Iraq News, 17 August 1999
By
Laurie Mylroie
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. RICHARD BUTLER, TALK, SEPT, 99
I. RICHARD BUTLER, TALK
NB: Discussed below is a June, 1996 agreement restricting UNSCOM's
freedom of operations in Iraq. The background of that agreement is
significant. Following Hussein Kamil's defection, UNSCOM became much
more aggressive in its inspections. In Jun, 96 an UNSCOM team had a
site surrounded, which was suspected of housing SCUD missiles. Iraq
blocked access. As was its habit under the Bush administration, UNSCOM
maintained a vigil around the site, expecting the US would threaten the
use of force against Iraq and Saddam would back down. Indeed, at the
UN, Madeleine Albright was moving to pass a resolution declaring Iraq in
"material breach" of the cease-fire, which would have constituted UNSC
authorization for a US strike on Iraq. In Washington, the State Dep't
was agreeable, but the White House felt Albright was moving too fast.
The most senior UNSCOM officials were aware they did not have US support
and the term "Tony Lake of the sweaty palms" was used then.
Talk
September, 1999
By Richard Butler
Earlier this summer, I decided not to seek a new term as head of
UNSCOM, the United Nations Special Commission formed to disarm one of
the world's most dangerous, and clever, tyrants. The two years spent
battling Saddam Hussein were grueling, but in the end it was not simply
his recalcitrance that made it impossible for me to do my job properly.
That, after all, was the predictable cost of doing business with a
dictator addicted to weapons of mass destruction. Nor was it a matter
of America's unwillingness to hold Saddam's feet to the fire, as one of
my former UNSCOM inspectors, Scott Ritter, has famously charged.
The larger issue was that the situation inside the UN had grown
untenable. Russia, a key member of the Security Council, had become
Saddam's most aggressive advocate-and has continued in that role right
up through this summer, when Moscow falsely accused me of endangering
millions of Iraqi by leaving behind dangerous chemicals and explosives
in our laboratory in Baghdad. Deeply alarming, too, was the behavior of
the secretary-general of the UN, Kofi Annan, who repeatedly tried to
deal with the problems raised by an outlaw regime by papering them over
with diplomacy. Annan and his immediate staff sought to hand Saddam the
greatest possible prize: the destruction of UNSCOM, a thorn in the side
of both men. Saddam wanted the thorn removed so that he could retain
his weapons. Annan wanted it removed because UNSCOM was too independent
to work within the mainstream of the UN.
A year ago, Saddam put an end to all attempts to get rid of his
weapons of mass destruction. Soon afterward, he went a step further,
shutting down the monitoring inspections intended to deter him from
building more of those weapons. It's impossible to know exactly what
Saddam has been up to since then; for a year now the Security Council
has struggled to reach an agreement on a successor organization to
UNSCOM. But a few things are certain: Iraq possessed the knowledge
required to make a sophisticated atomic bomb. Iraq has long-range
missiles and has been hard at work on extending their range. Iraq
possesses the means to make both chemical and biological weapons.
This is the disturbing reality, and not simply because it portends
instability in the Middle East, serious though that is. In far graver
terms, if Saddam gets away with facing down the UN, he could destroy the
world community's ability to deal with rogue states-and its capacity to
stop the production of these deadly armaments.
THE FIRST EVIDENCE that Iraq possessed chemical weapons was discovered
by an Australian scientist, Dr. Peter Dunn, who had been sent by the UN
to the Iran-Iraq battle zone in 1986. Dunn found an unexploded Iraqi
shell. He carefully drained the yellow-brown contents into the nearest
receptacle, a Coca-Cola bottle. It was mustard gas.
In 1991, as coalition troops massed on the borders of Kuwait in the
run-up to the Gulf War, Iraq sent chemical weapons encased in artillery
shells and missile warheads to the front lines. All Saddam had to do
was say, "Fire." James Baker, then secretary of state, took Iraqi
Deputy Prime Minister Tariq Aziz aside in Geneva and warned him that if
the Iraqis used chemical weapons on the coalition troops, there would be
a resounding silence in the desert. Aziz understood this to mean that
the US would retaliate with nuclear weapons. Chemical weapons were not
used during the Gulf war.
