Dear Osama Bin Laden, Yasser Arafat, and Sadam ussein, et. al.,
We are pleased to announce that we unequivocally accept your challenge to an old-fashioned game of whoop-azz. Now that we understand the rule that there are no rules, we look forward to playing by them for the first time.
Since this game is a winner-take-all, we unfortunately are unable to invite you to join us at the victory celebration. But rest assured that we will toast you --LITERALLY.
While we will admit that you are off to an impressive lead, it is however now our turn at the plate. By the way, we will be playing on your court now.
Batter up.
Sincerely,
The 270,000,000 citizens of the United States of America!
CHARLOTTESVILLE, VA. ? For any US President, the initiation of war against another country is momentous. If the aim of such a campaign is, as President Bush states on Iraq, the revolutionary goal of bringing about "regime change," then the stakes are even higher. Before he launches this campaign, Mr. Bush must seek the formal backing of Congress. And he must spell out clearly not just his goals in Iraq, but also his precise casus belli, or his reasons for voluntarily taking the country ? and the world ? into this war.
President Saddam Hussein's record as a repressive, totalitarian ruler is unquestioned. But it does not provide a valid reason to wage war against him and Iraq.
Is Bush's casus belli that President Hussein poses a direct threat to American national security? Nothing has been proved. And nothing in Mr. Hussein's weapons store is anywhere near capable of reaching US soil.
Is the casus belli that Hussein's pursuit of weapons of mass destruction (WMD) makes him a threat to world order? Here, the suppositions have a stronger basis. Iraq, like scores of other governments, has acquired chemical-weapons capability in the past. But its achievements in acquiring "off the books" WMD capabilities pale in comparison with those of India, Pakistan, or for that matter, Israel. Yes, it is very worrying that, unlike those others, Hussein has actually used chemical weapons, which he did in the 1980s against domestic and neighboring-country foes. But it is hard to see why the US, which winked at those episodes when they happened, should now use them as a reason to make war on Iraq. It's even harder to see that a war aimed explicitly at regime change is the best response.
There's a third possible casus belli: that Hussein poses an imminent threat to his neighbors. One of these, Turkey, is strategically linked to the US through membership in NATO. Others like Israel, Kuwait, Jordan, and Saudi Arabia are close US friends. Not one of these countries is asking Washington to wage war against Iraq. Indeed, Turkey, Saudi Arabia, Jordan, and other key Middle East nations have urged Washington to find alternatives to war in its dealings with Hussein.
What about Israel? Do Israeli leaders and analysts judge that Saddam poses a major threat to their country ? and that the best way of dealing with this threat is for the US to go to war?
I spent more than a week in Israel recently, hearing a broad range of Israeli views. Amazingly, no one mentioned a "threat from Iraq" unless asked directly. Attention was focused much more on the continuing Palestinian attacks in the occupied territories. In an hour-long briefing, Deputy Foreign Minister Gadi Golan never mentioned Iraq.
When Israelis do think about Iraq, their views ? including those of people in and near the country's ruling coalition ? diverge as widely as they do on most other topics. Some influential Israelis seem less worried than most Americans about the threat from Iraqi WMD. Shai Feldman, the well-connected head of the Jaffee Center for Strategic Studies, wrote recently: "Despite the deterioration of the monitoring and verification regime applied against Iraq in the aftermath of the Gulf War, Saddam Hussein failed to rebuild the facilities for the production of chemical and nuclear weapons."
Israelis know, too, that their own WMD capabilities allow them to deter Hussein from sending his WMDs against them. Hussein's people must have read Israeli news accounts that Prime Minister Ariel Sharon recently told Bush that if Israel is attacked by Iraq, it will respond. (Of course, such deterrence collapses the moment Hussein feels his own life is in imminent danger, and he has nothing more to lose. This might explain why many Israelis are uneasy with a declared US war aim of "regime change.")
Some Israelis use a different argument, claiming that weakening Iraq through war will weaken the motivation of the Palestinians to clash with Israel. One Israeli general, making this case, claimed that the payments Iraq makes to families of Palestinians who die in anti-Israel clashes contribute significantly to keeping Palestinian militancy high. But when I was in the occupied territories in June, it was clear from the harsh conditions faced by the Palestinians, and from my extensive discussions with Palestinians, that no such "external" motivator for militancy is needed. Payments from Iraq (if they get through, which is unclear) were never mentioned.
We could note, too, that Iraq signed on to the regional peace plan adopted by the Arab League last March.
What Palestinians and Israeli peace activists do mention urgently is the fear that, in the regionwide turmoil surrounding any US attack on Iraq, the Israeli authorities might take even harsher measures against Palestinians in the hope that these would pass little noticed. The greatest fear in this regard is of mass deportations of Palestinians from the West Bank.
For all the people of the Middle East, the stakes in a possible US-Iraq war are very high. And they are high for all Americans. If the president wants to launch this war, the world first needs to know what his exact casus belli would be.
Helena Cobban is the author of five books on international issues.
The most crucial question facing Americans this election year is whether an unelected president will drag us into an undeclared war in Iraq. Most Democrats, however, don't want to talk about it. Try finding a Democrat running for the U.S. Senate--Arkansas' Mark Pryor comes to mind--who's taken a strong position for or against what President Junior smugly calls "regime change" with the passionate conviction of the CEO of a fast food chain touting a new line of fries.
Fortunately, brutal internal strife has broken out among Republicans. For now, Democrats appear willing to let GOP factions fight it out. Broadly speaking, foreign policy "realists" aligned with Secretary of State Colin Powell oppose an unprovoked, unilateral attack on Saddam Hussein's nasty despotic regime.
Repeatedly humiliated by the-so-called "hardliners" around Vice President Dick Cheney and Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld, Powell appears to be striking back as only a veteran bureaucratic warrior knows how.
It's possible that the New York Times' stunning story citing "senior military officers" stating that the Reagan-Bush administration gave Iraq intelligence data helping it target Iranian troops reached the newspaper without Powell's knowledge. But I doubt it.
The intelligence was passed, the officers say, despite U.S. knowledge that Saddam Hussein's army was using poison gas weapons. Keep that in mind as you watch those sickening CNN tapes of al Qaeda gassing dogs. Kind of takes the edge off the "weapons of mass destruction" chant doesn't it?
Meanwhile, an unkind way of characterizing the GOP split would be to say it's between real warriors and chickenhawk theoreticians. The Bush stalwarts most eager to invade Iraq are mostly bookish types who avoided Vietnam and subsequent shooting wars, but are keen on abstract geopolitical schemes requiring the sacrifice of other people's children.
If you think this too harsh, consider the bitter exchange last week between Richard N. Pearle, a Bush Pentagon appointee,and Sen. Chuck Hagel, a decorated Vietnam veteran.
The two differed over a column by Brent Scowcroft, the retired Army general who was the first President Bush's national security director, in the Wall Street Journal. Scowcroft wrote that "an attack on Iraq at this time would seriously jeopardize, if not destroy the global terrorist campaign we have undertaken."
Scowcroft helped put together the international coalition that expelled Saddam from Kuwait in the Gulf War. His article is widely seen as a public message to Junior from Poppy Bush. Scowcroft argues that Iraq has been successfully contained for a dozen years, while "if we were seen to be turning our backs" on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict "in order to go after Iraq, there would be an explosion of outrage against us" among American allies and enemies alike.
Pearle's rejoinder, and remember, Junior appointed him, was to say "the failure to take on Saddam after what the president said would produce such a collapse of confidence in the president that it would set back the war on terrorism." A neighbor asked me why Pearle shouldn't be fired for insubordination. Good question.
Sen. Hagel responded bitterly in the New York Times. "Maybe Mr. Pearle would like to be in the first wave of those who go into Baghdad," he said. But unless they start producing "Meet the Press" on location from the Baghdad Hilton, that won't happen.
Hagel pointed out that it's far simpler to start wars than extricate yourself after hostilities have begun. He said that the CIA has "absolutely no evidence" that Iraq has or will soon have nuclear weapons. He might have added that unlike Osama bin Laden, Saddam isn't a religious zealot but a hard-eyed, brutal realist--a sort of Arabic-speaking Stalin.
That Saddam would guarantee his own destruction by attacking the U.S. is a preposterous fantasy dreamed up by ideologues with their own crackpot schemes of global domination. See Nicholas Lemann's unjustifiably-neglected article "The Next World Order" in the April 1, 2002 New Yorker for details. In their own words, the so-called "defense intellectuals" around Dick Cheney plan "to preclude the rise of another global rival for the indefinite future" the kind of mad-scientist stuff normally left to the villains of James Bond movies.
There's no question that the U.S. can defeat Iraq militarily. Then what? Who do you know that wants to spend years patrolling the Iraq-Iran border?
