Weapons of Mass Destruction (WMD)

DATE=01/16/2003

TYPE=ON THE LINE

NUMBER=1-01262

TITLE=HOW LIKELY IS WAR IN IRAQ?

INTERNET=Yes

EDITOR=OFFICE OF POLICY 619-0037

CONTENT=

THEME: UP, HOLD UNDER AND FADE

Host: How likely is war in Iraq? Next, On the Line.

[music]

Host: United Nations weapons inspectors are in Iraq looking for evidence that Saddam Hussein's regime has weapons of mass destruction. Chief U-N weapons inspector Hans Blix says that his team has yet to find anything that would prove Iraq has prohibited weapons, but the inspections are far from complete. President George W. Bush's spokesman, Ari Fleischer, said, "The president has not put any type of artificial timetable on how long he believes is necessary for Saddam Hussein to prove to the world that he is going to comply." At the same time, the United States and its allies are preparing for possible military action against the Saddam Hussein regime. Tens of thousands of U-S troops are on their way to the region and the build-up is expected to peak in the coming weeks. Will there be a second Gulf War? I'll ask my guests, Gary Schmitt, executive director of the Project for the New American Century; and Jon Wolfsthal, deputy director of the non-proliferation project at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. Welcome, thanks for joining us today.

Gary Schmitt, what have the inspectors been up to in Iraq and how are the inspections going?

Schmitt: Well, they've been doing the remedial work, which is, they've been touching base with the most obvious sites, going back to places where they've had monitoring equipment in the past, in some ways doing the base work that has to be done that would lead you to then progress to the more difficult inspections, more difficult surprise inspections and the like. Blix is proceeding as you would expect an inspector to proceed. But, of course, the question is whether he's got enough time to do the kind of job he wants to do versus the timeline the administration has in mind for forcing the issue and possibly going to war.

Host: Jon Wolfsthal, what kind of timeline is Hans Blix looking at?

Wolfsthal: Well, everybody in Washington, I think all over the world was using the timeline put out in U-N resolution 1441, which mandated these inspections and has a reporting date of January 27th for Hans Blix to come after sixty days of inspections and report back. Everyone was sort of looking at that date as a do or die date, that by then we would know what's going on and Hans Blix just today [January 14th] said that, in fact, we are going to need more time. We're looking at that report as an interim report and in fact we look to be continuing to do our work well into March. We've had some inspectors come out and say it may take a year to really get a comprehensive picture about what's going on in Iraq. So, I think the timeline is really open at this point.

Host: Gary Schmitt, what has been the reaction? President Bush said that "time is running out on Saddam Hussein. He must disarm. I'm sick and tired of games and deception and that's my view of timetables." Is the U-N inspectors' timetable going to jibe with the U-S timetable?

Schmitt: Probably not, but there is a problem the administration faces, which is they keep saying "this is the time." It's a little bit like Chicken Little. Initially they wanted, a lot of people in the administration wanted Iraq's own report on its weapons of mass destruction to be the final chapter in this saga. That didn't happen.

Host: How so? How would that have been?

Schmitt: Because under the U-N resolution, Iraq is supposed to be forthcoming about its weapons of mass destruction. What the report they produced in fact was, is nothing but a compilation of previous old reports that didn't lead to any new discoveries of Iraq's weapons program. Under the U-N resolution, the failure by Iraq to be forthcoming is considered another material breach and potentially a casus belli under the resolution. But the administration wasn't ready to go to war, wasn't ready to go to the U-N. So they said, well, this is the opening lines of the last chapter. And they began to proceed, to act as though January 27th was going to be the final lines of that chapter. But for a variety of reasons, some of them having to do with just getting troops in place, they said, "Never mind. Maybe a little bit further down the road we'll be talking about this." So you have an administration which is a little bit uncertain about its own timeline and into that vacuum you've had the inspection process kind of raise itself up a little bit and demand more time and the political process demand more time.

Wolfsthal: And now the administration is getting deeper into a problem. It depends I'm not a military expert, but the ones I talked to are very blunt about the prospects of fighting a war during summertime in Iraq. It's just not going to happen. We may be an all-weather fighting force, but we're not an all-temperature fighting force. Especially when you look at the prospect of chemical or biological weapons, the need to wear suits to protect you from those agents. And so, the administration is going to need, if we're going to war soon, to really get going soon, because after mid-March, you're literally looking at a six to nine month window before you can engage in full-scale military action again. And that means that you're going to have a lot of troops sitting on their hands for six to nine months. At the same time, the administration does have a reason for wanting those troops in the region, even if it's not going to war, which is, you've got to convince Saddam Hussein that you're serious if you're to have any prospect of getting him to cough up whatever he's got. The U-S has been very clear. Intelligence has said we know he has chemical weapons, we know he has biological weapons. They may not have provided the smoking gun intelligence yet to Hans Blix, but if that's true, then I think we need to see a very quick move to give that intelligence over to inspectors, let them do their job and if we're going to go to war, go to war.