Desperate to stop the coalition bombing, Saddam quickly agreed to a
cease-fire, which took the form of UN Security Council resolutions
requiring that Iraq be stripped of its weapons of mass destruction.
Iraq had 15 days to declare all of its illegal weapons and a year to
destroy them. Saddam, it turned out, had an awesome array of illegal
munitions. The UN created UNSCOM to catalog his weapons and supervise
their destruction-and gave UNSCOM unprecedented, far-reaching power to
do so.
The policy of deceit reached its height four years later with the
alleged defection of Hussein Kamel, Saddam Hussein's son-in-law and the
lieutenant general in charge of his weapons programs. In August, 1995
Kamel left Iraq for Jordan. Shortly thereafter, Iraqi officials pointed
Rolf Ekeus, then executive chairman of UNSCOM to Kamel's chicken farm
some 15 miles southeast of Baghdad, where they said UNSCOM would find
what it had been looking for. They were making a preemptive
strike-presumably motivated by fear of what Kamel would reveal. At the
farm Ekeus discovered aluminum shipping trunks containing plans and
instructions for Saddam's arsenal.
Six months later Kamel returned home amid promises that all would be
forgiven. A few days after he arrived in Baghdad he was executed by
members of his own family. Kamel's defection had, after all, forced
Saddam to reveal the dark heart of his germ warfare program. Or had it?
Another take on the Kamel defection soon emerged inside UNSCOM. The
whole thing was a setup. Shortly before Kamel left Iraq, UNSCOM had
taken aerial photographs of the chicken farm, as part of its routine
surveillance. The photos showed a line of a dozen very large shipping
containers outside the barns. By the time Ekeus and his team arrived,
these containers had disappeared. When asked to explain this
discrepancy, Iraq denied the existence of these larger containers--
UNSCOM's photos notwithstanding. But as UNSCOM sifted through the
millions of pages of documents found on Kamel's farm, gaps were
revealed; the papers had been carefully culled before Saddam's secrets
were "exposed." The whole operation had been a daring ruse designed by
Saddam and Kamel-who was in on every part of the play, except for the
last scene: a spray of bullets to ensure his silence.
Afterwards, Ekeus strengthened the UNSCOM team investigating Iraq's
attempts to conceal its weapons cache and sought intelligence assistance
from UN member states. Iraq countered by stepping up its interference
with UNSCOM inspections. Tensions mounted. In June, 1996, Ekeus flew
to Baghdad for an emergency meeting with Aziz. The two struck an
agreement: Iraq would be permitted to severely restrict UNSCOM's access
to any site the Iraqi government deemed "sensitive" for national
security reasons. This was in direct violation of a Security Council
resolution stating the UNSCOM should be able to go anyplace, anytime,
with whatever people it needed to do its job. The cave-in had begun.
SUCH WAS THE STATE of affairs in early 1997 when Secretary-General Annan
asked me to replace Ekeus. I had been the Australian ambassador to the
United Nations for five years: during the period, Annan had been head of
peacekeeping at the UN, so we were already well acquainted. I had spent
most of my career formulating treaties to stop the proliferation and
testing of nuclear weapons. Now I was being given the chance to do some
hands-on disarmament-actually destroying weapons, not negotiating
agreements.
I started on July 1. Three weeks later I flew to Baghdad to see
Aziz. I was as direct as possible with him. I promised to maintain the
objectivity of science and technology in all of our inspections, and I
assured him we would declare Iraq disarmed just as soon as we were able
to do so on the basis of hard evidence. All I required was a full and
final accounting of Iraq's imported weapons and its indigenous weapons
productions.
Meanwhile, I was being encouraged to move ahead quickly by senior
members of the Security Council, the Russian included. Edward "Skip"
Gnehm Jr., a US diplomat offered me sage advice the morning I started
work. Don't give the Iraqis a finite list of UNSCOM's demands. I
understood his point. If I were to tell Iraq that UNSCOM believed that
it was missing 10 missiles, trucks carrying 10 missiles would likely
turn up at our front door in Baghdad the next day. We would never know
if the real number had been 15.
