April and began planning surprise
inspections of Mahmoud's document hiding sites. But our efforts were cut
short by objections from a most unusual source: the United States.
Without warning, the United States withheld intelligence support central
to this line of investigation. What's more, it prevented more than half
of the members of my team from rejoining me in New York (by reassigning
U.S. officials on the team and putting pressure on the governments of
other team members to prohibit them from coming to New York). The
investigative capabilities that UNSCOM had so carefully constructed
since 1996 were wiped out.
Why did the United States respond this way? It turns out, the
Clinton administration wanted UNSCOM to verify Iraqi compliance with
Security Council resolutions--but only up to a point. The U.S.'s
primary policy goal in the Persian Gulf had become the containment of
Iraq through the maintenance of international sanctions--not necessarily
the disarmament of Iraq. Thus, for all its ostensible support of
UNSCOM, the administration was not willing to go to war in order to
ensure UNSCOM the access it needed to fully disarm Iraq. And Clinton's
national security team worried that there was no quicker way to provoke
a new crisis that would undermine international support for sanctions
than through an UNSCOM effort to inspect Mahmoud's inner sanctum. And
so the inspection regime was reduced to merely carrying out the illusion
of arms control.
But Saddam was not about to let himself be contained any more than he
was going to allow Iraq to be inspected. Taking advantage of the
reluctance to support intrusive surprise inspections (the United States
had directly intervened to stop UNSCOM from carrying out such
inspections on at least six occasions since November 1996, the most
recent being in August 1998), Saddam marshaled his allies in the
Security Council--Russia, France, and China--and in the Office of the
Secretary-General to change the subject from his refusal to come clean
to whether the inspection process was fair. This further isolated those
of us on the inspection team, creating an underlying sense at the United
Nations that we were somehow to blame for the crises with Iraq.
Meanwhile, Iraqi diplomats doggedly tried to split the requirements
of verification from the technical practicalities of on-site inspection.
In at least seven separate technical forums conducted by UNSCOM since
January 1998, Iraq had failed to convince even its allies in Russia,
France, and China that it had complied with its disarmament obligations.
So Iraq sought to shift the compliance debate away from such matters
into the political arena, where Iraq had more flexibility to maneuver
given the admission by the secretary-general and the executive chairman
of UNSCOM that 100 percent disarmament might never be accomplished. In
effect, Iraq was seeking a political resolution to the issue of
compliance, one that would undermine UNSCOM's role. The confused
policies of the United States vis-a-vis UNSCOM inspections only made
Iraq's efforts easier.
By August of this year, the United States was fully committed to a
policy--albeit unstated--of containing Iraq through economic sanctions
and a large military presence in the Gulf, while avoiding expensive,
debilitating confrontations between UNSCOM and Saddam. This entailed
suppressing the efforts of our inspection team to root out all the
facts. (It was for this reason that I resigned--reasoning that it was
better to have no inspections process at all than a sham process
conferring approval upon Iraq when it deserved anything but.)
It was at this point that Saddam pressed his advantage--and once
again ceased cooperating with UNSCOM. Iraq's extreme actions were
clearly unsupportable even to its allies, and the United States, while
keeping its rhetoric to a minimum, took the opportunity to gain
international backing for its policy of isolation and containment. The
United States gamely allowed the Security Council to deliberate for more
than a month before passing a resolution condemning Iraq's actions, then
proclaimed victory, on the assumption that Iraq was now more isolated
than ever.
In fact, the United States had played right into Sadddam's hands. In
a concession to France, Russia, and China, the United States didn't
object to the invitation by the Security Council to the secretary-
general to participate in its proceedings. And Kofi Annan proved to be
no mute witness. He proposed a "comprehensive review" of Iraq's
outstanding disarmament obligations, a process which shifted the burden
of proof from Iraq--where it belonged--to UNSCOM, which would now be
required to define Iraq's level of noncompliance and then back these
assertions with facts, including the sources and methods used to
establish those facts. Iraq's allies on the council concurred. The
United States, eager to preserve the appearance of consensus,
acquiesced.
