18 November 2002
World Facing "Unfortunate Choice" on Iraq, Mideast Expert Says
(War now or later, when Iraq has nuclear weapons, Pollack warns) (1320) By Charles W. Corey Washington File Staff Writer Washington --The United States and the international community are faced with the "very unfortunate choice" of forcing Saddam Hussein's Iraq to give up its weapons of mass destruction now or waiting and, within two years, going to war after the regime has acquired nuclear weapons and advanced biological and chemical agents, "when the costs of going to war are going to be infinitely greater." Kenneth M. Pollack, a senior Fellow in Foreign Policy Studies at the Brookings Institute in Washington, made that point in a November 18 digital videoconference with participants in Johannesburg and Cape Town, South Africa. The broadcast was sponsored by the U.S. Department of State. Pollack, who is also director of research for the Saban Center for Middle East Policy and author of the recently published book "The Threatening Storm: The Case for Invading Iraq," told his audience that in examining policy options for Iraq one must return to 1991. "After the Gulf War, it was the United Nations, the international community, that set up the policy of containment, and that is a critical element in all of this. It is not the United States that set up the containment of Iraq, it is the international community! "There was a consensus among the [U.N.] Security Council states -- in fact, a consensus among the international community simply expressing itself through the Security Council -- that Saddam Hussein was such a dangerous leader that Iraq could not be allowed to reconstitute its weapons of mass destruction programs" at the end of the Gulf War. As a result, he said, the United Nations passed a series of resolutions that imposed sanctions on Iraq that had never been imposed on any other country before in history, sanctions and other measures designed to prevent the Iraqis from reconstituting their weapons of mass destruction. The United Nations took such action for good reason, he said. "It was not simply a matter that the Iraqis would go their own way and we would watch them. It was very much a recognition that this was such a dangerous leader in possession of such dangerous weapons, that he simply could not be allowed to exist the way other leaders were allowed to exist." What resulted, he said, was that the international community set up the containment of Iraq. "What we found six or seven years later," he lamented, "was that it was the international community that also had turned away from the containment of Iraq." By 1998, Pollack told his audience, the United States was "incredibly frustrated" because it realized that the British and only a handful of other countries in the world were willing to actually try to make the international containment of Iraq work. "Whenever the Iraqis violated the terms of the various resolutions, the United States and Great Britain would go to the Security Council and try to get the Security Council to take action, to live up to its earlier commitments. What was found time and again," he said, "was that the Security Council simply was not interested anymore. And the international community was not willing to make the system of containment work." For that reason, he said, it was in 1998 that the Clinton administration -- for which Pollack served as director for Persian Gulf Affairs in the National Security Council 1999-2001 -- first espoused the idea of regime change in Iraq, because there was a recognition that the international community was failing to live up to its commitments. Therefore, Pollack said, the United States felt that it had to take action to head off this threat since no one else and few other countries were willing to help us do so. "At that time," he said, the topic of regime change was a "very different policy" because there was no one in the United States who was ready to countenance a full-scale invasion of Iraq. What we recognized then was that the only sure way to remove Saddam Hussein from power was to mount a full-scale invasion," but he said, the American people would not support such a move at that time. Therefore, he added, the Clinton administration sought other ways to effect change -- through covert action, support for the Iraqi opposition, public diplomacy, etc. "Of course, none of those methods worked," he noted, "because Saddam Hussein is extraordinarily good at keeping himself in power in Iraq, where he wields enormous power within Iraqi society and has terrified the Iraqi people." "That," he pointed out, "is all part of the backdrop of the current decision-making" that, having failed to remove Saddam Hussein by all methods short of war, something more is needed." In 2002, he said, there is a consensus among all of the Western intelligence agencies -- U.S., British, French, German, Israeli -- that Iraq now has everything it needs to build a nuclear weapon. It is simply a matter of time before Iraq is able to enrich the fissile material (needed) to build nuclear weapons. "What we do know about Saddam Hussein is that he believes that once he acquires a nuclear weapon, he will be free once again to resume his pattern of aggression in the region" and that no one can stop him. Pollack called such a mindset "an extraordinarily dangerous way of thinking about the world," and the reason the United States and the international community are faced with such an unpleasant task. "We can go to war with Iraq sooner, before the Iraqis have acquired a nuclear weapon, while it is still feasible to prevent them from making additional trouble in the vital Persian Gulf region, or else we will be faced with a situation several years down the road when Iraq has a nuclear weapon. At which time, they will resume their course of aggression, and we will then find ourselves with the unpleasant situation of either having to allow the Iraqis to gobble up countries in the Persian Gulf or risk nuclear war with them." Looking ahead, Pollack predicted that "the United States, and in fact the international community, is going to have to go to war with Iraq to relieve Saddam Hussein of his weapons of mass destruction and prevent him from acquiring nuclear weapons." He called that action "the only real option." Responding to viewers' questions, Pollack said that the United States, under Security Council Resolution 1441, has all the authority it needs to take action to disarm Iraq. "The Security Council has already given its blessing, by agreeing to Resolution 1441, which specifically indicates that member states should discuss, but need not submit to a vote, future action against Iraq. With that vote, the council "has already blessed any future action against Iraq." Pollack added, however, that it is much better for the United States to act in concert with the Security Council. Asked to speculate on the outcome of the current weapons inspections, Pollack called it "exceedingly unlikely" that the Iraqis will actually agree to disarm. "My expectation is that Saddam Hussein will cooperate but not comply. He will allow the inspectors effectively unfettered access to Iraq. And overall the Iraqis will cooperate. But I think the Iraqis learned in the mid-1990s that they were much better at hiding their weapons than we were at finding them -- we being the international community, the inspectors and all of the intelligence communities that were supporting the inspectors," Pollack said. Hence, he speculated, the Iraqis would not voluntarily surrender their weapons of mass destruction. "Saddam Hussein's recent statements, the letter of acceptance, his remarks yesterday: all indicate that the Iraqis have no intention of declaring any of their weapons of mass destruction," he said. In the end, he said, their strategy will be to "declare nothing and simply leave it up to the United Nations to prove that they are lying." (The Washington File is a product of the Office of International Information Programs, U.S. Department of State. Web site: http://usinfo.state.gov)
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