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US Policy after Desert Fox
Phyllis Bennis
Contribution to the ADC (Arab-American Anti-Discrimination Committee) Foreign Policy Symposium 'What Next: Towards a Responsible Iraq Policy'
29 December 1998
I think that the recent US military strikes against Iraq represent an abandonment of a number of earlier components of US strategy in the region. It means an abandonment of dual containment (of Iraq and Iran), which has guided US strategy - to its detriment, I would say - for some years. It represents an abandonment of disarmament as both a reality, in the form of UNSCOM - a weak, but, nonetheless, functioning reality - and as a pretense.
Abandoning Disarmament
It means abandoning even the claim that disarmament underlies current US policy, and - perhaps most dangerously - I think that it represents an abandonment of the United Nations and multilateralism in US policymaking on the question of Iraq, in favor of a world assertion, on the part of the US, that it, and it alone - with the British running along behind to keep up... but, essentially, a unilateral kind of decision-making, where NATO, if anything, becomes the only necessary international credential for this kind of military action.
Instead of this earlier policy, what we see is a new, aggressively unilateral effort to use military force and even tightened economic sanctions aimed specifically not at containment, but at overthrowing the leadership of the regime in Iraq... I think this is an important distinction, because I don't think that US policymakers actually want to overturn the entire regime. This is, after all, the same regime that had such close ties
with the US throughout the 1970s and 1980s. It was led then by Saddam Hussein as well. Like in other countries - Panama comes to mind - when an allied dictator, who the US once endorses, becomes unaccountable to the US, the US turns on that dictator and decides that suddenly this is a dictator who must be removed. But I don't think that the US is seriously interested anymore now than it was in 1990-91 in a real, popular and democratic uprising in Iraq, a real transformation of the nature of the Iraqi state.
I think there is an urgent need [by US policy makers], not least because of the level of political capital that has been invested in this effort, to get Saddam Hussein personally out of the way. That may come by assassination, through missiles - if they're lucky - they haven't been in the efforts that have been used so far. They got his sister's house. They didn't get him, similar to the situation we saw in 1983 in Libya, when the US went after Qaddafi with missiles. Didn't get Qaddafi. Did get his three-year-old daughter. This is not likely to work, nor are the presumably increasing efforts by the CIA and other covert operations to carry out efforts to overthrow Saddam Hussein, in my view, likely to have much impact on actual US policy or on developments on the ground in the country.
So, on the one hand, we have a specifically unilaterally-driven effort to use military force aimed at overturning the regime. The economic sanctions, if anything, will, I'm afraid, become harsher, rather than [being recognized as] a failed instrument, the kind of blunt instrument that can only affect civilian populations, while the military regime remains privileged from the worst ravages of those sanctions. And where disarmament,
essentially, plays no role in US strategy, and what we are told is we have no option.
This is the Clinton administration's line. This is the Pentagon's line. This is the line of many in Congress. We have no option but to use military force. This is the only language that the Iraqi government understands. This is our only option.
Non-military Options
In fact, there are a number of options that have never been taken seriously. I think, first, we have to start with the given that economic sanctions have to come to an end. They have had, as we have seen, little impact on the government in Iraq. They have, if anything, made worse the human rights violations committed by the Iraqi regime, in the context of civil and political rights being denied to its population, while the population now faces the added and far more physically debilitating human rights violations imposed by the US-engineered sanctions, in the name of the UN, those being the economic and social rights, the other human rights, which are so rarely spoken of in this country.
I think we have to reclaun certain aspects of UN policy. First, we have to claim for the United Nations the legitimacy of Iraq policy and decision-making on Iraq, and that means looking at the full text of what the UN resolutions actually call for. We hear a great deal in this country about Resolution 687, and we hear mostly about Article 22, which outlines the six things that Iraq has to do - all having to do with weapons of mass
destruction - in order to get economic oil sanctions lifted.
Resolution 687, Article 14
We don't hear very much about the preamble, and we don't hear very much about Article 14, both of which talk about the need to establish weapons-of-mass-destruction-free zones, and, specifically, a nuclear-weapons free zone throughout the Middle East. That's not me talking. That's not the Arab group at the United Nations talking. That's the Security Council! That's Resolution 687 that says explicitly that efforts to disarm Iraq must be shaped by the effort towards regional disarmament.
And yet, we see... the permanent members of the Security Council, led by the United States, by an enormous - an enormous - lead, providing increasing amounts of weapons to all the states in the region. [This is done] without taking into account Israel's nuclear arsenal, Syria's chemical weapons, Iran's missiles, Turkey's and Saudi Arabia's missiles and weapons of virtually every description that get more advanced and broader in their reach every year.
So instead of abiding by the conditions of Resolution 687 that says that Iraqi disarmament must take place in a regional framework, what we see is a US effort to say only Iraq should be subject to disarmament efforts...
