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David Horovitz: A Despicable Failure of International Will
David Horovitz
He has used every trick in the book to rebuild and improve his array of illegal weaponry while preventing the inspectors from achieving the critical tasks they were assigned in the wake of the Gulf War: to receive full disclosure from Iraq about this weaponry and its abilities to manufacture more, to verify such disclosure, and to "render harmless" all prohibited weapons and material.
Saddam has consistently lied about his non-conventional arms, con-cealed them, and barred inspectors from weapons sites. Iraqi officials have laughingly shown inspectors around factories quite blatantly emptied in advance of their visits. By manipulating international players, he has managed to subvert the entire inspection process, obtaining prolonged periods when he was subject to no monitoring whatsoever, and thus free to rearm without interruption.
His regime has invented the most ludicrous excuses to evade a reckoning. In a memorable example that no scriptwriter would have dared dream up, Iraqi officials explained to UNSCOM inspectors that critical documents were unavailable because "the wicked girlfriend of one of our workers" had torn them up. In another case, the Iraqis claimed a U.N.-installed video camera, monitoring activity in a chemical plant, had failed because "a wandering psychopath cut some wires."
Yet despite the evasion efforts -- which extended to rushing trucks out of the back gates of installations as U.N. teams were being stalled at the front -- the inspectors did establish unequivocally that Saddam had loaded the nerve gas VX, one of the most toxic substances ever made, into Scud missile warheads -- a single one of which, successfully activated
above a city, would have dispersed enough poison to
kill up to a million people. And tens of thousands of "chemical munitions" that Iraq is known to have manufactured before the Gulf War remain unaccounted for, according to the former chairman of UNSCOM, Australian diplomat Richard Butler.
The inspectors never extracted credible disclosure from Saddam about his biological weapons program. But Iraq has admitted that, at the start of the Gulf War, it had 100 aircraft bombs loaded with botulinus toxin and 50 with anthrax, and 13 Scud warheads loaded with botulinus toxin (a single one of which, experts say, could cause devastation hundreds of times worse than Hiroshima if delivered effectively) and 10 with anthrax. (It also had 30 chemical warheads for Scuds, mainly filled with sarin.) Moreover in 1997, Tariq Aziz, Saddam�s vice president, acknowledged to
Butler that Iraq maintained biological weaponry, developed specifically for use against the "Zionist entity."
Damningly, Saddam has managed this consistent feat of international defiance thanks to the na�vet� of U.N. Secretary General Kofi Annan and the complicity of three of the five permanent members of the Security Council -- China, France and Russia.
Out of a laudable concern for the ordinary Iraqis whose lives have been so affected by the U.N. sanctions, Annan has frequently attempted to water down the requirements of full disclosure and full dismantling. Sadly, he has always missed the central point: the sanctions would have ended long ago, and relief would have been obtained for suffering Iraqis, had Saddam simply complied with the U.N.�s requirements.
China, France and Russia have favored the shabbiest of self-interests at the expense of international cohesion and resilience. France has pressed for a more lenient approach by the inspectors, among other despicable reasons, because of its desire to implement lucrative fuel contracts with an Iraq liberated from sanctions. From the very start of the inspection regime, Russia reprehensibly sought to obtain an all clear for Saddam so that it might boost its prestige in a region where America is loathed and, most specifically, recoup an $8-billion Iraqi debt for military equipment.
According to the unmelodramatic Butler -- more credible a source than his publicity-seeking former employee, Scott Ritter, whose undermining of UNSCOM is such manna for Iraqi prop-aganda -- the former Russian foreign minister, Yevgeny Primakov, took payoffs from Baghdad. Russian officials have even helped Iraq draft the text of its responses to the Security Council.
Shortly before the Security Council�s November 8 ultimatum to Saddam, President Bush declared that the "civilized world" was now mounting a concerted effort to disarm him. Such rhetoric aside, the fact is that as much as the U.N. is now giving Saddam one more last chance, Bush is doing the same for the Security Council. When Saddam fails to fully comply with the ultimatum, it seems certain that the U.S., backed firmly by the U.K., will resort to military measures to achieve what the inspectors have not been allowed to. And the U.S. will act with or without the support of the rest of the pusillanimous international community.
We learned after 1991 that Saddam chose not to use his nonconventional warheads against the coalition forces because of the last Bush Administration�s icy threat to exact "vengeance," presumably nuclear. The same deterrent threat presumably dissuaded him from using them against Israel, It is a dreadful indictment of the international community, and its will to counter the gravest threat to civilization, that 11 years later Saddam still possesses such weaponry, and will very probably try to use it if, as seems inevitable, he believes his regime is nearing its end. And the country that could pay the price for this dilution of international will is, of course, Israel.
Israeli defense officials express high confidence in the capabilities of the Arrow missile defense system. We may have cause to pray that their confidence, in that system and the rest of our defensive weaponry, is well founded. As Butler noted on the concluding page of "The Greatest Threat," his terrifying account of UNSCOM�s failed mission, "if a single missile loaded with nerve gas was to hit Tel Aviv, the world will never be the same."
December 2, 2002
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