Before long, I had my first taste of Iraqi defiance. During a
routine inspection in September 1997 at what Iraq had described as a
food-testing lab, the chief of our biological team glimpsed two Iraqi
officials trying to run out the back door. She seized a briefcase from
one, inside were biological test equipment and documents linking the
headquarters of the Iraqi Special Security Organization to what appeared
to be a biological weapons program. After the Iraqi generals in charge
dodged my requests to explain these materials, I ordered a no-notice
inspection of the Special Security headquarters building to be led by
Scott Ritter, the head of our concealment staff. A small convoy of
vehicles set off toward this destination. But about a half mile from
the building, the convoy was stopped by armed Iraqi guards.
I telephoned Aziz, telling him to allow my people to move forward.
He refused, claiming that the building in question was a "presidential
site" and was therefore off-limits. It was an entirely new concept to
deem these sites sanctuaries. Nothing-not even "sensitive sites"-was
off-limits according to the deal Saddam had signed to put an end to the
Gulf War. Besides, I pointed out, the U2 aerial picture I had on my
desk in preparation for our conversation showed that the presidential
palace was a mile down the road from where our motorcade had been
stopped. We were still denied access. Fearing for its safety, I
withdrew our team.
I reported this and similar incidents to the Security Council in
October and asked the UN to rescind the agreement Ekeus had struck on
the sensitive sites. But by then UNSCOM's political support was
beginning to collapse. Russia, china, and France refused to vote for a
resolution supporting the conclusions of my report of UNSCOM's work-a
resolution that threatened new sanctions against Iraq unless Iraq
co-operated with inspectors. The Iraqis seized on these divisions
within the Security Council, formally affirming the existence of the
so-called presidential sites and declaring them off-limits to UNSCOM
investigators. Eight areas covering a total of 30 square miles-
including 1,100 buildings, many of them warehouses and garages ideal for
storage-were designated as presidential sites.
Later in the month Iraq announced that all American UNSCOM personnel
would be expelled from Iraq within a week. I was determined not to
allow Iraq to dictate the terms of our inspections, especially if that
meant singling out a nationality. Nothing, I thought, could be more of
an affront to the spirit of the United Nations. When the deadline
arrived, the Americans were told to be out of Iraq by midnight. At that
point, I withdrew all UNSCOM staff from Baghdad. A concerned Kofi Annan
asked why we couldn't do our inspections without Americans. I was
incredulous. I tried to explain that giving Iraq veto power over the
composition of inspection teams would undermine the quality of the teams
and set an unacceptable precedent. I prevailed, but I received my first
glimpse of Annan's tendency to sacrifice substance to his notion of
diplomacy.
Through all of this, Russia was playing the self-appointed role of
Iraq's chief advocate in the Security Council. Russia's ambassador to
the UN, Sergei Lavrov, stopped by my office regularly to take me through
the latest concessions Iraq wanted from the Security Council and UNSCOM.
It was an unsettling spectacle: the ambassador of a permanent member of
the Security Council working through Saddam's shopping list.
Lavrov suggested that I visit Moscow. I accepted, thinking that if I
could reason with Russia's foreign minister, Yevgeny Primakov, I might
be able to get things back on track. We met in a conference room in
Russia's foreign ministry, where Primakov proceeded to point out that
these presidential sites were deeply important to the dignity of the
regime and thus should be kept out of UNSCOM's reach. I could not
believe it. This was, of course, in violation of the very resolution
that Russia had helped the Security Council adopt. Then he told me that
it was in Russia's interest for sanctions against Iraq to be lifted so
that Iraq would again be free to sell oil for profit. Why should Russia
care about Iraq's economic fortunes? Primakov volunteered the answer.
Iraq owed Moscow some $7 billion (for Russian tanks, helicopters, and
other weapons dating back to the Iran-Iraq war), and Russia wanted the
money. UNSCOM must be more "flexible," he continued. "If you can't
find something, weapons, during your inspections, you should accept that
it's because they don't exist." According to his logic, the onus of
proof should be shifted from Iraq to UNSCOM. What more could Saddam
have asked for?