Schmitt: If I could jump in real quick, the difficulty of keeping troops is analogous to a boxer training for a fight. A boxer's schedule is regimented and it leads up to a certain date. And you carefully plan out how you get into shape, what your regimen is, leading to that particular date. It's extremely hard for a boxer, let alone a military of two-hundred thousand men to maintain that level of readiness for weeks and months on end. So, if the administration doesn't act by a certain point, they in fact will have to pull those troops back, because you cannot leave those folks out there in prime fighting shape for weeks on end.

Wolfsthal: And that itself has, I think, really negative consequences for the United States. I mean, President Bush has said, "Saddam Hussein has got to go." Then he said, "Okay, his weapons have got to go and if he doesn't give up the weapons, then Saddam Hussein has got to go." He's also added "And we know he has those weapons." But if the inspectors take longer than the next couple of months to do their job and Saddam Hussein is still there and we do pull the military back, then I think there's a problem for U-S credibility worldwide. I mean, how do we convince our allies in other parts of the world that when we say, we're with them and this is really essential to our security, and then we begin to hem and haw. I'm not saying that we need to go to war simply for U-S credibility. I don't think we need to repeat the mistakes of the early Cold War. But I think we need to bear in mind that the President has committed the United States to a course of action and even if that action does not include war, it does mean that we have to be serious about fulfilling our commitments.

Host: Gary Schmitt, how aggressive have the U-N inspectors been? Is there a case to be made that the U-N inspectors, as there's been this build-up, Hans Blix says he finds the build-up troubling and combine that with the fact that before the inspections began there were critics who suggested that the U-N might not be as aggressive as it could be for fear of being the trigger for a war. Are the U-N inspectors being as aggressive as possible?

Schmitt: Well, the answer is both yes and no. As a U-N inspection effort, that's about what you would expect. They're not particularly hard-nosed aggressive. On the other hand, Blix, I think, has done a better job than many people expected. On the other hand, the reality is, a hundred, even two hundred inspectors in Iraq, without the cooperation of Baghdad, just don't stand much of a chance of finding what needs to be found.

Host: Now by the cooperation of Baghdad, what do you mean?

Schmitt: Well, under the U-N resolution and as a matter of practicality, Baghdad has had a long program of hiding precisely the weapons that we're trying to find. They know how to do it. They've done it in the past. They've had ten years of experience of learning how to do it. And it's just a very difficult task for two-hundred men to go around places the size of France and discover, you know, a mobile biological lounge.

Wolfsthal: Of course it's really hard if they're not getting all the intelligence that the world has to offer. I mean, this is really, I think some people that are concerned about the Bush administration's commitment to the inspections look at what they've said publicly about sharing intelligence and what they've said about what that intelligence says. The C-I-A put out a report in October that said without any conditions, no ifs ands or buts, we know Iraq has resumed production of biological and chemical weapons. Well, if we've got that evidence, I fail to see any reason why we're not turning that over to the inspectors, even if that means you're burning sources and methods. I recognize that those are live people probably at the end of the chain, but we're talking about risking hundreds of thousands of Americans lives over war and sometimes you have to make those difficult calls. So, the inspectors aren't getting the best of the U-S intelligence, or British intelligence, or whatever, then I think it's very hard to expect that they'll be able to come up with something just on their own.

Schmitt: It's a difficult square to circle. There are two complicated factors. One is, I think, the U-S intelligence doesn't trust the U-N to be able to keep a secret. Not because people were traitors or treasonists or anything like that. It's just security-wise, a very determined foe can find out a lot of things without you knowing about it. So, I think the problem is if we hand over very, very good intelligence about something, well before those inspectors are actually out finding it, it'll disappear because Iraq will know we're onto them. That's one problem. The second problem is, if we're talking about biological or chemical stocks, the U-S military has a concern that if you in fact go and say, let's find this thing, we know about it, and they don't in fact get it, and there's a war, it's precisely those chemical and biological weapons that could be used against them. So, the military of the United States for very good reasons is a little bit skeptical about giving the U-N this kind of intelligence because they in fact want to be able to destroy those stocks in the first hours of the war.

