Weapons of Mass Destruction (WMD)

DATE=11/15/2002

TYPE=ON THE LINE

NUMBER=1-01226

TITLE=DISARMING IRAQ

INTERNET=Yes

EDITOR=OFFICE OF POLICY 619-0037

CONTENT=

THEME: UP, HOLD UNDER AND FADE

Host: The final test for Saddam Hussein. Next, On the Line.

[music]

Host: The Iraqi ambassador to the United Nations announced on November 13th that Iraq would accept a new U-N Security Council resolution. Unanimously adopted on November 7th, the resolution requires Iraq to reveal its weapons of mass destruction and destroy them. The resolution also demands that Saddam Hussein's regime give U-N weapons inspectors a full and unimpeded access to verify Iraq's disarmament. The Iraqi regime has flagrantly violated similar resolutions passed since the 1991 Persian Gulf War. President George W. Bush called the new U-N Security Council resolution a final test for the Iraqi regime. Will Saddam Hussein disarm? I'll ask my guests: former C-I-A [Central Intelligence Agency] director James Woolsey; John Barry, national security correspondent for Newsweek Magazine; and Patrick Clawson, deputy director of the Washington Institute for Near East Policy. Welcome and thanks for joining us today.

Host: James Woolsey, the Iraqi ambassador to the U-N announced that Iraq would abide by the U-N resolution, but also at the same time said that's going to be easy for us to do because we have no weapons of mass destruction. What does that say about Iraq's willingness to actually abide by the resolution?

Woolsey: That they're going to continue to lie as they have for the last eleven years. I think that the chance that they will actually comply in the real world and declare what they have -- and it's not just weapons by the way, it's programs, personnel and dual-use programs in the resolution. I think the chance that they will do that is about as low as chances get.

Host: Now, dual-use program is what?

Woolsey: If they have a pharmaceutical facility that's capable of manufacturing both pharmaceuticals and biological warfare agents, they have to declare that under the regime that's stated in the resolution.

Host: John Barry, do you agree that this is already an indication that Iraq is not going to live up to the resolution?

Barry: I think it's an indication that Iraq is going to try to conceal as much as it can while avoiding U-S retribution for being caught out in a lie. I think we're now going to enter several months of a complicated dance. The first test is going to come in thirty days when he [Saddam Hussein] has to produce enormous written declarations of what programs he has, as James says, including dual-use. The problem is going to be for the administration and the security council proving straight out that those declarations are untrue and contain lies. That's going to be tricky, I think, but I agree in principle with what Jim has just said. I don't think Iraq has the slightest intention of complying.

Host: Patrick Clawson, is the U-S or U-N going to have to prove outright that Iraq is lying when it produces these documents in thirty days?

Clawson: Well, even worse. We're probably going to face a situation in which the Iraqis give us some new information, so we make some limited progress. And there are going to be those who say, well, all right, we know this isn't everything Iraq has got, but it's good enough and it's a step forward. And therefore we should start a process with the Iraqis of accepting what they've given us and asking for a bit more. And of course, that's Saddam's game, which is to delay, delay, and delay until we lose interest. So, what the administration and the U-N have to do is to show to the world why we have to act now and why it's so important that Saddam provide a complete declaration, as the resolution calls for, not just a declaration that tells us a little bit more than what we knew. It's got to be the whole thing or that's not good enough.

Host: James Woolsey, how is the U-S going to react when this declaration comes out?

Woolsey: I don't know. Like Pat, I very much hope that when it's false -- and it will be -- they declare that to be a material breach and move accordingly militarily. But I don't know whether they will do that or let Hans Blix look for as long as he wants and doesn't find anything or doesn't find anything substantial. Blix does not exactly have a stellar reputation as a searcher. He has missed some things before and the reason he's in the job is that in January of 2000, Kofi Annan first nominated Rolf Ekeus, the very fine first head of the U-N inspectors. The French and the Russians, or Chinese, I think, anyway, carrying the Iraqis water, objected, and they searched around for the one inspector, head of inspections, who'd be acceptable to the Iraqis and it turned out to be Mr. Blix. So, I think there's a chance, there's a greater chance that Hans Blix will find something than that Saddam Hussein will tell the truth, but both of those probabilities, I think, are pretty low.

Host: John Barry, do you agree that Hans Blix is going to be a less than aggressive inspector?