When I returned to New York, Primakov's disturbing pronouncements
took on a new meaning. I received intelligence reports from an
outstanding source that the Russian foreign minister had been getting
personal payments from Iraq. For God's sake, I thought, here we are
trying to disarm a rogue regime, and a person who should be a prime
mover in this grand enterprise was on the take. Since then, Russian
officials have publicly denied these reports. But in intelligence
circles, the report's credibility has deepened over time.
KOFI ANNAN HAD been secretary-general for about a year when the drama
over the presidential sites started to unfold. Eager to intervene, he
began communicating with Aziz. In one of their conversations, the Iraqi
minister told Annan that Iraq didn't have adequate maps of its
presidential sites and asked if the UN would send a team of surveyors to
draw some up. Annan called me into his office to discuss this request.
I advised him to refuse. One of our chief inspectors, I explained, had
been in the Iraqi government's mapping office and had held in his hands
maps of precisely the sites at issue. But Annan was determined to agree
to Aziz's request, saying it was a matter of diplomacy, not truth.
Frustrated, I decided to put it to Annan in writing. In my memo I
noted that Iraq had detailed maps of every inch of its territory and
that he should reject Aziz's request on the grounds that he was being
lied to. I said it was important to signal now that the secretary-
general of the United Nations was not prepared to be played for a fool;
otherwise the prospects for meaningful negotiations in Baghdad would be
minimal. Annan rejected my advice, sending UN surveyors to Iraq to draw
up the maps. Within a few weeks the maps were completed and delivered
to UN headquarters under arrangements that suggested that they were as
sacred as the Dead Sea Scrolls. The stage was now set for Annan to go
to Baghdad.
On the eve of his departure in February 1998, I sent Annan and the
members of the Security Council an urgent memo. This time I urged them
to agree to accept special conditions for the inspection of presidential
sites if-and only if-Iraq lifted the extensive restrictions it had
placed on its "sensitive sites" in the earlier agreement with Ekeus.
Without this trade-off, I wrote, they risked departing further from
Security Council decisions.
Annan called me, clearly puzzled. "Does this mean that there's a
special category of sites in addition to presidential sites?" he asked.
I was shocked. For almost six months we'd been talking about this very
issue-ever since I had first brought it to the Security Council. Now,
hours before his departure for Iraq, it was clear that he did not
understand that critical distinction. When I explained the history to
him, Annan seemed concerned--in a somewhat disconsolate aside, he said
that my proposal would make his negotiations very difficult.
The following week, Annan returned triumphant from Baghdad. The
crisis, he said, had been averted. Iraq would allow UNSCOM inspectors
into the presidential sites. But according to the fine print, our
inspectors would now be accompanied by diplomatic observers. Everything
else, including the sensitive site restrictions, would remain in place.
"This is a man I can do business with," Annan said of Saddam at a
hastily convened press conference-thus signaling a major step toward the
appeasement of Iraq.
It fell to me to test the pact. I made plans to resume UNSCOM's
work, arranging for several inspections at sites that I believed housed
weapons or related materials. Then I went to see Annan at his Manhattan
apartment to give him an update. He was uncomfortable with my decision
to press ahead so soon after the agreement had been forged. "Couldn't
you wait awhile?" he asked. I replied that this was the only way to
test the integrity of Iraq's commitment. Annan wanted to delay my going
ahead.
Around this time, the Clinton administration got wind of the fact
that I was being pressured to proceed with caution. At Time magazine's
75th-anniversary bash at Radio City Music Hall in March, 1998, America's
ambassador to the UN at the time, Bill Richardson, ushered my wife and
me backstage to meet President and Mrs. Clinton. The president thanked
me for my work and tried to bolster my spirits. "It's hard as hell and
you're doing well and courageously," he told me. "Don't feel threatened
or dissuaded by the sort of things that are being thrown at you. Do
your job down the line. Go get those armaments. That's what we want
and we'll back you." These were encouraging words, but I knew then that
the support of the United States (and, to be fair, the United Kingdom)
would not be enough in the face of weakening resolve inside the UN.
We resumed inspections. To my surprise, Iraq decided to let us into
places to which we had never before been admitted, including the Defense
Ministry, a "sensitive site." But as our inspectors stepped inside it
became clear why the Iraqis had been willing to cooperate. The building
had been emptied of its contents.