Meanwhile, another real warrior warning against the dangers of stampeding into Iraq is Little Rock's own Gen. Wesley Clark. Writing in Washington Monthly, the former NATO Supreme Commander argues that would weaken, not strengthen the U.S.
"The longer the war [against terrorism] goes on," Clark writes "the more we are going to need cooperation and support from other nations--not just troops and ships and airplanes, but whole-hearted governmental collaboration. Instead, we seem to be getting less as time goes on."
If endless terrorism and war are what Americans want, attacking Iraq is the surest way to get it.
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"Congress shall have Power...
To declare War, grant letters of Marque and Reprisal, and make Rules concerning Captures on Land and water..."
~~Constitution of the United States, Article I, Section.8., Clause 11
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"The first casualty when war comes is truth."
--Hiram Johnson (1866-1945) Spreech, U.S. Senate, 1917
One common philosophical argument for democracy is that democratic regimes are particularly unlikely to start wars. When the power to declare war is closely tethered to the preferences of those who would bear the costs of fighting, it stands to reason that this power will be used sparingly. Thus, many political philosophers have followed Kant in supposing that the universal embrace of democracy offers the best hope of world peace.
Our nation now finds itself on the verge of initiating war against another sovereign nation. We have not been attacked by Iraq, and we have thus far failed to produce convincing evidence that Iraq has aided, or plans to aid, those who have attacked us. If we go to war, we will be the initiators of aggression.
It would be a mistake, however, to take this as fresh cause for doubt about the link between democracy and peace. We ought instead to view this imminent possibility as an occasion for raising hard questions about whether, in the critical matter of waging war, we still function as a genuine democracy.
It was widely viewed as a victory for the peace movement when the draft was abolished and military service became voluntary. Unfortunately this arrangement does not really serve the cause of peace but rather lowers the threshold of war by creating a decisive cleavage between the social classes that wield political power and those that supply the country its soldiers. Too many of our political leaders are now in a position to choose war with little fear that it will endanger their friends or loved ones. This is dangerous for the same reason it would be dangerous to entrust the power to determine tax policies to a class of citizens who have been granted blanket immunity from taxes. It breeds political irresponsibility.
No doubt many of our political leaders do feel a certain generalized concern for the lives of their fellow Americans, including those in the military. Still, even this potential call to moral seriousness is dampened by the otherwise happy fact that our technological and military mastery permits us to fight and win wars with remarkably few casualties.
Nor are we prone to give sufficient thought to the foreigners whose futures we put at risk when we make use of our impressive capacities for destroying nations and our very modest capacities for rebuilding them. Today we wage war at an anesthetizing distance, with precise munitions that make killing an abstract activity, registered largely in terms of hit and miss rates. We rarely are recalled to moral reality by the last look in the eyes of those our errant bombs maim or shred, or by the anguish and indelible anger of the sons and daughters they leave behind, or by the political chaos that we ourselves all too often leave behind when our troops and journalists decamp.
These are familiar and deeply troubling sources of moral levity in the public war deliberations of the world's dominant military power. There is, however, another, less familiar yet possibly more troubling source of such levity. It is the relative passivity with which most Americans now experience the mobilization for war. This process has become highly undemocratic. Large groups of ''we the people" now are insulated not only from the physical risks of injury or death in war but also from the moral risks that attend any active role in the initiation of war.
What are the moral risks of war? Consider, to begin with, that one cannot responsibly choose to start a war without supposing oneself to have the capacity to discern those rare historical moments when war has a realistic chance of doing more good than harm. Overestimating one's capacity to shape the course of history raises the risk of becoming responsible for the creation of a damnable mess.
Consider, too, that one cannot responsibly choose the path of war without being certain that one's enthusiasm for fighting is not rooted at least partly in such dark psychological sources as an overgeneralized thirst for revenge or intoxication with the capacity to humble one's enemies. To overestimate the purity of one's war motives is to risk becoming responsible for evil, entered into -- as evil ordinarily is -- with every belief in one's good intentions.
Today both sorts of moral risks are in play. We are contemplating a fresh military adventure at a time when our attempts at statecraft in Afghanistan show signs of crumbling into anarchic violence. If we depose Saddam Hussein and his tyrannical regime, it is by no means clear that we can establish a stable successor. Meanwhile, we run the danger of provoking Hussein to use weapons he might otherwise not dare to use.
There is also good reason for scrutiny of our desire for combat. We are hurt, angry and still grieving over the meaningless loss of thousands of American lives in the attacks of Sept. 11. Desire for revenge is general in our land and often overgeneralized in its target. We hear this in George Bush's loose talk of an ''axis" of evil formed somehow by countries that have almost no dealings with one another. We see it in our readiness to tar Iraq with the same brush used to discredit the Taliban.
The cause of peace is threatened as much by specialization in the distribution of the moral risks of war as by specialization in its risks to life and limb. Both sorts of specializations can lull citizens into passive fascination with impressive shows of power staged by a military that is, in theory, supposed to do the public's will. In a properly constituted democracy, decisions of war and peace must emerge from the conscientious deliberation of the public's true representatives, and their deliberations must shape and be shaped by the equally conscientious if less organized deliberations of an engaged citizenry.
While today's Congress hardly answers to this ideal account, it remains the center of the nation's public political deliberation.
It is, then, a blessing that Article I, Section 8, of our Constitution clearly vests the power to declare war in Congress. Yet we have fallen from this democratic element of our own Constitution to the point at which the public expresses little or no outrage when the president speaks and acts as though he has the unilateral prerogative to initiate a war in nonemergency conditions.
The first fateful bomb might fall on Baghdad before Congress even begins its formal discussion of the wisdom of the war. Even if debate does take place, it likely will be a mere fifth wheel to the seemingly self-sufficient decision-making already underway behind closed doors in the White House. Under these circumstances, both Congress and the public it represents are reduced to the role of spectators.
It may be objected that presidential decisions about war and peace are in good democratic order, because presidents generally are concerned about maintaining their popularity and can do so only if their decisions reflect public preferences. One superficial problem with this objection is that it applies only to those reasonably popular first-term presidents who have a realistic hope of reelection. But the more fundamental problem is that it overlooks the vast difference between what a person is capable of applauding and what a person is capable of making the deliberate and considered decision to do.
If war policy is chosen behind closed doors and then conveyed to the people in conjunction with a skillful caricature of the predetermined enemy (supported, perhaps, by intelligence whose precise nature cannot be revealed), the public can be made to prefer an array of unsavory wars that it would never choose in the light of open deliberation. To think that democracy boils down to making sure one's decisions can be made popular in retrospect is to reduce the ideal of democracy to competency in marketing.
It is true that we cannot make decisions about war and peace more democratically without also making them more slowly and openly. It is also true that openness and deliberateness can be costly. Yet these costs are part of the price of self-rule, the essence of the political freedom we Americans have historically cherished.
We must assume these costs, along with the burdens of the citizen-soldier, not only to realize our own aspiration to self-rule but also to give the world the best available guarantee that we will use our vast military power as responsibly as is humanly possible.
The writer is an assistant professor of philosophy at the University of Virginia.
Wars are not won on the defensive," asserts Vice President Dick Cheney. "We must take the battle to the enemy and, where necessary, preempt grave threats to our country before they materialize." For the Bush administration, this policy appears to include a preemptive strike against Iraq, which is viewed as another installment in its war against terrorism.
A war of preemption, advocates maintain, will bring about a highly desired "regime change" in Iraq, install a democratic government there and free the Iraqi people. By just war standards, however, a preemptive attack against Iraq must be condemned.
According to just war theory, three criteria determine whether going to war is justifiable: the cause must be just, the chances of success must be reasonable and the authority to wage war must be competent. None of these conditions can be met by the preemptive strike planned against Iraq. It is not likely that the main criteria for justifiable conduct in war--providing immunity for noncombatants and using means proportional to the ends--can be met either. Let's look at each of these principles in light of the proposed attack against Iraq.
Just cause? Having a sufficient cause is the most important condition justifying war. Historically this has involved (a) self-defense (b) against an act of aggression and (c) used as a last resort. Initiating an act of war violates this requirement, since the only sufficient reason for warfare is self-defense against physical aggression.
The right to preempt an anticipated attack can be extrapolated from the self-defense principle if preemptive strikes meet a high standard of justification: the attack being prevented must be imminent, not merely conjectured or vaguely feared in the long run. Everything depends, therefore, on whether Iraq plans to launch an attack against the U.S. in the near future.
Two questions are relevant: Does Hussein actually possess weapons of mass destruction? And if so, do they pose a clear and imminent danger to the U.S. or its allies? The answer to both these questions seems to be no. No evidence has been produced that Iraq is manufacturing weapons of mass destruction. According to experts, both the capacity to manufacture them and the capability of delivering them are lacking. This assessment has been confirmed by sources as diverse as Former Defense Secretary William S. Cohen, current Secretary of State Colin Powell and former UN arms inspector Scott Ritter.
