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COMMENTARY
December 14, 2002
Getting uglier
Farce continues to define the genre of the official United Nations effort to disarm the regime of Saddam Hussein in Iraq. In this last week the United States and the four other permanent members of the Security Council as well as the International Atomic Energy Agency in Vienna and the UNMOVIC apparatchiks in New York have had a chance to review the 12 159 pages and 529 megabytes of Iraq's "currently accurate full and complete declaration" of its illegal weapons of mass destruction. The document is a joke. At least three-quarters of it is recycled material supplied to past U.N. weapons inspectors in 1998 and before. In many sections around half of the material is about events preceding the Gulf War in 1991. The very brief update sections on current nuclear chemical and biological weaponry reduce to we don't have any with a few suggestive leads all of which will prove false and planted. No attempt is made to explain even what happened to illicit weapons stocks that U.N. inspectors had tagged before they were thrown out of Iraq more than four years ago. The blanket claim is made repeatedly that all this materiel has simply vanished together with all paperwork associated with it and no details are supplied because no one can remember. The Iraqis thus glibly regret that none of their statements are checkable. Nor does the document anticipate questions about let alone try to explain Iraq's substantial importations over the past four years of various items ranging from huge quantities of dual-use technology from especially Germany France and Russia to unknown quantities of natural uranium from Africa. Given the claim that there is no nuclear activity in Iraq whatever whether civilian or military why was the regime shopping for uranium and also by astounding coincidence for specialized aluminum tubing and a host of other products that could be used for processing it? No answer. The imposture is too ludicrous to discuss seriously and yet it must be formally reviewed and responded to with the gravity that the situation demands. As of yesterday the initial reviews were coming back from the seven institutional readers. It appears even the United Nations readers agree the document is inadequate. A certain amount of delay and confusion was caused by the last-minute attempt Hans Blix made to prevent the Americans from getting their hands on it immediately so he could study it himself at his leisure and decide what they should or shouldn't see. (Mr. Blix has no technical training and cannot read Arabic.) On Monday the Americans had to physically storm the Security Council chambers in order to procure a copy. Despite protests diplomats and bureaucrats went along with their demand when they made plain they would not be toyed with. Owing to secretarial incompetence they then seem to have walked away with the only complete copy in the building making copies for return distribution from Washington after excising some sections. (There is another complete copy in Vienna.) It took the rest of the week comparing line by line while translating the parts in Arabic to determine how completely "recycled" the document was and how circular its approximately 300 pages of new assertions. It belongs in a blue box. The accompanying computer discs could serve for office frisbee. It is surreal that trained talented people are spending time on this nonsense. Meanwhile back in Iraq the U.N. inspection team of Blix and company have continued to operate with a tiny force of technically incompetent people. A month after landing they still have less than 100 inspectors on the ground and the inspections themselves are lame publicity stunts. Over the last week it has further emerged that the U.N. sanctions bureaucracy allowed Iraq to import very large quantities -- millions of doses -- of atropine with self-injectors. The supplies may still be going through. The significance of this is that atropine is the antidote to nerve gas; it is distributed to the troops to inoculate themselves when using gas in battle. It appears the U.S. State Department knew what was happening but failed to inform the rest of the administration. For the last month the White House and Pentagon have been trying to establish what happened and if it has stopped. Consider for a moment the cynicism in this. It is like the uranium imports to a country that supposedly has no nuclear industry. Is anyone so na?ve? Atropine can be used in small doses to give emergency treatment to heart attack victims but these are large quantities much of it in raw form. The same U.N. bureaucracy and international diplomats who are maintaining the pretence that Iraq may indeed have no chemical weapons are watching this atropine pass through. In fact they know as well as the Americans that Saddam has plentiful stocks of tabun sarin soman yellow rain micotoxins mustard gas cyanide and many other chemicals -- all of which he has used before on the battlefield and against defenceless civilians. The atropine injectors are an effective admission that he will try to use them against invading U.S. soldiers. Let me spell this out. The U.N. and the powers who want to prevent the U.S. from acting in Iraq are playing a two-part game. On the one hand they proceed with these fey inspections designed not to find anything that would offer the pretext for a U.S. attack. On the other they are allowing Saddam to raise the cost of such an attack in U.S. and Iraqi civilian casualties. The calculation is that between the one trick and the other Mr. Bush will be persuaded to back down. The diplomatic game is itself getting ugly. It is degenerating at one level into a duel between President Bush and French President Jacques Chirac. The French having done everything in their power to water down the U.N.'s inspection effort are now offering daily diplomatic cover as Mr. Blix resists using even the powers he has. In response I noticed that Richard Perle an extremely articulate apologist for the "hawk" position within Pentagon and Bush administration generally (he is chairman of the Defence Policy Review Board) turned up in Paris yesterday. He was on the front page of the daily Le Figaro. In the course of a long interview he criticized President Chirac directly for his role in impeding a robust inspection effort. "We wanted a lot more inspectors. Ask Chirac why there are so few." Them's fightin' words Jack. The Russians are less and less in the way. In fact by unilaterally cancelling a $4 billion oilfield development contract with the Russian company Lukoil yesterday Saddam may have written off his old Russian ally entirely. For it was just such business interests in Iraq plus huge debts still owing from the Cold War era that gave the Russians an interest in keeping Saddam alive. A very curious if for the moment impenetrable issue is the fate of various mostly French and German multinationals that are seriously invested in Iraq or have been supplying dual-use products on a very big scale. The Bush administration deleted the names of these companies from versions of the Iraqi arms declaration that it redistributed. There will be a few American corporate names on that list too; but the "passion value" of public disclosure of the fact that for instance the same German pharmaceutical giants that outfitted Hitler's gas chambers for the Jews of Germany have outfitted Saddam's gas warheads for the Jews of Israel could be fairly high. The question I ask myself is: what is the administration doing with this information? I should think at the least it is extracting much candour from these Western firms about what they have supplied Iraq when where and how. It is the kind of information the Americans now need to know not for the purpose of getting a mundane war resolution from the Security Council which they don't really need but to save tens of thousands of American and other lives when the shooting begins (probably about six weeks from now). On the U.S. home front a more and more urgent effort to decapitate Islamist terror operations that may be directed against North America in response to war in Iraq. Three pregnant pieces of information one news from the intelligence community via what appears to have been a White House leak surfacing in the Washington Post. The U.S. believes Saddam has supplied the VX nerve agent to Al Qaeda through the Turkish underground. Two a Bush administration policy statement setting out the circumstances in which the U.S. will use pre-emptively if necessary low-yield tactical nuclear weapons to eliminate real and present dangers that cannot be reached in any other way. Three the very public information that frontline U.S. forces foreign services personnel and President Bush himself are to be vaccinated for smallpox. While the announcement was downplayed as a mere precaution and accompanied by reassurances that there was no specific tip of an imminent attack I note the executive order is for one million people to be extended later on a voluntary basis to medical professionals and emergency workers across the United States and perhaps after that to the public at large. As I've argued before there is not a war coming it is already in progress; though most of it is happening out of public view. But it must almost inevitably become quite visible in the near future. David Warren
© Ottawa Citizen
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