Over the next few months the same charade would be repeated again and
again. We visited an Iraqi intelligence building only to find that the
rooms had been stripped. When we asked what the building was used for,
we were told that this was where Iraqis came for marriage licenses.
Back at the UN I argued that showing us nothing-literally empty
rooms-hardly constituted compliance with the agreement. But Annan and
his advisers insisted that the agreement was alive and that Iraq was
cooperating. Every time I saw the secretary-general he would ask how
the inspections were going. The truthful answer was always "mixed at
best," but no matter how I replied he would try to put a positive spin
on my words-repeatedly confusing superficial cooperation with
substantive compliance.
This approach became irrelevant about six weeks after the agreement
was signed. The first inspections of presidential sites were conducted
under the terms of the agreement. Professional inspectors were overseen
by diplomats. The sites had been thoroughly sanitized, turned into
Potemkin villages. It was ludicrous. On the last day, Iraq informed
the UNSCOM team leader that it did not see a need for further
inspections of the sites. With this action Iraq effectively killed the
agreement.
Nonetheless, a sort of Iraq fatigue was beginning to take hold inside
the Security Council. One prominent member, a man who had previously
been foreign minister of his country, had even said to me, "I know
[Saddam] is a homicidal dictator. I know he's cheated on you and
retained weapons capability, but do we have to deal with this problem
every six months?"
UNDER THESE circumstances I decided UNSCOM needed to take action. I
offered the Security Council a technical briefing and a list of priority
objectives-a road map to get us to the end of the disarmament task. The
Council agreed that I could take the road map to Aziz in Baghdad.
We arrived in mid-June 1998 at Habbaniyah Air Base, a military
airport 85 miles northwest of Baghdad. This was the only place Iraq
would permit us to land. When I stepped out of our aircraft I was
approached by senior members of UNSCOM's chemical weapons staff. They
asked me for a word in private-and handed me a laboratory report
containing the analysis of a number of destroyed missile warheads that
had recently been excavated. The report showed that some of the
warheads contained traces of a chemical call EMPA, a degradation product
of VX nerve gas-and of no other known chemical substance. A single drop
of VX can kill with an hour.
I was floored. "What the hell do we do now?" I asked the chemists.
Several years earlier Iraq had denied it had ever even produced VX.
UNSCOM found evidence to the contrary; confronted with that evidence,
the Iraqis tried to minimize its significance, saying they had only made
200 liters of the stuff. UNSCOM, however, proved they had actually made
at least 3,900 liters, mainly at the Muthanna State Establishment, the
country's vast production ground for chemical weapons. Now we had proof
that they had actually loaded this deadly chemical into weapons. The
extreme danger posed by such weapons was not lost on neighbors in the
region.
I told Aziz that I found the VX findings disturbing but had no
desire to turn them into a public fuss. I suggested that our technical
advisers adjourn to a private room. In the meetings that followed, the
Iraqi officials dug in, insisting that they had never loaded VX into
weapons. I authorized our side to offer to run further tests on other
warhead remnants in other laboratories. The Iraqis agreed. I told
them, however, that whatever the results in other laboratories might be,
the ones in hand would still need to be explained.
Aziz and I also talked about the road map I'd drawn up. He agreed
to a version of it, pledged that his people would give us what we
needed, and told me to return in six weeks to check on their progress.
IN AUGUST 1998 I flew to Baghdad for the eighth and final time. Once
again my team and I took our places at the big square donut of a table
in the upstairs conference room of the Iraqi foreign ministry. Aziz sat
opposite me with his team, puffing on his Cohiba cigar. The Iraqis had
five video cameras running, notwithstanding the brown-out illumination
of the room, to record for Iraq's propaganda purposes the exchanges to
come.
Aziz asked me to begin by giving my analysis of what had happened
during the last six weeks. I said we'd been given virtually none of the
information or materials we had sought. Aziz remained silent. I felt
like an actor in a play, only it seemed that Aziz had the whole script
and I had not a sheet. When I finished Aziz said in effect that he
didn't agree with much of my speech, but that I'd get "the definitive
answer of the leadership of the government of Iraq" at our meeting that
night.