As a result of the gulf war, Iraq had virtually all of its major weapons programs destroyed--including its nuclear weapons capability, as reported by the International Atomic Energy Agency. Even if Hussein does retain some minimal capability in weapons of mass destruction, mere possession, by just war criteria, is not enough. Iraq has obvious incentives not to implicate itself in using such a capability against the U.S.--unless Iraq itself should be attacked first in an unprovoked war of preemption. In that case, Saddam Hussein would have nothing to lose by unleashing, in desperation, anything he may have.
Reasonable chance of success? The just war theory requires stringently weighing in advance the consequences of a military campaign, even though this requirement by itself is not decisive. Any one who has read Tolstoy's War and Peace or who remembers the Vietnam War should know that when success is made to sound too easy, skepticism is the order of the day. Precious human lives and scarce economic resources are at stake.
Would "liberating" Iraq really be a "cakewalk," as Ken Adelman, former U.S. arms control director, has claimed? Or is Immanuel Wallerstein of Yale University correct when he warns that Iraq could become another Vietnam: "Just as in Vietnam, the war will drag on and will cost many U.S. lives. And the political effects will be so negative for the U.S. that eventually Bush (or his successor) will pull out. A renewed and amplified Vietnam syndrome will be the result at home."
According to some estimates, as many as 250,000 U.S. troops will be needed. While other estimates are lower, one Pentagon study has projected an "acceptable" death rate of 20,000-30,000 U.S. soldiers. (The number of "acceptable" Iraqi deaths has apparently not been calculated.) The Iraqi army, estimated at 500,000 troops, will be defending their homeland against a foreign invader who has been bombing them for years. Dissident military analyst Carlton Meyer says: "Ideally, the campaign can be won by sending in 50,000 troops charging in from the air and sea. . . . However, they could get bogged down if the Iraqis fight in the cities and mine the roads. In every military operation there are a hundred things that can go wrong; if you can anticipate half of them, you're a genius."
Arab leaders have warned that a U.S. war against Iraq could destabilize the entire region. Iraq itself threatens to collapse into anarchy. A puppet regime is far more likely to result than a democracy, and even that will be difficult to achieve. Senior U.S. military officials reportedly have serious doubts about whether defeating Iraq would be worth the high military and diplomatic cost. A unilateral war against Iraq would be widely perceived as an American bid for colonial occupation in the Middle East. An occupation of oil-rich Iraq, says Meyer, "will not be about freedom, democracy, or security; just money and power."
Legitimate authority? It is doubtful that the U.S. possesses legitimate authority to launch a preemptive war alone against Iraq. "Unilateral action by the United States to overthrow the government of another sovereign nation," writes Hastings law professor George Bisharat, "would constitute a grave breach of international law." Yet that is what the administration proposes to do.
Almost no other country supports a U.S. invasion of Iraq. No Arab state supports it, nor does most of Europe, Russia, Turkey, Pakistan and Iran. Israel and Great Britain are the two notable exceptions, although Tony Blair has pledged that no attack on Iraq will be permitted without UN assent. Whether he will stand by this pledge, however, is by no means clear.
Article 51 of the UN Charter allows for international attacks only if there are no alternatives, and if there is immediate danger with no time for deliberation. The U.S. will almost certainly disregard the UN, since it expects its planned invasion will be opposed. Our country will then look less like the honest international broker it claims to be and increasingly like a rogue state.
On the domestic front there are also doubts about legitimate authority. Recently, Senator Robert C. Byrd (D., W. Va.) urged the Senate to play a central role in determining whether our nation should invade Iraq. According to the Constitution, he insisted, it is the role of the Congress to declare war. "I am determined to do everything in my power to prevent this country from becoming involved in another Vietnam nightmare," he declared. "This determination begins with Congress being fully and sufficiently informed on the undertakings of our government, especially if it involves the commitment to military action."
Proportionality and noncombatant immunity? The principles of proportionality and noncombatant immunity concern how much force is morally appropriate and who are legitimate targets of war. They distinguish the legitimate conduct of war from acts of murder. Too often our country fails to honor these principles.
According to military analyst William Arkin, the Pentagon fails to take civilian casualties with sufficient seriousness. Having surveyed recent U.S. military engagements in the gulf war, the Balkans and Afghanistan, Arkin concludes that though some progress has been made, U.S. efforts are just not good enough. "The U.S. military can assert all it wants that it takes 'all' measures to minimize civilian harm. But until it is willing to actually study why civilians die in conflict, it is an assertion that has little credibility."
The planned U.S. preemptive strike will take place against the background of comprehensive UN sanctions that have already wreaked havoc on civilians. They have devastated the weakest and most vulnerable members of Iraqi society: the poor, the elderly, the sick, the newborn and the young. According to UN reports, over 1 million civilians, the vast majority of whom are children and the elderly, have died since 1990 because of this suffocating blockade. UNICEF officials estimate that in 2000 more than 5,000 children were dying each month primarily because of the sanctions.
From this perspective, the planned invasion will be a continuation of outrages begun by other means. Cluster bombs, like those used in Afghanistan, and other ghastly weapons dropped from 15,000 feet are sure to produce massive civilian casualties. Earlier this year, in a change of official policy, our government even announced a possible "first-use" strategy of "low yield" nuclear weapons. Richard Perle, chairman of the Defense Policy Board that advises the defense secretary, has said: "No strategist would reject, in principle, using nuclear weapons against Iraq."
George Kennan observed years ago that just war principles mean little without a commitment to keep civilian casualties to the absolute minimum, "even at the cost of military victory." The just war tradition requires that "victory" alone cannot be the overriding goal.
George Hunsinger is Hazel Thompson McCord Professor of Systematic Theology at Princeton Theological Seminary. A longer version of this article can be read at: http://www.pres-outlook.com/hun_iraq081902.html
© Copyrighted 1997-2001
The Bush Administration's special Mideast envoy, retired Marine General Anthony Zinni, denounced the drive to war in Iraq last Saturday during an appearance in Florida. He did so with certainty and a touch of sardonic wit. Somehow, this front-page story hasn't yet penetrated the consciousness of the nation's great newspaper editors. But Zinni's speech at the Economic Club in Tallahassee (just down the street from Jeb's office) powerfully reaffirms the quiet dissent of Colin Powell, who appointed him. His tough remarks about the administration he is currently serving may also suggest that the Mideast envoy feels deep frustration over White House mishandling of Israeli-Palestinian issues. In short, he may be ready to quit.
Zinni made a direct reference to the Secretary of State, along with retired generals Schwarzkopf and Scowcroft, and derided the armchair hawks who are promoting "pre-emptive" military action:
"It´s pretty interesting that all the generals see it the same way, and all the others who have never fired a shot and are hot to go to war see it another way."
If I were Dick Cheney or Richard Perle or Paul Wolfowitz, I might have to take that personally.
Zinni isn't just any general, of course. In addition to his Marine resume, he's also the former chief of the Army's Central Command, with responsibility for the Mideast region. The quotes in the Tampa Trib reflect a remarkably sensible outlook, but one that is wholly at odds with the president's "axis of evil" mindset.
According to the Trib reporter, he indicated that "more important than Iraq right now are 'the opportunities that exist for the United States to encourage a peaceful transition in Iran where young people are increasingly challenging the power of the Islamic theocracy.'"
In articulating the case for going to war with Iraq, the Bush administration emphasizes that Saddam Hussein possesses and has used "weapons of mass destruction." In an Aug. 26 speech, Vice President Dick Cheney said that Saddam wants more time to husband his resources, to invest in his ongoing chemical and biological weapons programs, and to gain possession of nuclear arms. Should all his ambitions be realized, the implications would be enormous for the Middle East, for the United States, and for the peace of the world. The whole range of weapons of mass destruction then would rest in the hands of a dictator who has already shown his willingness to use such weapons [italics Chatterbox's], and has done so, both in his war with Iran and against his own people.
In the Sept. 2 New Republic, an editorial headlined "Best Case" states this more starkly:
What is it, then, about the villain in Baghdad that should provoke the United States to rid the world of him? One spectacular thing: He is the only leader in the world with weapons of mass destruction who has used them. He used them against Iranian troops and against Kurdish civilians. This is what makes Saddam Hussein so distinguished in the field of evil.
The trouble with this distinction is that it rests on the long-standing dubious convention of classifying chemical and biological weapons as "weapons of mass destruction." Saddam has indeed used mustard gas and chemical agents to commit genocide "against his own people," and that is indeed a horror. (For details, see Chatterbox's earlier item, "Jude Wanniski's Genocide Denial .") Were Saddam to use them against anybody now, the U.S. would probably be justified in declaring immediate war on Iraq. But to call chemical and biological agents "weapons of mass destruction" is to blur the crucial distinction between these weapons and nuclear weapons, the use of which would be a far greater horror, both because it would kill many more people and because it would open the door to further, and deadlier, nuclear warfare.