Barry: No. I think he's aware that his reputation is on the line and I think he wants and believes he can do a serious job. I agree with Jim, that back in the early '90s when he was running, when Blix was running the I-A-E-A, the International Atomic Energy Agency, basically Iraq fooled the I-A-E-A at that time about the extent of its program. So, yes, the precedents are poor. But I think Blix will try to be serious. The problem, I think, is that, my assessment from what people say in Washington is that we at the moment really do not have a very good idea where the programs which we suppose Saddam to have are hidden. And they could be in any number of places, from the hospital laboratory for biological warfare to a small centrifuge program hidden inside some city block in Baghdad, where you can hide the electricity cables and so on for an embryonic nuclear program. We actually don't know. Now, we have in theory a great deal of information coming from defectors over the last X years, many of them supplied by Mr. [Ahmed] Chalabi and the Iraqi National Congress. The intelligence community in this town is very split about the worth and validity and probity of those defectors. But I think that among the first things that Blix is going to be asked to do is to go and look in all places where the defectors have said there are installations. The problem is, what if those defectors were basically exaggerating? We look in a whole series of places including the famous palaces and we don't find anything. At that point the international community is going to say: "Ho hum, ho hum. Now wait a moment. Do we really know that he has these big weapons of mass destruction programs if you can't find them?" So I do see, you know, big problems fairly rapidly coming down the line.

Host: Patrick Clawson, what happens when the inspectors go in if they don't find anything?

Clawson: Well, if the Iraqis haven't provided an accurate declaration, then the inspectors have to go on a hunt. And if they have to go on a hunt in a big country like Iraq and then, as John was explaining, there's a million places where you can hide things. So they're faced with an almost impossible task. And even the most dedicated inspector with the best intelligence is still going to take months and months and months to be able to turn up concrete evidence. And that evidence is always going to be rather ambiguous. There's never going to be some kind of a moment like a Hollywood movie where Hans Blix opens the secret door and finds the Iraqi scientists assembling a nuclear bomb.

Barry: Hans Blix played by Harrison Ford. [Laughter]

Clawson: Exactly. It's going to be a much more ambiguous process and its going to be a discovery of a little piece here and a little piece there that doesn't seem to fit and the jigsaw puzzle won't be clear for many, many months. And that's why this declaration is so important, because that's going to tell us from the beginning whether or not the Iraqis are cooperating or whether or not the inspectors are going to have to go on that kind of a detailed hunting process from day one.

Woolsey: The point is the inspectors were never in this scheme supposed to be the people or the instrumentality for uncovering the Iraqi programs. The original cease-fire and the original U-N resolution required the Iraqis to come clean with everything and the inspectors were then to monitor a steady state after disarmament had occurred. To ask the inspectors to find things which are being hidden -- particularly mobile biological warfare laboratories on trucks and gas centrifuges the size, some of them, of washing machines -- to ask them to find that in a country the size of France, that's a complete totalitarian dictatorship, and to find them in the first instance here with about eighty inspectors -- by the way that's the size of the police force of Blacksburg, Virginia, and they operate in a pretty benign environment -- to ask them to use eighty inspectors in this very big country to find things that are being concealed is a complete misappropriation of what the inspectors were supposed to be for. And even if they were diligent, I agree they are unlikely to find anything. And if they give in to the Iraqis, as I think, on a lot of marginal points -- such as, is a traffic jam an intentional traffic jam or not -- as I think Blix has a history of doing, I think the chance that they will find something is pretty well zero.

Host: Well, if there isn't anything found and Iraq maintains at all times that there was never anything in the first place, is there any credible claim for Iraq to make that there are no such weapons?

Woolsey: After two years. But it's going to take good inspectors with reasonable cooperation with the Iraqis two years to be sure that the Iraqis aren't hiding things. And it's highly premature to think that we've given the Iraqis a clean bill of health until that team has been able to look all over that country and that's going to take two years.

Host: But that's not the timetable that we're looking at immediately is it? There's a forty-five day timetable?

Woolsey: A test of cooperation. That's all it is is a test of cooperation. It's not a test of anything other than whether the Iraqis are letting the inspectors go about their business. Not a test of what the inspectors have found, but just, are the Iraqis allowing the inspectors to go about their business, or as Jim said, are they causing all kinds of obstructions? And there are a thousand points on which Iraq has in the past obstructed the inspectors. So, all we can expect back in that report after forty-five days is, are the Iraqis willing to let us do our job? Now, give us a long time to go looking before you ask us if there's anything here.

