***please distribute freely***
The following article was run on the front page of the NY Times,
contains several inaccuracies, and lends support to an increased
bombing campaign against Iraq this Fall. Please write a letter to the
Times in opposition of this policy, and of continued bombings and
sanctions against the Iraqi people.
email letters to:
[EMAIL PROTECTED]
Or snailmail to:
Letters to the Editor
The New York Times
229 West 43rd Street
New York, NY 10036
------------------------
U.N. Readies Team to Check Weapons Held by the Iraqis
By BARBARA CROSSETTE and STEVEN LEE MYERS
August 22, 2000, The New York Times, pg. A1
The United Nations has assembled a new team of arms inspectors that
is ready to enter Iraq within weeks, raising the prospect of another
confrontation with President Saddam Hussein over his weapons
programs.
The creation of the new team comes more than two years after Mr.
Hussein halted cooperation with a previous group of inspectors,
provoking a diplomatic crisis that culminated in four nights of
American and British airstrikes in December 1998.
Iraq has repeatedly said it will not cooperate with the new weapons
commission, which the Security Council ordered nine months ago in the
hope that it would resolve some objections the Iraqis, as well as the
Russians and French, had about the previous commission.
One of the chief Iraqi complaints about the previous commission,
headed by Richard Butler, an Australian arms control expert, was that
there were too many inspectors from the United States and Britain,
who the Iraqis asserted were really spies.
The new team, with members from 19 countries, is meant to be more
accountable to the United Nations secretary general, Kofi Annan. All
the members work directly for the United Nations, not for their own
countries as before.
This week, Hans Blix, the leader of the new team, is to discuss the
need for access to Iraq with a panel of international weapons experts
who serve as the commission's directors. By Sept. 1 he is expected to
report to the Security Council that the inspectors are ready to begin
work and, barring a change in Iraq's position, to report that the
Iraqis continued to reject new inspections.
But it remains far from clear what the United States or other members
of the Security Council will do if Iraq refuses to cooperate.
It is also not clear how forcefully the council will push the new
inspections, especially since its 15 members are sharply divided over
Iraq and the broad economic sanctions imposed on it. Their positions
are not likely to become clear until debates in the council begin
sometime in September.
The sanctions were imposed after Iraq invaded Kuwait in 1990. They
are to remain in place until Iraq is certified as free of prohibited
weapons -- chemical, biological and nuclear arms as well as long-
range missiles. Last December the Security Council said it would
suspend the sanctions if Iraq cooperated with the new team of arms
inspectors.
Refusal by Mr. Hussein would leave the council no alternative to
keeping the sanctions in place. It is unlikely that the council would
call for the use of force, but in previous confrontations the United
States and Britain have argued that existing resolutions authorize
military action.
A confrontation would focus new attention on the Clinton
administration's policy toward Iraq in the middle of the presidential
election. That policy has come under sharp attack from Republicans
and even some Democrats in Washington, who complain that President
Clinton has not acted forcefully enough to force Mr. Hussein's
government to accept the inspections.
If Mr. Hussein refuses to cooperate, the administration will be under
political pressure to act forcefully. If the Iraqi leader reverses
course, Mr. Clinton's successor could be confronted with the
politically difficult decision of whether to go along with a
suspension of sanctions.
Diplomats and other officials at the United Nations said they
believed that during this year's election campaign, the Clinton
administration is not likely to press for strong action, even if Iraq
remains defiant.
But a senior administration official said the Iraqis or anyone else
would be foolish to assume that. Although the administration has not
indicated how it would answer new Iraqi defiance, the official
refused to rule out the possibility of an "October surprise" of
American military action at the height of a campaign, should the
Iraqis provoke it.
"They will be making a severe mistake if they think an election
campaign will affect how we carry out our foreign policy," the
official said.
In Washington, administration officials said they would insist that
Iraq comply with the resolution that created Dr. Blix's team or face
an indefinite extension of sanctions.
"It's a mandatory resolution," Thomas R. Pickering, an under
secretary of state, said in a telephone interview. "If the Iraqis
don't comply, the sanctions will stay in place."
Under the resolution that created Dr. Blix's team, those sanctions
can be suspended six months after the Iraqis fulfill a list of key
requirements set by the inspectors and, ultimately, be lifted once
the inspectors conclude that Iraq has come clean and dismantled its
prohibited weapons programs.
The previous commission had a more comprehensive standard for
declaring Iraq free of weapons before sanctions could be lifted,
offering no interim steps like a suspension.
The new inspection organization is officially known as the United
Nations Monitoring, Verification and Inspection Commission. Dr. Blix,
a Swedish arms control expert, previously served as director general
of the International Atomic Energy Agency in Vienna.
This month, he completed recruiting and training the 44 inspectors
from countries friendly and not so friendly to the Iraqis.
Dr. Blix said his first step would be to find out what had happened
to several hundred sites inspected by the last commission in 1998, a
process that could take at least several months.