That chemical and biological weapons don't deserve to be called "weapons of mass destruction" is a point long familiar to arms control experts. Here, for example, is Gert G. Harigel of the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace:
The term "weapons of mass destruction" (WMD), used to encompass nuclear (NW), biological (BW), and chemical weapons (CW), is misleading, politically dangerous, and cannot be justified on grounds of military efficiency. ?Whereas protection with various degrees of efficiency is possible against chemical and biological weapons, however inconvenient it might be for military forces on the battlefield and for civilians at home, it is not feasible at all against nuclear weapons.
Wolfgang K.H. Panofsky spells out the comparative lethality of nuclear versus chemical and biological weapons in the April 1998 issue of Arms Control Today, in an article headlined "Dismantling the Concept of 'Weapons of Mass Destruction' ":
The weapons detonated over Hiroshima and Nagasaki, which killed about a quarter of a million people, had an explosive power about one-tenth that carried by a modern nuclear weapon. ? If a 1-megaton thermonuclear warhead exploded at optimum altitude over a large city, little would be left standing or alive within five miles. A firestorm could be ignited, further extending the range of destruction. In a large-scale exchange, lethal fallout would cover an entire region.
Biological and chemical weapons, though certainly very nasty, are not nearly so deadly:
If virulent BW materials were to be widely distributed over an exposed population, then the ratio of potential lethality to the total weight of the material could be comparable to that of nuclear weapons. However, for this horrifying scenario to occur, the materials cannot be dispersed by a single-point explosion, but instead must be spread by an appropriate mechanism such as spray tanks or by "fractionating" a missile's payload and dispersing separate mini-munitions over a wide area. Moreover, survival of BW material depends critically on local meteorological and other conditions which define the delivery environment. The survival of agents is generally of short duration and effects are delayed for days. ? There is little question that the lethality of chemical weapons?as measured by per unit weight of delivered munitions? is lower by many orders of magnitude than it is for nuclear weapons or the undemonstrated and inherently uncertain potential of biological weapons.
Cheney's claim that Saddam "has already shown his willingness" to use weapons of mass destruction and the New Republic 's claim that Saddam is the "only leader in the world with weapons of mass destruction who has used them" undermine the extremely valuable concept of nuclear exceptionalism. The New Republic's claim is also just plain wrong. Saddam is the only living leader in the world with weapons of mass destruction who has used them. The only leader in the world with nuclear weapons who ever used them was Harry Truman. If you agree that biological and chemical weapons deserve to be called "weapons of mass destruction," then the New Republic's condemnation may be extended to include Woodrow Wilson and many others who deployed chemical warfare during World War I.
Is Chatterbox saying that Harry Truman and Woodrow Wilson were no better than Saddam Hussein? Of course not. Saddam is a brutal dictator, while Truman and Wilson are justly admired presidents. But it remains true that Wilson and Truman allowed use of weapons in their time that today are judged beyond the pale within the international community. Quite rightly, the international consensus further holds that nuclear warfare is much more dangerous, and therefore much more reprehensible, than chemical and biological warfare. This is a distinction that the phrase "weapons of mass destruction" undermines. If Saddam has already used "weapons of mass destruction" (and, moreover, suffered little for it), what deters him from using nukes in the future? They're all "weapons of mass destruction," aren't they?
This interview is the sixth of a series in which national and world figures reflect on the terrorist attacks and their effect on a year of public life and policy.
PARIS, Sept. 8 - President Jacques Chirac of France proposed a two-stage plan today that could lead to United Nations authorization of military force against Iraq.
In a wide-ranging interview at Élysée Palace, he said that he personally would like to see a new Iraqi government, but that any attempt to oust Saddam Hussein without the backing of a Security Council resolution would be a recipe for chaos in global affairs.
Mr. Chirac called Mr. Hussein a man who "is especially dangerous to his own people." He added, "I don't need to tell you that I condemn the regime in Iraq, naturally, for all the reasons we know, for all the dangers that it puts on the region and the tragedy it constitutes for the Iraqi people who are held hostage by it."
On the topic of ousting the Iraqi leader, he said: "One can wish for it. I do wish for it, naturally. But a few principles and a little order are needed to run the affairs of the world." Noting that there are many governments whose overthrow might appear desirable to Western leaders, Mr. Chirac cautioned, "If we go down that road, where are we going?" He noted that the Security Council had not reviewed any proposal for replacing Mr. Hussein - the declared objective of the Bush administration.
In the interview, Mr. Chirac proposed a Security Council resolution that would give Iraq a three-week deadline for admitting United Nations weapons inspectors "without restrictions or preconditions." If Mr. Hussein rejected their return or hampered their work, he said, a second resolution should be passed on whether to use military force.
The president said France would work on drafting this second resolution and the ultimate French stance would depend on the wording.
Mr. Chirac did not commit France to providing combat troops.
President Chirac described the Bush administration doctrine of pre-emptive military action in its fight against terrorism as "extraordinarily dangerous."
He said, "As soon as one nation claims the right to take preventive action, other countries will naturally do the same." He asked, "What would you say in the entirely hypothetical event that China wanted to take pre-emptive action against Taiwan, saying that Taiwan was a threat to it? How would the Americans, the Europeans and others react? Or what if India decided to take preventive action against Pakistan, or vice versa?"
Vice President Dick Cheney has dismissed the usefulness of returning weapons inspectors to Iraq, but President Chirac indicated he was listening to other voices in the administration, including that of Secretary of State Colin L. Powell.
"What Mr. Cheney says does not interest me," Mr. Chirac said. "What interests me is what Mr. Bush says. Because I hear Mr. Cheney saying one thing; I hear Mr. Powell saying another."
Mr. Chirac spoke in a 75-minute interview that ranged from his concern over what he called a deteriorating situation in Afghanistan to American perceptions of anti-Semitism in France. But his chief focus was Iraq. His position appeared nuanced, placing France closer to the administration's position than Germany, which has said it will not take part in an attack on Iraq, whatever the United Nations decides.
On Saturday, as President Bush was meeting with Prime Minister Tony Blair of Britain, Mr. Chirac was in Germany, meeting with Chancellor Gerhard Schröder, who has dismissed military intervention in Iraq as an "adventure."
Asked whether the timing of the meeting was intended to signal that France and Germany were united on one side of the debate, and America and Britain on the other, Mr. Chirac said, "It's not Schröder and I on one side, and Bush and Blair on the other; it's Bush and Blair on one side and all the others on the other side."
But, he said, "I am in a different position from that of the chancellor."
Mr. Chirac said that he and Mr. Bush had a "friendly and warm" telephone conversation on Friday and that Mr. Bush would be sending emissaries to France and elsewhere to make the administration's case. The quest for broad support for any move against Mr. Hussein clearly pleased Mr. Chirac.
He appeared concerned, however, that the United States, if it acted alone, might undermine the international coalition formed to fight terrorism in Afghanistan and accentuate what he called rising anti-Americanism and anti-Western sentiment in developing countries. "I am totally against unilateralism in the modern world," he said.
He added that extreme care should be taken in preserving the coalition, suggesting that precipitate action against Iraq could alienate the Islamic world.
A collapse of the coalition would be especially dangerous at a time when Afghanistan remained treacherous and "the many small warlords are well armed to fight against Al Qaeda" but are now "fighting among themselves," Mr. Chirac said.
Still, he made clear that the use of force against Iraq, with France's participation, could be envisioned. Asked whether military options to oust Mr. Hussein might be approved by the Security Council, he replied, "Nothing is impossible, if it is decided by the international community on the basis of indisputable proof" of the existence of weapons of mass destruction. But, he added, "For the moment, we have neither proof nor decisions."
Despite efforts by the Bush administration to link Iraq to Al Qaeda, Mr. Chirac said he had seen no evidence of a connection.
France has a particular interest in the future of Iraq. France became Iraq's main military supplier in the West and was building a nuclear reactor for Iraq that was destroyed by the Israelis in 1979. As prime minister in 1975, Mr. Chirac welcomed Mr. Hussein to France, referring to him as "a personal friend" and inviting him to his home. France had the closest relationship with Iraq of any Western country, but that ended when Iraq invaded Kuwait in 1990, and France participated fully in the American-led coalition that ousted Iraq. In recent years, French companies have received billions of dollars in contracts in Iraq under a United Nations program.
On the eve of the anniversary of Sept. 11, Mr. Chirac said his first thoughts were for the victims and their families, adding that despite all the criticism of the United States in France, "When the chips are down, the French and Americans have always stood together and have never failed to be there for one another."