The story behind the "comprehensive review" concept is an interesting
one, too. Its origins lie in the aftermath of Annan's triumphal February
Memorandum of Understanding. Seeking to consolidate his diplomatic
victory, Annan appointed a special representative of the secretary-
general to Iraq. The role of the special representative was ostensibly
to monitor the situation in Baghdad and attempt to mediate any disputes
between our inspection team and Iraq before they developed into
full-fledged crises. In fact, he was to be Kofi Annan's man on the
ground in Baghdad--to keep an eye on UNSCOM.
Annan chose his man carefully, pulling out of retirement Prakash
Shah--an Indian diplomat who was appealing to the Iraqis both because he
wasn't from an "Anglo-Saxon" country and because he evinced general
sympathy for the plight of a Third World power standing up to the United
States. Soon after the February agreement, we found ourselves at odds
with the Iraqis over the removal from Iraq of ballistic missile warhead
fragments that we wanted to have tested for the presence of chemical
and/or biological agent. The Iraqis objected, claiming that the
warheads only contained isopropyl alcohol and that we were looking for
an excuse to lengthen the inspection process and keep sanctions on Iraq.
Iraq appealed to Prakash Shah, who immediately contacted UNSCOM's
chairman, Richard Butler. It didn't matter to Prakash Shah that UNSCOM
had every right under the relevant Security Council resolutions to
remove these fragments and test them. It didn't matter that, given the
Iraqi history of unilateral destruction, fabricated evidence, and
withheld documentation, these war-head fragments offered the only means
of verification available to UNSCOM. What did matter, according to
Prakash Shah, was that the secretary-general's Memorandum of
Understanding be protected in every way. As Butler relayed to me at the
time, Prakash Shah had told him: "There must be peace at any cost." In
the end, Shah and Annan pressured Butler to accept a compromise solution
that placed a 30~day time limit on testing these materials, although
UNSCOM experts contended that up to three months might be required.
When UNSCOM tested the fragments, we found irrefutable evidence that
the warheads had been filled with both VX nerve agent and anthrax
biological agent, directly contradicting earlier Iraqi claims. Still,
Prakash Shah continued to maintain close contact with the Iraqi deputy
prime minister, Tariq Aziz, and other senior Iraqi officials, not to
push for their unconditional compliance with Security Council
resolutions, but rather to lend a sympathetic ear to their complaints
about the sins that we inspectors had supposedly committed and to
converse about how the secretary-general and the Security Council could
be mobilized to rein in UNSCOM and get the earliest possible relief of
sanctions for Iraq.
As the summer of 1998 wore on and Iraq continued to fail every
logical, technical, and scientific test of compliance, it became
increasingly clear to Prakash Shah and Kofi Annan that the only possible
solution to this problem was political. It was at this point that they
hit upon the idea of the "comprehensive review," which would, of course,
be a political process divorced from the messy facts and reality of
UNSCOM'S technical work. Iraq, naturally, was delighted--seeing the
idea as a way of putting UNSCOM on trial and, as such, a potential
shortcut toward the lifting of economic sanctions.
By the end of September, all that was required was a face-saving
means of getting the weapons inspectors back into Iraq in order to set
the process in motion. On October 31, in a dramatic move that caught
even its supporters on the Security Council by surprise, Iraq
terminated all relations with UNSCOM and its chief, Richard Butler.
Saddam Hussein timed his move well. One day prior to Iraq's precipitous
announcement, the Security Council had issued verbal assurances for
active engagement toward the early lifting of sanctions once Iraq
reversed its decision and allowed the inspectors back to work. Iraq
pocketed this promise, and struck.