Wolfsthal: I think we need to be careful. I agree that the second point is a good one that if the inspectors get the information and can't track down those stocks, then it does present a battlefield problem. But then the military at least -- there's no model within the military -- but a lot of the fighting people that especially have experience in the Gulf War and afterwards recognize the inspectors could do some of their job for them. I mean, if every chemical weapon that they eliminate, every biological lab that they are able to find is a weapon that may not be pointed at U-S military troops in the field. The problem is you have the top line element in the military, Donald Rumsfeld and a lot of his advisors have no trust at all in the inspectors. They think the whole thing is a sham and all it is is holding up their plans to go in and get rid of Saddam Hussein's arsenals militarily.

Host: Gary Schmitt, one of the things that the U-S has asked for repeatedly is that Iraqi scientists be interviewed away from the presence of minders and if feasible, in fact, out of the country with their families protected. What's been going on in terms of interviews with Iraqi scientists.

Schmitt: Very little actually. And very little in terms of actually demanding that the scientists be interviewed even alone in Baghdad or in the country, let alone bringing them outside of Iraq. Blix has seemed very, very reluctant to go down this road, even though the U-N resolution makes it perfectly clear he has the power and authority to interview anybody within the country and also to take them out of the country to do these interviews, along with their families. But Blix seems very, very reluctant to go down this road.

Wolfsthal: I think he's got a practical reason for being reluctant, which is right now in Iraq, I think any scientist who even agrees to be interviewed without the minders is going to be suspect and may himself be killed immediately thereafter. And he also has a problem which is no country, including the United States, has been willing to say in advance if they come out of the country they can stay in the United States with their families. We haven't been granting this blanket asylum and I think to be consistent, the United States needs to seriously look at this. If we're going to empower Hans Blix to decide who he wants to interrogate or question outside of the country, are we then going to give them asylum here in the United States? I think it's a reasonable policy to pursue.

Schmitt: No. I think that these are really problems and the way to address them, well, there's two things that have to be addressed. One is, if you do take people outside the country, you want to take several. You may want to take as many as ten to twenty scientists out at the same time, because then it's harder for the Iraqis to pinpoint where some information might have come from.

Host: Would that work as well even if you were in country, if a group of twenty or thirty scientists were all interviewed on the same day so that the information wouldn't be clear where it came from?

Schmitt: In theory, in potential, but the truth is it's hard to find twenty sites that the Iraqis couldn't bug to find out what was going on.

Wolfsthal: And nothing really that says they won't just kill all twenty of them. You know, we are dealing with a pretty horrifying regime.

Host: How significant is the U-S military build-up that's been going on while these inspections have been going on, Gary Schmitt?

Schmitt: Oh, it's significant. We're close to having two-thirds of the troops required to go into battle there. So, we're almost ready to pull the trigger in terms of the battle plan. What remains to be done is finding a way to get troops into northern Iraq. The Pentagon hopes to do that through Turkey, but the Turkish government has not yet provided the authority to let U-S troops use the Turkish bases.

Host: Are there other complications, Jon Wolfsthal, in terms of allies' cooperation?

Wolfsthal: Well sure. I mean it's a very sensitive subject in the region, especially when we don't know what the mandate for the military action is going to be. Things definitely get simpler for the United States military planning if we get either a smoking gun in Iraq or a number of circumstances lead to a second resolution authorizing force from the United Nations. Without that, I think we'll have a lot of our allies go along with the United States plan. I think Saudi Arabia is going to let us use their bases, Kuwait is clearly on board, a lot of our allies are prepared if we push them to say yes. There's a cause for pushing them, but I think militarily we can get it done. Turkey, I think, Gary's right, is probably the biggest sticking point right now, because we do need northern military operations to be successful. You need to truly have the ability to circle the country and operate from all areas. Could we get it done without Turkey? Probably, but it makes it a little bit more complicated.

Host: What are the prospects for solving the equation in Turkey?

Schmitt: Well, I think the difficulty is, you have a very new government with a party that's never held power before and they're getting their feet on the ground. So, it's not surprising that it's been difficult. On the other hand, I think the truth is, they're going to realize that their best friend vis-à-vis the rest of the world, vis-à-vis Europe, is the United States. It's not worth standing against the United States' wishes if Turkey's long-term viability towards getting into the E-U, being helped economically and also frankly, it doesn't help them vis-à-vis the Kurdish problem. If we're not in northern Iraq, then the problem of a separatist Kurdish movement becomes more difficult for the Turks. So, all those things point at the end of the day to Turkey letting us use those bases for their own interest and long-term security.

Wolfsthal: And this is where I think President Bush's line in the war on terrorism is going to come and play a role in Turkey. President Bush has said very black and white here: "You're either with us or against us." And I think Turkey doesn't want to be against us because they recognize over the long-term, especially for E-U membership and some of their economic development plans, that they need the U-S as a strong ally.