Barry: Now UNSCOM, the previous U-N inspection regime, UNSCOM it's called, did do, in my judgment, a stunning job of finding material in the face of an enormous Iraqi opposition. And it took some of the programs, a biological program for instance, we'll say that it took the team essentially five years to find it, but they did find it. And people commonly say that they only found it because of the defection by Saddam's son-in-law. That's not true. He defected after they found the program. But UNMOVIC, the new inspection team, does have the advantage of working off the knowledge base of the UNSCOM people. The problem of course is that it's a new team and most of the inspectors are wholly new. And while the people up at the U-N, the new UNMOVIC, have spent the four years, less than that, three years, essentially working through this material, so they have ideas of where to look, Patrick's right, it's going to take a long time and a lot of luck, actually, for the inspectors to find well-hidden material. The best bet, I think, is going to be personnel. The limiting factor on Saddam's programs is the limited number of technologically competent personnel that Iraq has for its weapons programs. So, one of the key things is where are these people working?

Woolsey: And this is another reason why I remain, frankly, skeptical of Hans Blix. He's publicly stated that it would be difficult to do what the resolution authorizes him to do and remove Iraqi scientists and engineers who worked on these programs together with their families from Iraq so that they can be questioned. If they are questioned in Iraq, they know and the world knows that they and/or their families will be tortured and killed. That's what has happened in the past. And so the only way to question the people who are in the program and find out whether or not it's under the third house from the corner in this part of Baghdad that the centrifuge is, is to talk to the people in the program. And you can't talk to them in Iraq. It's a totalitarian country. And Blix has publicly said it would be difficult to implement that part of the resolution.

Host: Difficult or impossible? Is he saying he's not going to do it?

Woolsey: He said difficult. It signals, I think, that he's not particularly eager or interested in doing it, and certainly the Iraqis will object. And the history of his inspections in the past has been that when the Iraqis have objected he's tried to accommodate. And this is, I think, one of the very biggest problems.

Clawson: And so this will also be one of the earliest tests. Does Blix set up a mechanism whereby Iraqis who want to provide information to Blix can come to him readily and easily and know that their families will be taken out of the country. If Saddam cooperates with that, I will be shocked. But that's going to be the test and we will be able to tell, hopefully within that forty-five day time period, is Blix serious about setting up such a program? Are the Iraqis, despite their dislike for it, going to cooperate with it? If so, then there's some hope that over the succeeding months the inspectors will produce positive results. We'll get a good idea. If not, forget it. This thing's not working.

Barry: I think the administration, which is trying to make the best of the situation it finds itself in -- and we can discuss later why it finds itself in this situation -- but it seems to me the administration actually doesn't believe that inspections are an instrument for finding weapons of mass destruction. As I understand it from senior administration officials, what they want Blix to do is to test the willingness of Saddam to cooperate. To test, in other words, whether he has changed his mind in some fashion. And so they want Blix to set up inspections in the most sensitive places in Iraq as rapidly as you can.

Host: What would those be?

Barry: Oh, those would be the headquarters of his inner-most group of body guards. It would be his command and control centers in Baghdad. I mean places like that which are really at the heart of the regime. And they want Blix to set up inspections there, not because they believe there are weapons of mass destruction there, but because they think that Saddam will balk at that and that will be proof of non-cooperation.

Clawson: That's also where the records are kept. That is to say -- those units don't have the programs themselves, but those units were responsible for hiding those records.

Woolsey: And it's not just the records. There's a history back in the nineties of the special units that surround Saddam being the units that drag around with them some of the things like mobile laboratories and so forth for weapons of mass destruction. It would be as if in this country, the secret service, guarding the president, drove around with lots of trucks wherever the president went and inside them was some secret program. This is one of the ways Saddam has said, one of the reasons he said any attempt to look at these people who guard me, special Republican Guards, special security organization, is an affront to Iraqi sovereignty and so forth. That's where he's put some of the things he's wanted to hide, at least at times in the past and may again.