Mr. Chirac was the first foreign leader to visit Mr. Bush just after the attacks, when he toured the site of the destroyed World Trade Center with Rudolph W. Giuliani, then the mayor.
"It's a country that I love, that I admire, that I respect, naturally," he said at another point, recalling the time he spent in the United States as a young man, when he was, as he said in English, "a soda jerk."
But he stressed that France would never be a lackey of the United States. "In life, you know, one must not confuse friends with sycophants," he said. "It's better to have only a few friends than to have a lot of sycophants. And I'm telling you that France considers itself one of the friends of the Americans, not necessarily one of its sycophants. And when we have something to say, we say it."
Copyright 2002 The New York Times Company
AUSTIN, Texas -- Excuse me: I don't want to be tacky or anything, but hasn't it occurred to anyone in Washington that sending Vice President Dick Cheney out to champion an invasion of Iraq on the grounds that Saddam Hussein is a "murderous dictator" is somewhere between bad taste and flaming hypocrisy?
When Dick Cheney was CEO of the oilfield supply firm Halliburton, the company did $23.8 million in business with Saddam Hussein, the evildoer "prepared to share his weapons of mass destruction with terrorists."
So if Saddam is "the world's worst leader," how come Cheney sold him the equipment to get his dilapidated oil fields up and running so he to could afford to build weapons of mass destruction?
In 1998, the United Nations passed a resolution allowing Iraq to buy spare parts for its oilfields, but other sanctions remained in place, and the United States has consistently pressured the U.N. to stop exports of medicine and other needed supplies on the grounds they could have "dual use." As the former Secretary of Defense under Bush the Elder, Cheney was in particularly vulnerable position on the hypocrisy of doing business with Iraq. (Although in 1991, after the Gulf War, Cheney told a group of oil industry executives he was emphatically against trying to topple Hussein.)
Using two subsidiaries, Dresser-Rand and Ingersoll-Dresser, Halliburton helped rebuild Saddam's war-damaged oil fields. The combined value of these contracts for parts and equipment was greater than that of any other American company doing business with Iraq -- companies including Schlumberger, Flowserve, Fisher-Rosemount, General Electric. They acted through foreign subsidiaries or associated companies in France, Belgium, Germany, India, Switzerland, Bahrain, Egypt and the Netherlands.
In several cases, it is clear the European companies did no more than loan their names to American firms for the purpose of dealing with Hussein. Iraq then became America's second-largest Middle Eastern oil supplier.
This story was initially reported by the Financial Times of London over two years ago and has since been more extensively reported in the European press. But as we have seen with the case of Harken Energy and many other stories, there is a difference between a story having been reported and having attention being paid to it (a distinction many journalists have trouble with). Thus the administration was able to dismiss the new information on shady dealings at Harken as "old news" because not much attention was ever paid when the old news was new.
When Cheney left Halliburton, he received a $34 million severance package despite the fact that the single biggest deal of his five-year career there, the acquisition of Dresser Industries, turned out to be a huge blunder since the company came saddled with asbestos liability. (On the campaign trail, Cheney often claimed he had been "out in the private sector creating jobs." The first thing he did after the Dresser merger was lay off 10,000 people.)
Halliburton, America's No. 1 oil-services company, is the nation's fifth-largest military contractor and the biggest non-union employer in the United States. It employs more than 100,000 workers worldwide and does over $15 billion a year. Halliburton under Cheney dealt with several brutal dictatorships, including the despicable government of Burma (Myanmar). The company also played questionable roles in Algeria, Angola, Bosnia, Croatia, Haiti, Somalia and Indonesia.
Halliburton also had dealings with Iran and Libya, both on the State Department's list of terrorist states. Halliburton's subsidiary Brown & Root, the old Texas construction firm that does much business with the U.S. military, was fined $3.8 million for re-exporting goods to Libya in violation of U.S. sanctions.
If you want to know why the Democrats didn't jump all over this story and make a big deal out it, it's because -- as usual -- Democrats are involved in similar dealings. Former CIA director John Deutsch is on the board of Schlumberger, the second largest oil services firm after Halliburton, which is also doing business with Iraq through subsidiaries.
Americans have long been aware that corporate money has consistently corrupted domestic policy in favor of corporate interests, and that both parties are in thrall to huge corporate campaign donors. We are less accustomed to connecting the dots when it comes to foreign policy. But there is no more evidence that corporations pay attention to anything other than profits in their foreign dealings than they do in their domestic deals.
Enron, as usual, provides some textbook examples of just how indifferent to human rights American companies can be. Halliburton's dealings in Nigeria, in partnership with Shell and Chevron, provide another such example, including gross violations of human rights and environmental abuses.
No one is ever going to argue that Saddam Hussein is a good guy, but Dick Cheney is not the right man to make the case against him. I have never understood why the Washington press corps cannot remember anything for longer than 10 minutes, but hearing Cheney denounce Saddam is truly "Give us a break" time.
© 2002 Creators Syndicate
The summary proposal that follows draws heavily on the expertise of all those who participated in the Carnegie discussions on Iraq and on the individually authored papers. Further explanation and greater detail on virtually every point, especially the proposal's military aspects, can be found therein.
With rising emphasis in recent months, the president has made clear that the United States' number one concern in Iraq is its pursuit of weapons of mass destruction (WMD). No link has yet been found between Baghdad's assertively secular regime and radical Islamist terrorists. There is much else about the Iraqi government that is fiercely objectionable but nothing that presents an imminent threat to the region, the United States, or the world. Thus, the United States' primary goal is, and should be, to deal with the WMD threat.
In light of what is now a four-year-long absence of international inspectors from the country, it has been widely assumed that the United States has only two options regarding that threat: continue to do nothing to find and destroy Iraq's nuclear, chemical, biological, and missile programs, or pursue covert action or a full-scale military operation to overthrow Saddam Hussein. At best, the latter would be a unilateral initiative with grudging partners.
This paper proposes a third approach, a middle ground between an unacceptable status quo that allows Iraqi WMD programs to continue and the enormous costs and risks of an invasion. It proposes a new regime of coercive international inspections. A powerful, multinational military force, created by the UN Security Council, would enable UN and International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) inspection teams to carry out "comply or else" inspections. The "or else" is overthrow of the regime. The burden of choosing war is placed squarely on Saddam Hussein.
The middle-ground option is a radical change from the earlier international inspection effort in which the playing field was tilted steeply in Iraq's favor. It requires a military commitment sufficient to pose a credible threat to Iraq and would take a vigorous diplomatic initiative on Washington's part to launch. Long-term success would require sustained unity of purpose among the major powers. These difficulties make this approach attractive only in comparison to the alternatives, but in that light, its virtues emerge sharply.
Inspections backed by a force authorized by the UN Security Council would carry unimpeachable legitimacy and command broad international support. The effort would therefore strengthen, rather than undermine, the cooperation the United States needs for long-term success in the war against terrorism. It would avoid a direct blow to the authority of the Security Council and the rule of law. It would avoid setting a dangerous precedent of a unilateral right to attack in "preventive self-defense." Although not likely to be welcomed by Iraq's neighbors, it would be their clear choice over war. Regional assistance (basing, over-flight rights, and so on) should therefore be more forthcoming. If successful, it would reduce Iraq's WMD threat to negligible levels. If a failure, it would lay an operational and political basis for a transition to a war to oust Saddam. The United States would be seen to have worked through the United Nations with the rest of the world rather than alone, and Iraq's intent would have been cleanly tested and found wanting. Baghdad would be isolated. In these circumstances, the risks to the region of a war to overthrow Iraq's government-from domestic pressure on shaky governments (Pakistan) to governments misreading U.S. intentions (Iran) to heightened Arab and Islamic anger toward the United States-would be sharply diminished.
Compared to a war aimed at regime change, the approach greatly reduces the risk of Saddam's using whatever WMD he has (probably against Israel) while a force aimed at his destruction is being assembled. On the political front, coercive inspections avoid the looming question of what regime would replace the current government. It would also avoid the risks of persistent instability in Iraq, its possible disintegration into Shia, Suni, and Kurdish regions, and the need to station tens of thousands of U.S. troops in the country for what could be a very long time.
A year ago, this approach would have been impossible. Since then, however, four factors have combined to make it achievable:
greatly increased concern about WMD in the wake of September 11,
Iraq's continued lies and intransigence even after major reform of the UN sanctions regime,
Russia's embrace of the United States after the September 11 attacks, and the Bush administration's threats of unilateral military action, which have opened a political space that did not exist before.
Together, these changes have restored a consensus among the Security Council's five permanent members (P-5) regarding the need for action on Iraq's WMD that has not existed for the past five years.
CORE PREMISES
Several key premises underlie the new approach.