The Iraqis have said they believe that the United States would never
agree to a suspension of sanctions but would instead find another
reason to keep them in place, making cooperation, in their view,
fruitless.
Administration officials have long argued that resuming inspections
in Iraq -- rather than resorting to force -- is the most effective
way to combat Mr. Hussein's efforts to hold on to nuclear, chemical
or biological weapons, as well as long-range missiles that could
deliver them.
But within the Pentagon and the American intelligence agencies, there
is growing concern that Mr. Hussein has used the prolonged absence of
inspectors to continue those efforts. The Central Intelligence Agency
sent a report to Congress this month warning that Iraq had already
rebuilt missile and chemical weapons factories since the airstrikes
in 1998.
The issue of inspections is only one area in which the international
standoff with Mr. Hussein appears headed for a new period of
confrontation, a decade after Iraq's invasion of Kuwait led to the
Persian Gulf war.
In recent weeks Mr. Hussein has taken steps to ease his diplomatic
isolation, receiving a visit from President Hugo Ch�vez of
Venezuela.
A thriving black market is reportedly eroding the sanctions, while
Russia, supported by China, is challenging the American and British
patrols of the "no flight" zones in northern and southern Iraq, which
were established to protect Kurds and Shiite Muslims from Mr.
Hussein's government.
In the face of these challenges, diplomats at the United Nations and
even some American officials say, the administration's policy has
been left to drift. The American ambassador to the United Nations,
Richard C. Holbrooke, has not involved himself in the issue. Mr.
Holbrooke says he has been too busy on other matters.
"There's no doubt things are on autopilot," said one official in
Washington. "And it might be an autopilot with a 10-degree downward
tilt."
Several diplomats, including some from nations on the Security
Council, said the administration had undermined its influence by
openly calling for the removal of Mr. Hussein from power. That has
given the Iraqis an excuse for dismissing the council's pledge to
suspend sanctions if Mr. Hussein cooperates with new inspectors, the
diplomats said.
The administration may find itself even further isolated on the
council, since three countries supportive of the United States and
Britain -- Argentina, Canada and the Netherlands -- will be among the
five countries relinquishing their rotating council seats.
Administration officials say they have succeeded in containing Iraq
by enforcing the sanctions and continuing to enforce the "no flight"
zones despite repeated Iraqi provocations that have resulted in
hundreds of limited retaliatory airstrikes since 1998.
When American and British warplanes and missiles launched a much
larger attack 20 months ago, administration officials acknowledged
that the attack would make it difficult to resume weapons
inspections. But they argued that with Mr. Hussein refusing to
cooperate, there was no other way to prevent Iraq from acquiring
chemical or biological weapons.
"Mark my words," President Clinton said of Mr. Hussein at the time,
"he will develop weapons of mass destruction. He will deploy them,
and he will use them. Because we're acting today, it is less likely
that we will face these dangers in the future."
At the time, Secretary of Defense William S. Cohen and others also
warned that the United States was prepared to use force again if
there was evidence that Iraq had resumed its chemical or biological
weapons programs -- or if Iraq threatened its neighbors or attacked
the Kurds in the north.
James M. Bodner, the principal deputy under secretary of defense for
policy and a longtime aide to Mr. Cohen, said in an interview that
the United States remained ready to respond if Iraq crossed any of
those "red lines."
Administration officials said they had no concrete evidence that Iraq
had restarted its weapons programs. But in addition to repairing the
damage done in 1998, Iraq has resumed testing its shorter-range
missiles. Officials fear that those tests, while not prohibited under
the United Nations resolutions, have allowed Iraq to perfect longer-
range missiles.
Despite that, the administration's warnings about Iraq's weapons have
lost much of their urgency. In the fall of 1997, Mr. Cohen held up a
bag of sugar on television and ominously warned that an equivalent
amount of anthrax bacteria, which Iraq is believed to possess, could
destroy half the population of Washington.
In recent months administration officials have made no such dire
warnings, even though there have been no effective inspections in two
years. At the same time, Americans have done little publicly to press
Dr. Blix to accelerate the formation of his inspection team, which
has proceeded slowly.
He began interviewing weapons experts in May, and those selected have
completed a four-week training program. Dr. Blix said there are signs
that Iraq is thinking over its next moves.
The Iraqis recently presented a legalistic analysis of the new
inspection plan to governments of Islamic nations meeting in Kuala
Lumpur, Malaysia. The memorandum suggests that the Iraqis still
nurture hopes that the resolution creating the inspection commission
can be rewritten. Russia has already called for changes, but United
Nations and American officials have adamantly ruled that out.
Some diplomats say that Iraq may have calculated that it can bide its
time, hoping for a better deal. Others say Mr. Hussein will stop
short of any actions that would invite American retaliation, while
trying to build support for an unconditional lifting of the
sanctions.
"Right now, he thinks things are going his way," a Defense Department
official said. "He's outlasted the Clinton administration. He
outlasted the Bush administration. I think his perception is he can
outlast them all."
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