Host: Now John Wolfsthal, you had mentioned that the key thing that has yet to happen in the preparation for confronting Iraq is a second U-N resolution that would authorize force. What is the likelihood of such a resolution and how would it come about at this point?

Wolfsthal: Well, I think right now the prospects for a resolution, given the current environment, are very, very low. Also a resolution depends on what kind of vote you're going to get. You might get a straight majority vote, but that's not exactly a resounding endorsement for U-S policy. What the first resolution says is that the U-S will come back and consult with the Security Council regarding what the inspectors do find and what President Bush and Tony Blair, the British Prime Minister, have said is that while they would prefer a U-N resolution, they're prepared to go, if necessary, without that resolution. But the key things that would tip the balance and enable the U-N to produce a new resolution would clearly be hard evidence that there are weapons of mass destruction in Iraq. If you find a chemical weapons plant or trove of chemical weapons or biological weapon lab, long-range ballistic missiles, anything where you could show a picture and explain to somebody that this is a clear violation, I think you'd very quickly get countries that would then fall in line. But you'd still even then have some complications. If the inspectors find a chemical weapon base then you'll have people say, "Well, look the inspectors are doing their job. Why don't we let them continue to go? There's no need to go to war." So there is a bit of a trap there. But I think over the long run if we find something concrete, that makes it much easier to get the resolution.

Schmitt: The key country here I think is France. I think Paris wants to go to war now. I think Paris accepts the idea that there will be a war and I think they want, they've had their pound of flesh at the U-N. They've exercised their prerogatives in the Security Council. But they also don't want to stand in the way of us actually executing what we think needs to be done. So I think you'll see Paris maneuver very quickly to try to figure out a resolution, which even if it doesn't directly say the U-S is legitimated to go do this war, do this military action. They'll find a formula in such a way that it will allow both Paris and other allies to say, "Well, the U-N has in fact, de facto, authorized this action."

Wolfsthal: Well there's also the interesting question that since we've had the first resolution, we've had a change-over in some of the membership in the Security Council. Obviously the five permanent members, the United States, Britain, France, China, and Russia are all still there, they all have veto power. But you have one strong U-S ally, Germany, who has been very vocal about their opposition to the war which is now a new member of the Security Council. So I think you raise a lot of questions about the ability to get a unanimous vote. Something that Secretary [of State Colin] Powell was really lauded for, his ability to cobble together this coalition on the first resolution. I think that's much more up in the air with the new membership.

Host: Gary Schmitt, as the build-up has been going on in the Persian Gulf, a separate crisis involving weapons of mass destruction and rogue regimes has popped up -- the crisis with North Korea. How is that complicating preparations for Iraq and also the diplomatic situation.

Schmitt: I think a great deal for all kinds of reasons, one just very practical reason, which is when you're leading up, you have a war on terrorism and you're trying to plan the possibility of a war with Iraq, senior policy makers simply only have two hands. You've got twenty-four hours in the day and that doesn't count sleeping and the last thing they need is another crisis. And frankly, the Bush administration is doing everything in its power to try to push the North Korean problem off to the side until it takes care of the Iraq problem. Personally, I don't think he can do it because the North Koreans have a way of coming back onto the front page when we don't want them to. But it is complicating things, it is distracting people, it is distracting the effort on the Middle East.

Wolfsthal: The problem with trying to push North Korea aside is that's exactly what North Korea doesn't want. A lot of people believe that the reason North Korea is making these moves, restarting its nuclear program, pulling out or trying to pull out of a non-proliferation treaty is that it wants U-S attention. And so, every time we sort of push them aside, they think they have to do something else in order to say, no, no, no, you know we've got to come back into the fold. I think it does complicate the efforts, not so much of the military, because as President Bush has already said, "There are no good military options in Korea." Therefore, military planners are still focused on Iraq. I think if anything, it's more indicative of a larger problem the administration has, which is, it has two camps within the administration, that view the world very differently. You have a group within the administration mostly based in the State Department, that is prepared to engage and negotiate and try and deal in a multilateral diplomatic way in order to solve these problems. Colin Powell, I think, got the upper hand in Iraq with the passage of the resolution.

Host: I'm afraid that's going to have to be the last word because we're out of time. But I'd like to thank my guests joining us today, Gary Schmitt of the project for the New American Century and Jon Wolfsthal of the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. Before we go, I'd like to invite our audience to send us your questions or comments. You can e-mail them to Ontheline@ibb.gov For On the Line, I'm Eric Felten.