As my team and I went to our office to prepare for the evening's
meeting, I had a pretty good hunch what that answer would be. I bet my
deputy, Charles Duelfer, $5 that we would be thrown out of Iraq when we
reconvened that evening.
We returned to the foreign ministry at about 8 p.m. Aziz got right
to the point: Iraq was fed up. The country was disarmed he said, and
the information we were seeking was of no importance. It was, he
claimed, a deception aimed at delaying the day the Security Council
would deem Iraq disarmed and lift the sanctions. "Your only duty now,"
Aziz told me, "is to leave this room and go back to New York and tell
the Council that Iraq is disarmed." Iraq, he continued, would provide
us no further information and no weapons materials, and would permit no
further disarmament inspections. If I failed to deliver the message, it
would be on my conscience.
"I will not do what you ask because I cannot," I replied. "This is
not a question of disarmament by declaration. We need evidence --
facts--and you have refused to provide them." At an impasse, we curtly
shook hands and parted.
My staff and I went the brief distance down the road to the
al-Rashid Hotel. It was clear to me then that Saddam was finally making
a run for it. Aziz had no doubt shut us down because our road map was
right. What's more, the VX discovery could potentially unravel a whole
series of false statements. Worst of all, Saddam was certain that the
Security Council wouldn't chase him. Upstairs, Duelfer signed and dated
a $5 bill and silently handed it to me.
Later that month UNSCOM was further shaken by the resignation of
Scott Ritter, who blamed the United States for the growing success of
Iraq's defiance. Ritter has painted himself as a hero stabbed in the
back by the boffins in Washington, a cross between John Rambo and Oliver
North.
Ritter misrepresented facts and reconstructed events,
conversations, and decisions in which he had played no part. But the
deepest harm he did was to make allegations about UNSCOM's use of
intelligence assistance provided to it by the US. UNSCOM used such
assistance-which did not come solely from the US-for disarmament
purposes only; we needed to try to break the Iraqi wall of deceit. I
rejected proposals that might have served or been construed to have
served any other purpose. Any provider-whether it be the US, Russia, or
France, for example-that sought to piggyback on UNSCOM for its own
national intelligence purposes would damage the integrity of our
efforts. I would lament that. What is truly unjust is that those who
want to destroy UNSCOM have seized on Ritter's misleading and misguided
posturing. Rather than stand up to Saddam, they have chosen to shoot
the messenger, UNSCOM.
FROM THEN ON, events moved quickly. True to Aziz's word, Iraq shut down
all further disarmament work by UNSCOM; in October, we were barred from
monitoring production facilities. This produced yet another crisis.
The United States and the United Kingdom again increased their armed
forces in the Gulf. On November 10, 1998, the acting United States
ambassador to the United Nations, Peter Burleigh, conveyed to me a
message from Washington. It would be prudent for me to evacuate my
staff from Iraq.
Four days later the Security Council convened an emergency meeting.
Members received from Aziz a last-minute pledge of cooperation with
UNSCOM inspections, clearly aimed at avoiding bombing. But as the
United States and the United Kingdom pointed out, the wording was
ambiguous.
Lavrov, the Russian ambassador, suggested that the Security Council
ask for another letter. A recess was called. As I walked out of the
chamber I saw two diplomats, one Russian, one Iraqi, urgently crafting a
second letter in Arabic. It was presented to the Council, but was again
found deficient. Lavrov promised a third, which was also hastily
drafted in the adjoining hallway.
The atmosphere had become comical. The revisions all focused on
changing words, but no one had any notion whether the words corresponded
to reality. It was a farce, but it worked. After the third letter, the
pressure became too great. America and Britain agreed to refrain from
bombing.
The next morning President Clinton announced that the bombers had
been called back. He warned that this would be Saddam's last chance.
The Security Council accepted Iraq's new promise of full cooperation but
asked me, through UNSCOM's work, to test and report on Saddam's
performance.