One of the demands that I think we must make today - when UNSCOM is not on the ground in Iraq, when the UNSCOM inspectors themselves are - I don't know what they do - sitting around watching CNN, perhaps, waiting to go back or waiting for whatever they're waiting for - waiting for Godot, perhaps - that they must be allowed to do something they have never been allowed to do before, and that is to make public the documents they have found in Iraq that identify the sources of Iraq's weapons systems... By Security Council mandate UNSCOM has been prohibited from making that public. The US and its allies on the Council were afraid. They were afraid of being embarrassed, at being found out at being the source of this [weapons trade].
Why do we think US policymakers were so afraid of what Iraq might have left after the Gulf War in 1991? Well, I would assert it wasn't least because the US specifically knew exactly what US companies had provided throughout the 1980s - in the '70s also, but more, relatively, in the 1980s - including after the infamous use by the Iraqi regime of chemical weapons against Kurdish civilians and Iranian troops.
Seed Stock for Biological Weapons
Right outside of Washington [is] ... the American Type Culture Collection Company of Rockville, Maryland, that all through the 1980s provided to the Iraqi regime - to the Iraqi military, in fact - the seed stock for producing biological weapons; for producing botulism, anthrax, ecoli - and those are the ones I can pronounce. (I don't try and follow the rest of them.) It's a horrifying list; and they were not a rogue company. They weren't violating any US law. This was not part of a black-market operation. They were licensed by the Commerce Department.
Now, we understand that there were some in the Pentagon that were uneasy about this, that felt this was not such a great idea, that the State Department was a little ambivalent. I was informed - reminded, in no uncertain terms - by Congressman Tom Lantos from California that there were voices in Congress saying this should not go forward; but what a surprise, commerce trumped disarmament once again. Market democracy triumphs, and the order went out, the license was given.
UNSCOM Looking for Documents
We know from the last year or more UNSCOM has been concentrating not on weapons themselves - because very little is left - but on documents, on trying to find documents that would give indications about what is the potential for future capability in Iraq and what are the past sources of lraq's weapons, but they have been prohibited from making [the findings] public. It seems to me that this has to be on top of the agenda for public calls for a policy change. The US [should be asked] to take the lead in the Security Council - and we know that when the US leads in the Security Council it generally gets its way - to make those documents public.
Relevant Resolutions
We must also stop allowing the Clinton administration and others to make the claim that in carrying out unilateral, or, in this case, bilateral - barely bilateral - military strikes against Iraq it is somehow following or abiding by UN resolutions it's a lie. It's absolutely not true.
There are two [resolutions] that are usually claimed. Resolution 678, which authorized the use of force [was] passed on November 29, 1990 - and we can talk at another tiine about the kinds of bribes and threats that were required to get that passed, but, nonetheless, it did pass. It did authorize the use of force, for a very specific purpose. It authorized the use of force to expel Iraqi troops from Kuwait, and therefore, expired on the day that the last Iraqi troop crossed the border. That happened a long time ago. There are no longer Iraqi troops in Kuwait.
The other resolution that US officials often talk about is Resolution 1154, which was passed last March 2 [1998], after the February dust-up that led to an almost US strike. In that one, Ambassador Bill Richardson had succeeded, andwas very proud of the fact that he had succeeded in getting the Security Council to include the language that said there should be severest consequences in the event of a future Iraqi action, and it is certainly arguable, from the Butler report, that there have been certain discrete violations by Iraq. Butler's report ... says specifically that those violations take place in a broad context of what he calls 'majority inspections taking place with Iraqi cooperation'. Those are Butler's words, not mine.
Nonetheless, there have been some violations, but the UN Resolution makes very clear to avoid what the Russian Ambassador called 'automaticity'. He made up this new word to define what the Security Council was not agreeing to: that the Resolution somehow gives the US the automatic right to use military force. It says explicitly that the Security Council remains in control of the issue and that any decision about future violations - in deciding what are the violations, has there been a violation and what should be the international response to the violation, rests with the Security Council. So when anyone in Washington says that that Resolution somehow justifies future military strikes, its not true.
Back to the Question of Disarmament
I think, finally, we have to come back to the question of disarmament. Disarmament, in this arms-glutted region, is a crucial priority, and I think that we have the means to begin targeting the suppliers. In his speech right here in the Press Club last week, Sandy Berger ... said, We can watch Iraq's external procurement activity.
Well, that's fine, but let's go beyond that. Let's stop Iraq's procurement activity. Let's stop the procurement activity throughout the entire Middle East and identify publicly which are the companies that are providing the basic seed stock for chemical weapons, for biological weapons, for nuclear technology throughout that region. Until then, I think that the US is poorly placed to claim the legitimate right to determine, as the largest arms dealer in the region, the right to determine who should and should not have the right to get other weapons.
Copyright 1998 Phyllis Bennis
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