Inspections can work. In their first five years, the United Nations Special Commission on Iraq (UNSCOM), which was responsible for inspecting and disarming Iraq's chemical, biological, and missile materials and capacities, and the IAEA Iraq Action Team, which did the same for Iraq's nuclear ones, achieved substantial successes. With sufficient human and technological resources, time, and political support, inspections can reduce Iraq's WMD threat, if not to zero, to a negligible level. (The term inspections encompasses a resumed discovery and disarmament phase and intrusive, ongoing monitoring and verification extending to dual-use facilities and the activities of key individuals.)
Saddam Hussein's overwhelming priority is to stay in power. He will never willingly give up pursuit of WMD, but he will do so if convinced that the only alternative is his certain destruction and that of his regime.
A credible and continuing military threat involving substantial forces on Iraq's borders will be necessary both to get the inspectors back into Iraq and to enable them to do their job. The record from 1991 to the present makes clear that Iraq views UN WMD inspections as war by other means. There is no reason to expect this to change. Sanctions, inducements, negotiations, or periodic air strikes will not suffice to restore effective inspection. Negotiations in the present circumstances only serve Baghdad's goals of delay and diversion.
The UNSCOM/IAEA successes also critically depended on unity of purpose within the UN Security Council. No amount of military force will be effective without unwavering political resolve behind it. Effective inspections cannot be reestablished until a way forward is found that the major powers and key regional states can support under the UN Charter.
NEGOTIATING COERCIVE INSPECTIONS
From roughly 1997 until recently, determined Iraqi diplomacy succeeded in dividing the P-5. Today, principally due to Iraq's behavior, Russia's new geopolitical stance, and U.S.-led reform of the sanctions regime, a limited consensus has reemerged. There is now agreement that Iraq has not met its obligations under UN Resolution 687 (which created the inspections regime) and that there is a need for the return of inspectors to Iraq. There is also support behind the new, yet-to-be tested inspection team known as the UN Monitoring, Verification, and Inspection Commission (UNMOVIC, created in December 1999 under Resolution 1284). Because three members of the P-5 abstained on the vote to create UNMOVIC, this development is particularly noteworthy. The May 2002 adoption of a revised sanctions plan was further evidence of a still fragile but real and evolving convergence of view on the Security Council.
Perhaps paradoxically, U.S. threats to act unilaterally against Iraq have the potential to strengthen this limited consensus. France, Russia, and China strongly share the view that only the Security Council can authorize the use of force-a view to which Great Britain is also sympathetic. All four know that after eleven years of the United Nations' handling of the issue, a U.S. decision to act unilaterally against Iraq would be a tremendous blow to the authority of the institution and the Security Council in particular. They want to avoid any further marginalization of the Council since that would translate into a diminution of their individual influence. Thus, U.S. threats provide these four countries with a shared interest in finding a formula for the use of force against Iraq that would be effective, acceptable to the United States, and able to be authorized by the Council as a whole. That formula could be found in a resolution authorizing multinational enforcement action to enable UNMOVIC to carry out its mandate.
Achieving such an outcome would require a tremendous diplomatic effort on Washington's part. That, however, should not be a seen as a serious deterrent. Achieving desired outcomes without resort to war is, in the first instance, what power is for. Launching the middle-ground approach would amount, in effect, to Washington and the rest of the P-5 re-seizing the diplomatic initiative from Baghdad.
The critical element will be that the United States makes clear that it forswears unilateral military action against Iraq for as long as international inspections are working. The United States would have to convince Iraq and others that this is not a perfunctory bow to international opinion preparatory to an invasion and that the United States' intent is to see inspections succeed, not a ruse to have them quickly fail. If Iraq is not convinced, it would have no reason to comply; indeed, quite the reverse because Baghdad would need whatever WMD it has to deter or fight a U.S. attack. Given the past history, many countries will be deeply skeptical. To succeed, Washington will have to be steady, unequivocal, and unambiguous on this point.
This does not mean that Washington need alter its declaratory policy favoring regime change in Iraq. Its stance would be that the United States continues to support regime change but will not take action to force it while Iraq is in full compliance with international inspections. There would be nothing unusual in such a position. The United States has, for example, had a declaratory policy for regime change in Cuba for more than forty years.
Beyond the Security Council, U.S. diplomacy will need to recognize the significant differences in strategic interests among the states in the region. Some want a strong Iraq to offset Iran. Others fear a prosperous, pro-West Iraq producing oil to its full potential. Many fear and oppose U.S. military dominance in the region. Virtually all, however, agree that Iraq should be free of WMD, and they universally fear the instability that is likely to accompany a violent overthrow of the Iraqi government.
Moreover, notwithstanding the substantial U.S. presence required for enforced inspections and what will be widely felt to be an unfair double standard (acting against Iraq's WMD but not against Israel's), public opinion throughout the region would certainly be less aroused by multilateral inspections than by a unilateral U.S. invasion.
Thus, if faced with a choice between a war to achieve regime change and an armed, multilateral effort to eradicate Iraq's WMD, all the region's governments are likely to share a clear preference for the latter.
IMPLEMENTING COERCIVE INSPECTIONS
Under the coercive inspections plan, the Security Council would authorize the creation of an Inspections Implementation Force (IIF) to act as the enforcement arm for UNMOVIC and the IAEA task force. Under the new resolution, the inspections process is transformed from a game of cat and mouse punctuated by diversions and manufactured crises, in which conditions heavily favor Iraqi obstruction, into a last chance, "comply or else" operation. The inspection teams would return to Iraq accompanied by a military arm strong enough to force immediate entry into any site at any time with complete security for the inspection team. No terms would be negotiated regarding the dates, duration, or modalities of inspection. If Iraq chose not to accept, or established a record of noncompliance, the U.S. regime-change option or, better, a UN authorization of "use of all necessary means" would come into play.
Overall control is vested in the civilian executive chairman of the inspection teams. He would determine what sites will be inspected, without interference from the Security Council, and whether military forces should accompany any particular inspection. Some inspections-for example, personnel interviews-may be better conducted without any accompanying force; others will require maximum insurance of prompt entry and protection. The size and composition of the accompanying force would be the decision of the IIF commander, and its employment would be under his command.
The IIF must be strong and mobile enough to support full inspection of any site, including socalled sensitive sites and those previously designated as off limits. "No-fly" and "no-drive" zones near to-be-inspected sites would be imposed with minimal advance notice to Baghdad. Violations of these bans would subject the opposing forces to attack. Robust operational and communications security would allow surprise inspections. In the event surprise fails and "spontaneous" gatherings of civilians attempt to impede inspections, rapid response riot control units must be available.
The IIF must be highly mobile, composed principally of air and armored cavalry units. It might include an armored cavalry regiment or equivalent on the Jordan-Iraq border, an air-mobile brigade in eastern Turkey, and two or more brigades and corps-sized infrastructure based in Saudi Arabia and Kuwait. Air support including fighter and fighterbomber aircraft and continuous air and ground surveillance, provided by AWACS and JSTARS, will be required.
The IIF must have a highly sophisticated intelligence capability. Iraq has become quite experienced in concealment and in its ability to penetrate and mislead inspection teams. It has had four unimpeded years to construct new underground sites, build mobile facilities, alter records, and so on. To overcome that advantage and ensure military success, the force must be equipped with the full range of reconnaissance, surveillance, listening, encryption, and photo interpretation capabilities.
The bulk of the force will be U.S. For critical political reasons, however, the IIF must be as multinational as possible and as small as practicable. Its design and composition should strive to make clear that the IIF is not a U.S. invasion force in disguise, but a UN enforcement force. Optimally, it would include, at a minimum, elements from all of the P-5, Turkey, Saudi Arabia, and Jordan, as well as others in the region.
Consistent with the IIF's mandate and UN origin, Washington will have to rigorously resist the temptation to use the force's access and the information it collects for purposes unrelated to its job. Nothing will more quickly sow division within the Security Council than excesses in this regard.
Operationally, on the civilian front, experts disagree as to whether UNMOVIC's mandate contains disabling weaknesses. Although some provisions could certainly be improved, it would be unwise to attempt to renegotiate Resolution 1284. Some of its weaknesses can be overcome in practice by tacit agreement (some have already been), some will be met by the vastly greater technological capabilities conferred by the IIF, and some can be corrected through the language of the IIF resolution. Four factors are critical:
Adequate time. The inspection process must not be placed under any arbitrary deadline because that would provide Baghdad with an enormous incentive for delay. It is in everyone's interest to complete the disarmament phase of the job as quickly as possible, but timelines cannot be fixed in advance.
Experienced personnel. UNMOVIC must not be forced to climb a learning curve as UNSCOM did but must be ready to operate with maximum effectiveness from the outset. To do so, it must be able to take full advantage of individuals with irreplaceable, on-the-ground experience.