On November 16 I ordered all UNSCOM staff back to Baghdad to resume
work. I then put together teams to conduct the full range of
inspections, from the relatively ordinary to the very tough. I expected
that the testing period would take a month. Two weeks into that period
I accepted an invitation to go to Moscow for consultations. There my
team and I had a long talk with the new foreign minister, Igor Ivanov,
who wanted to know how our testing of Iraq's promise was going. I told
him that it was too early to tell-that there had been elements of
cooperation as well as blockage. He made clear his preference for a
positive report on Iraq's behavior and stressed the great difficulty
Russia would have if the West bombed Iraq. He asked me some specific
questions about how long the testing period would last and how long it
would take us to give Iraq a clean bill of health on disarmament if
Saddam cooperated fully. I gave Ivanov factual answers to those
questions. He and his representatives in New York subsequently
flagrantly misrepresented those answers.
Upon my return to New York, reports from my chief inspectors in each
weapons field began rolling in. Iraq was refusing to give them access
to information; in some cases Iraq was seeking to impose new
restrictions on our work. UNSCOM inspectors had, for instance, been
blocked at the entrance to the Baath Party building where we had
compelling evidence that weapons were hidden. Iraq, once again, had
made a promise that it had no intention of keeping.
As I formulated my report I was contacted by the ambassadors from
several Security Council nations. I told them all I would have to
report was that Iraq had failed to keep its promise. The Russian
ambassador was not among those who contacted me.
I did, however, speak with the United States ambassador, and on one
occasion the president's national security adviser, Sandy Berger, came
to New York and asked to see me. It was a private meeting, but rumors
were soon circulating inside the UN that Berger had instructed me on
what my report should say and that I had cooperated and was planning to
give President Clinton an advance copy of the report. In fact, I told
Berger precisely what I told the Security Council ambassadors who cared
to ask: that I feared I would have to report failure.
Soon I was summoned by the United States ambassador, who told me that
as a precaution I should consider removing all UNSCOM staff from Iraq.
I set in motion the withdrawal procedures and spent a sleepless night
while they were being carried out. I was afraid Iraq might take our
people hostage and follow its past habit of placing human shields in
buildings that might be targeted by American bombers. When I told the
secretary-general about my evacuation decision, he agreed that it was
the right thing to do. Subsequently Anan's chief of staff deleted our
agreement from the record.
On December 15 I sent my report to the Security Council. The report
made clear that Iraq had failed to provide the full co-operation that it
had promised and that Iraq had failed to provide the full co-operation
that it had promised and that for this and other reasons. I was not
able to give the Security Council the assurance it required with respect
to Iraq's weapons of mass destruction.
The Russian ambassador was in the middle of condemning my report when
news of America's bombing of Iraq was announced in the Security Council
chamber. The atmosphere, already tense, exploded. Ambassador Lavrov
denounced me as a liar and stormed out. A recess was called.
The Council meeting resumed an hour and a half later. I was given
the floor to respond to what Lavrov had said. Again he walked out.
Since that day, the Security Council has been unable to come to
agreement on how to implement its own law with respect to Iraq.
IN THINKING BACK on all of this, I am reminded of an experience I had at
an Iraqi government guesthouse where I stayed on my first visit to
Baghdad. While I was using the bathroom one day, a large cockroach came
up through the drainage grate in the floor. I don't like squashing
cockroaches-it seems to me that the cure is worse than the disease-so I
simply turned over a small metal wastebasket and put it over the pest,
thinking that it fit more or less flush to the floor might suffocate the
thing. The wastebasket remained exactly where it was for three days.
As I was leaving, I couldn't resist taking a final peek. The roach was
still there, alive and well. It seems a fitting metaphor for Saddam-
and, more to the point, the UN's inability to contain him.
At stake, though, is more than just Iraq. If Saddam Hussein gets
away with facing down the UN and retains and rebuilds his weapons of
mass destruction, he will destroy the world's best shot at controlling
the spread of such weapons. He will also destroy the authority of the
supreme international body charged with maintaining peace and security-
the Security Council of the United Nations.
The transition from the 19th to the 20th century was marked by the
breakdown of a security system that had lasted some 50 years. The
consequence was World War I, and at least 10 million deaths. Today's UN
system is of a similar age.
As we turn the corner to the 21st century, we must not repeat
yesterday's mistakes. We must avoid what could be the blackest of
comedies: the rehabilitation of Saddam Hussein.
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