Shocked into silence, the world stood by mutely as the United States
clumsily mobilized for war. No matter how undesirable, war appeared
inevitable. And then, at the eleventh hour, Saddam played his hand. He
backed down, as any rational leader faced with overwhelming force would
do. Relieved, the diplomats of the world rushed in and declared an end
to the crisis. Stunned, the United States had no choice but to stand
down and declare itself the winner.
But the only winner was Saddam Hussein. In wrestling terms, Saddam
had executed a flawless reverse. It was the United States that now
found itself boxed in. It had no choice but to support the return of
the UNSCOM inspectors and--since basic decorum will prevent the United
States from conducting any military action against Iraq during the
upcoming Muslim holy month of Ramadan--to urge the inspectors to conduct
a quick "test" of Iraq's compliance. But once again the inspectors'
information on target sites has become hopelessly outdated (Iraq having
had four months to shuffle its materials to new hiding places). Thus
the inspectors will be forced to declare whatever sites they inspect
"clean." And, once Iraq has established a record of compliance with
these now meaningless surprise inspections, the comprehensive review
process can begin.
So what is the correct policy to pursue regarding Iraq? The Security
Council and the United States have several options. The first, which is
the favored option of Iraq and its supporters in France, Russia, China,
and the Office of the Secretary-General, recognizes that Iraq cannot
hope to have economic sanctions lifted without a certification from
UNSCOM that it has complied with its disarmament obligations. This
option therefore would restructure UNSCOM organizationally and
operationally so that it would promptly give Iraq a clean bill of health
despite Iraq's current dangerously incomplete level of disarmament. And
then Iraq would be free to rearm even more rapidly, perhaps with the
help of French, Russian, and Chinese companies.
A second option, similar to the de facto strategy pursued by the
United States and the United Kingdom from April through October of this
year, is to allow the continuation of a weakened UNSCOM, which, although
unable to effectively carry out its disarmament mandate inside Iraq,
would also not certify Iraq's disarmament. The hope would be for
indefinite containment of Iraq. This option is fraught with
problems--among them the lack of international support for keeping the
even leakier sanctions in place indefinitely as well as Saddam's
demonstrated unwillingness to allow UNSCOM to operate unless he knows
that he is going to get a clean bill of health.
A third option, one that nearly came about during the most recent
face-off this November, is to accept the demise of the UNSCOM inspection
regime and seek to punish Iraq through massive air strikes while
continuing to contain Iraq through sanctions. But punishing Iraq
without supporting the continued work of UNSCOM would only further
isolate the United States. (Another version of this option would be
massive military intervention, including the employment of ground force
for the purpose of overthrowing Saddam. But there currently appears to
be little support, at home or abroad for this kind of action.)
There is, however, a fourth option. Iraq's disarmament obligations
are set forth in a Chapter VII Security Council resolution, which
mandates Iraq's compliance and authorizes the use of military force to
compel it. UNSCOM is the organization designated for overseeing Iraq's
disarmament and verifying Iraq's long-term compliance. Thus, UNSCOM
alone holds the key to unlocking the Iraqi disarmament issue. There is
no endgame without UNSCOM.
Iraq knows this, which is the underlying reason for its continued
policy of confrontation and concession. Since 1991, each face-off with
Iraq has left UNSCOM weakened, as its rights and capabilities are
whittled away. Iraq is in the final phase of its plan to reconstitute
UNSCOM to its liking. The United States and the Security Council should
not allow this to happen. The world should demand a robust inspection
regime and total Iraqi compliance. If Iraq refuses to allow this, or if
it is unduly obstructive, then the United States and the Security
Council should seek to compel Iraq, through military force if necessary.
Military strikes carried out for the purpose of enabling a vigorous
UNSCOM to carry out it mandate are wholly justifiable. And one thing is
certain: Without an UNSCOM carrying out the full range of its
disarmament and monitoring activities unfettered by Iraqi obstruction,
the only winner to emerge from this situation will be Saddam Hussein.
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