Provision for two-way intelligence sharing with national governments. UNSCOM experience proves that provision for intelligence sharing with national governments is indispensable. Inspectors need much information not available from open sources or commercial satellites and prompt, direct access to defectors. For their part, intelligence agencies will not provide a flow of information without feedback on its value and accuracy. It must be accepted by all governments that such interactions are necessary and that the dialogue between providers and users would be on a strictly confidential, bilateral basis, protected from other governments. The individual in charge of information collection and assessment on the inspection team should have an intelligence background and command the trust of those governments that provide the bulk of the intelligence.
Ability to track Iraqi procurement activities outside the country. UNSCOM discovered covert transactions between Iraq and more than 500 companies from more than 40 countries between 1993 and 1998. Successful inspections would absolutely depend, therefore, on the team's authority to track procurement efforts both inside and outside Iraq, including at Iraqi embassies abroad. Accordingly, UNMOVIC should include a staff of specially trained customs experts, and inspections would need to include relevant ministries, commercial banks, and trading companies. As with military intelligence, tracking Iraqi procurement must not be used to collect unrelated commercial or technical intelligence or impede legal trade.
CONCLUSION
War should never be undertaken until the alternatives have been exhausted. In this case that moral imperative is buttressed by the very real possibility that a war to overthrow Saddam Hussein, even if successful in doing so, could subtract more from U.S. security and long-term political interests than it adds.
Political chaos in Iraq or an equally bad successor regime committed to WMD to prevent an invasion from ever happening again, possibly horrible costs to Israel, greater enmity toward the United States among Arab and other Muslim publics, a severe blow to the authority of the United Nations and the Security Council, and a giant step by the United States toward-in Zbigniew Brzezinski's phrase-political self-isolation are just some of the costs, in addition to potentially severe economic impacts and the loss of American and innocent Iraqi lives, that must be weighed.
In this case an alternative does exist. It blends the imperative for military threat against a regime that has learned how to divide and conquer the major powers with the legitimacy of UN sanction and multilateral action. Technically and operationally, it is less demanding than a war. Diplomatically, it requires a much greater effort for a greater gain. The message of an unswerving international determination to halt WMD proliferation will be heard far beyond Iraq. The only real question is can the major powers see their mutual interest, act together, and stay the course? Who is more determined -Iraq or the P-5?
Jessica Mathews is president of the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace
Copyright ©2002 Carnegie Endowment for International Peace
MOSCOW ? When George H. W. Bush ordered American forces to the Persian Gulf ? to reverse Iraq's August 1990 invasion of Kuwait ? part of the administration case was that an Iraqi juggernaut was also threatening to roll into Saudi Arabia.
Citing top-secret satellite images, Pentagon officials estimated in mid?September that up to 250,000 Iraqi troops and 1,500 tanks stood on the border, threatening the key US oil supplier.
But when the St. Petersburg Times in Florida acquired two commercial Soviet satellite images of the same area, taken at the same time, no Iraqi troops were visible near the Saudi border ? just empty desert.
"It was a pretty serious fib," says Jean Heller, the Times journalist who broke the story.
The White House is now making its case. to Congress and the public for another invasion of Iraq; President George W. Bush is expected to present specific evidence of the threat posed by Iraq during a speech to the United Nations next week.
But past cases of bad intelligence or outright disinformation used to justify war are making experts wary. The questions they are raising, some based on examples from the 1991 Persian Gulf War, highlight the importance of accurate information when a democracy considers military action.
"My concern in these situations, always, is that the intelligence that you get is driven by the policy, rather than the policy being driven by the intelligence," says former US Rep. Lee Hamilton (D) of Indiana, a 34-year veteran lawmaker until 1999, who served on numerous foreign affairs and intelligence committees, and is now director of the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars in Washington. The Bush team "understands it has not yet carried the burden of persuasion [about an imminent Iraqi threat], so they will look for any kind of evidence to support their premise," Mr. Hamilton says. "I think we have to be skeptical about it."
Examining the evidence
Shortly before US strikes began in the Gulf War, for example, the St. Petersburg Times asked two experts to examine the satellite images of the Kuwait and Saudi Arabia border area taken in mid-September 1990, a month and a half after the Iraqi invasion. The experts, including a former Defense Intelligence Agency analyst who specialized in desert warfare, pointed out the US build-up ? jet fighters standing wing-tip to wing-tip at Saudi bases ? but were surprised to see almost no sign of the Iraqis.
"That [Iraqi buildup] was the whole justification for Bush sending troops in there, and it just didn't exist," Ms. Heller says. Three times Heller contacted the office of Secretary of Defense Dick Cheney (now vice president) for evidence refuting the Times photos or analysis ? offering to hold the story if proven wrong. The official response: "Trust us." To this day, the Pentagon's photographs of the Iraqi troop buildup remain classified.
After the war, the House Armed Services Committee issued a report on lessons learned from the Persian Gulf War. It did not specifically look at the early stages of the Iraqi troop buildup in the fall, when the Bush administration was making its case to send American forces. But it did conclude that at the start of the ground war in February, the US faced only 183,000 Iraqi troops, less than half the Pentagon estimate. In 1996, Gen. Colin Powell, who is secretary of state today, told the PBS documentary program Frontline: "The Iraqis may not have been as strong as we thought they were...but that doesn't make a whole lot of difference to me. We put in place a force that would deal with it ? whether they were 300,000, or 500,000."
John MacArthur, publisher of Harper's Magazine and author of "Second Front: Censorship and Propaganda in the Gulf War," says that considering the number of senior officials shared by both Bush administrations, the American public should bear in mind the lessons of Gulf War propaganda.
"These are all the same people who were running it more than 10 years ago," Mr. MacArthur says. "They'll make up just about anything ... to get their way."
On Iraq, analysts note that little evidence so far of an imminent threat from Mr. Hussein's weapons of mass destruction has been made public.
Critics, including some former United Nations weapons inspectors in Iraq, say no such evidence exists. Mr. Bush says he will make his decision to go to war based on the "best" intelligence.
"You have to wonder about the quality of that intelligence," says Mr. Hamilton at Woodrow Wilson.
"This administration is capable of any lie ... in order to advance its war goal in Iraq," says a US government source in Washington with some two decades of experience in intelligence, who would not be further identified. "It is one of the reasons it doesn't want to have UN weapons inspectors go back in, because they might actually show that the probability of Iraq having [threatening illicit weapons] is much lower than they want us to believe."
The roots of modern war propaganda reach back to British World War II stories about German troops bayoneting babies, and can be traced through the Vietnam era and even to US campaigns in Somalia and Kosovo.
While the adage has it that "truth is the first casualty of war," senior administration officials say they cherish their credibility, and would not lie.
In a press briefing last September, Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld noted occasions during World War II when false information about US troop movements was leaked to confuse the enemy. He paraphrased Winston Churchill, saying: "Sometimes the truth is so precious it must be accompanied by a bodyguard of lies."
But he added that "my fervent hope is that we will be able to manage our affairs in a way that that will never happen. And I am 69 years old and I don't believe it's ever happened that I have lied to the press, and I don't intend to start now."
Last fall, the Pentagon secretly created an "Office of Strategic Influence." But when its existence was revealed, the ensuing media storm over reports that it would launch disinformation campaigns prompted its official closure in late February.
Commenting on the furor, President Bush pledged that the Pentagon will "tell the American people the truth."
Critics familiar with the precedent set in recent decades, however, remain skeptical. They point, for example, to the Office of Public Diplomacy run by the State Department in the 1980s. Using staff detailed from US military "psychological operations" units, it fanned fears about Nicaragua's leftist Sandinista regime with false "intelligence" leaks.
Besides placing a number of proContra, antiSandinista stories in the national US media as part of a "White Propaganda" campaign, that office fed the Miami Herald a make-believe story that the Soviet Union had given chemical weapons to the Sandinistas. Another tale ? which happened to emerge the night of President Ronald Reagan's reelection victory ? held that Soviet MiG fighters were on their way to Nicaragua.
The office was shut down in 1987, after a report by the US Comptroller-General found that some of their efforts were "prohibited, covert propaganda activities."
More recently, in the fall of 1990, members of Congress and the American public were swayed by the tearful testimony of a 15-year-old Kuwaiti girl, known only as Nayirah. In the girl's testimony before a congressional caucus, well-documented in MacArthur's book "Second Front" and elsewhere, she described how, as a volunteer in a Kuwait maternity ward, she had seen Iraqi troops storm her hospital, steal the incubators, and leave 312 babies "on the cold floor to die."
Seven US Senators later referred to the story during debate; the motion for war passed by just five votes. In the weeks after Nayirah spoke, President Bush senior invoked the incident five times, saying that such "ghastly atrocities" were like "Hitler revisited."
But just weeks before the US bombing campaign began in January, a few press reports began to raise questions about the validity of the incubator tale.