Barry: I think it was because, Jim's right, it was because UNSCOM was -- through 1998 particularly was homing in on precisely those organizations that Saddam actually pulled the plug on UNSCOM the last time around and made cooperation so impossible that at the end of 1998, as you recall, UNSCOM was pulled out. It was precisely because those sensitive organizations were being examined.

Clawson: If I may hop in, the quandary for the United States and the U-N is going to be: Do we say that lack of cooperation is sufficient reason to go to war? And we're going to have to persuade people that lack of cooperation shows that the inspections process isn't going to work. Many people's view seems to be that only when the inspectors find something

Barry: A smoking gun.

Clawson: A smoking gun, that then can we go to military force. That's fundamentally wrong. This process of inspections has to be working before the inspectors can find anything. And if the process never starts working, they'll never find anything. So we have to be prepared to use military force if the inspections process isn't working because Saddam blocks it.

Host: Well, there were long negotiations to get this resolution in the first place. How do those negotiations, what do those negotiations say about the U-N's willingness to act quickly in the face of Iraqi obstruction, James Woolsey?

Woolsey: Well, I think the French particularly and the Russians also did their best to try to amend the resolution in such a way that everything had to go through Blix. I don't think they completely succeeded, but they did partially succeed. So, both sides, I think, have an argument. If Saddam's declarations are clearly false and if he says he has no chemical and biological weapons and no ballistic missiles of greater [range] than one-hundred-fifty kilometers, it's false. If he makes a false declaration, then you could conceivably have an argument between, say, the French on the one hand and the Americans on the other as to whether or not we could, say, go to the Security Council, no matter what Blix does or says and say "That's a false declaration. We are considering, and we would like your advice, we are considering moving against Iraq because it is in material breach." I don't know if the administration's going to do that or not, but the only way they have any kind of reasonable chance of actually bringing about a disarmament of Iraq before years of gamesmanship by the Iraqis blocking Blix and UNMOVIC is if they do take that stance, when the false declaration comes in about a month.

Host: Do you think that's what's going to happen, John Barry?

Barry: I agree with Jim. If you look at, there were sort of three, could be four, versions of the U-S resolution put to the Scurity Cuncil. And if you compare the first version, which was circulated but never published [and] read the final version, then it's clear that the U-S gave up an enormous amount of ground to get the rest of the Security Council, in particular the French, who acted as representatives of the skeptics on the Security Council, to get the French to go along. And Jim is also right that the final, final change which was a change of "or" to "and" essentially made Blix the conduit through which the Security Council would consider any information about Iraqi breaches. Before that, under "or" the U-S or any other power on the Security Council had the power to bring up its own complaint and force the Security Council to act. So, Blix is the key figure. Everything hangs on Blix. What we don't know is what assurances were given between one leader and another, what actually were the assurances given between President Bush and President [Jacques] Chirac of France or President Bush and President [Vladimir] Putin. My understanding is that the way that everyone in the end signed off on the resolution was not that anyone thought that the wording was perfect -- this was wording which was kind of ambiguous so everyone could live with it -- but it was also bolstered by various assurances from one leader to another. So, everything depends on, for instance, my understanding is, that President Bush said to French President Chirac, we are serious about having a debate in the Security Council in the event of a breach. And Chirac said if Saddam does breach, then we are serious about his overthrow. We will contemplate his overthrow. And on that sort of handshake over the telephone, both leaders have pledged their credibility to two parts of this process. Whether this works in practice, remains to be seen.

Host: Patrick Clawson, we only have about a minute left. The U-S has also said, though, that if things get bogged down in the U-N, if the U-N isn't serious about enforcing these resolutions, that the U-S will build its own coalition and act. How likely is that going to be, given what's happening now.

Clawson: If we get a blockage at the Security Council, such as happened at Kosovo a few years ago, where it's obvious that -- evidence is clear that there's a broad consensus in the Security Council, but there's some holdouts, who have a veto, who are preventing the Security Council from acting, then I think there's going to be widespread understanding for the U-S to act alone.

Host: We only have a few seconds left. Do you agree Jim Woolsey?

Woolsey: Essentially and the key moment of truth here is whether we act as soon as Saddam files his false declaration in about a month.

Host: That's going to have to be the last word. That's all the time we have for today. I'd like to thank my guests, former C-I-A director James Woolsey, John Barry of Newsweek magazine, and Patrick Clawson of the Washington Institute for Near East Policy. For On the Line, I'm Eric Felten.