Later, it was learned that Nayirah was in fact the daughter of the Kuwaiti ambassador to Washington and had no connection to the Kuwait hospital.
She had been coached ? along with the handful of others who would "corroborate" the story ? by senior executives of Hill and Knowlton in Washington, the biggest global PR firm at the time, which had a contract worth more than $10 million with the Kuwaitis to make the case for war.
"We didn't know it wasn't true at the time," Brent Scowcroft, Bush's national security adviser, said of the incubator story in a 1995 interview with the London-based Guardian newspaper. He acknowledged "it was useful in mobilizing public opinion."
Intelligence as political tool
Selective use of intelligence information is not particular to any one presidential team, says former Congressman Hamilton.
"This is not a problem unique to George Bush. It's every president I've known, and I've worked with seven or eight of them," Hamilton says. "All, at some time or another, used intelligence to support their political objectives.
"Information is power, and the temptation to use information to achieve the results you want is almost overwhelming," he says. "The whole intelligence community knows exactly what the president wants [regarding Iraq], and most are in their jobs because of the president ? certainly the people at the top ? and they will do everything they can to support the policy.
"I'm always skeptical about intelligence," adds Hamilton, who has been awarded medallions from both the CIA and the Defense Intelligence Agency. "It's not as pure as the driven snow."
I know Dick Cheney finds it "reprehensible" that anyone could think the White House's timing on Iraq is politically inspired, but the administration has exhibited a pattern of behavior that (as Cheney rightly warns with Saddam) creates a context that raises extra concerns. What else should reasonable people make of these facts?
- In June a floppy disk found in Lafayette Park across from the White House turned out to contain a Powerpoint presentation used by Karl Rove to detail the White House's strategy for the midterm elections. "Focus on war" was a key point in a talk that centered on the White House's desire to "maintain a positive issue environment."
- Around this time Rove was upbraided (at least for PR reasons) after he told a Republican gathering that the war and terror themes and the associated military buildup could and should play to the Republicans' advantage in the midterm elections.
- When White House Chief of Staff Andrew Card was asked why the administration waited until after Labor Day to launch its campaign to convince the American people that military action against Iraq was necessary, Card replied: "From a marketing point of view, you don't introduce new products in August."
- Cheney's own language in dismissing political concerns on "Meet The Press" the other day was quite careful. He spoke of how he and the president have been "talking about Iraq for months," a formulation consistent with the possibility that they've been talking for months about fall being the right time to ratchet up public discussion.
- A mere two months ago inquiries about Bush's past business practices, corporate scandals, the sagging economy and stock markets dominated the front page. A little Iraq invasion talk and - presto! - they're all gone, creating the "positive issue environment" Rove wanted. Every top media outlet has redirected manpower and managerial attention to the question of Iraq. It's worth noting how easy it is for a president to transform the political/media culture by invoking national security.
- Lawmakers coming out of classified briefings in recent days say they don't understand Bush's urgency. According to the Washington Post, a senior GOP leader opined that if "top secret" information was not enough to sway Democrats and some Republicans here, "Bush would have trouble winning over a skeptical international audience."
Let me offer the obvious but sincere caveats. It may well be that the cumulative threat of Saddam's activities require action, even invasion, very soon. The president's warning that this new era will require acts of preemption rings reasonable to anyone (including me) who thought Israel entirely justified in taking out Iraq's nuclear plant two decades ago.
But a cynic might imagine a different scenario - one that should at least be on the table as events unfold. In this Stage Manage Events For Political Purposes Scenario, we'd see Bush and the GOP ride the benefit of today's calculated Iraq focus between now and November. Then, in a show of eminent reasonableness, Bush would agree to work first through the United Nations, which would authorize a resumption of inspections. Bush would allow these inspections a year to see whether they work, as any patient global statesman would.
Then, just as the presidential campaign heats up in 2004, something will happen, and Bush will say that time has run out, that inspections have proven fruitless, that the danger is even closer than we thought, and the nation cannot wait. Another "positive issue environment," in other words, that would shift attention from the administration's budget deficits, economic mismanagement and bankrupt domestic agenda.
Again, let me be clear because I know some people will misread this: It may be an entirely sound judgment that we need to act against Iraq because of imminent threats to U.S. security. Like every patriot, I'm ready if this is the case. I respect the experience of Messrs. Cheney, Powell and Rumsfeld and don't doubt their sense of duty and responsibility.
And yet - is it just me? - I can't shake the suspicion that we'll be doing this again in 2004, when the real invasion is close at hand as Bush's reelection campaign looms. And Dick Cheney will again be calling questions of timing "reprehensible."
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Note to editors: Matt Miller would greatly appreciate it if you would consider running his e-mail address, mattino@worldnet.att.net, at the bottom of his column. Columnist Matt Miller is a senior fellow at Occidental College in Los Angeles and host of "Left, Right & Center" on KCRW-FM in Los Angeles.
© 2002 MATTHEW MILLER
DISTRIBUTED BY TRIBUNE MEDIA SERVICES, INC.
Recently, I've had the chance to travel around the country and do some call-in radio shows, during which the question of Iraq has come up often. And here's what I can report from a totally unscientific sample: Don't believe the polls that a majority of Americans favor a military strike against Iraq. It's just not true.
It's also not true that the public is solidly against taking on Saddam Hussein. What is true is that most Americans are perplexed. The most oft-asked question I heard was some variation of: "How come all of a sudden we have to launch a war against Saddam? I realize that he's thumbed his nose at the U.N., and he has dangerous weapons, but he's never threatened us, and, if he does, couldn't we just vaporize him? What worries me are Osama and the terrorists still out there."
That's where I think most Americans are at. Deep down they believe that Saddam is "deterrable." That is, he does not threaten the U.S. and he never has, because he has been deterred the way Russia, China and North Korea have been. He knows that if he even hints at threatening us, we will destroy him. Saddam has always been homicidal, not suicidal. Indeed, he has spent a lifetime perfecting the art of survival - because he loves life more than he hates us.
No, what worries Americans are not the deterrables like Saddam. What worries them are the "undeterrables" - the kind of young Arab-Muslim men who hit us on 9/11, and are still lurking. Americans would pay virtually any price to eliminate the threat from the undeterrables - the terrorists who hate us more than they love their own lives, and therefore cannot be deterred.
I share this view, which is why I think the Iraq debate is upside down. Most strategists insist that the reason we must go into Iraq - and the only reason - is to get rid of its weapons of mass destruction, not regime change and democracy building. I disagree.
I think the chances of Saddam being willing, or able, to use a weapon of mass destruction against us are being exaggerated. What terrifies me is the prospect of another 9/11 - in my mall, in my airport or in my downtown - triggered by angry young Muslims, motivated by some pseudo-religious radicalism cooked up in a mosque in Saudi Arabia, Egypt or Pakistan. And I believe that the only way to begin defusing that threat is by changing the context in which these young men grow up - namely all the Arab-Muslim states that are failing at modernity and have become an engine for producing undeterrables.
So I am for invading Iraq only if we think that doing so can bring about regime change and democratization. Because what the Arab world desperately needs is a model that works - a progressive Arab regime that by its sheer existence would create pressure and inspiration for gradual democratization and modernization around the region.
I have no illusions about how difficult it would be to democratize a fractious Iraq. It would be a huge, long, costly task - if it is doable at all, and I am not embarrassed to say that I don't know if it is. All I know is that it's the most important task worth doing and worth debating. Because only by helping the Arabs gradually change their context - a context now dominated by anti-democratic regimes and anti-modernist religious leaders and educators - are we going to break the engine that is producing one generation after another of undeterrables.
These undeterrables are young men who are full of rage, because they are raised with a view of Islam as the most perfect form of monotheism, but they look around their home countries and see widespread poverty, ignorance and repression. And they are humiliated by it, humiliated by the contrast with the West and how it makes them feel, and it is this humiliation - this poverty of dignity - that drives them to suicidal revenge. The quest for dignity is a powerful force in human relations.
Closing that dignity gap is a decades-long project. We can help, but it can succeed only if people there have the will. But maybe that's what we're starting to see. Look at how Palestinian legislators just voted no confidence in Arafat; look at how some courageous Arab thinkers produced an Arab Human Development Report, which declared that the Arab-Muslim world was backward because of its deficits of freedom, modern education and women's empowerment.
If we don't find some way to help these countries reverse these deficits now - while access to smaller and smaller nuclear weapons is still limited - their young, angry undeterrables will blow us up long before Saddam ever does.
There are a lot of folks who can't understand how we came to have an oil shortage here in the USA.
Well, there's a very simple answer. Nobody bothered to check the oil!! We just didn't know we were getting low. The reason for this is purely geographical. All the oil is in Oklahoma, Texas, Louisiana Wyoming, etc.
... All the dipsticks are in Washington, DC