Excerpted
from a new FPIF Policy Report,
posted in its entirety at
www.fpif.org/papers/iraq2.html
he United States appears to be barging ahead with plans to engage in a
large-scale military operation against Iraq to overthrow the regime of Saddam Hussein. In the international community, however, serious questions are being
raised regarding its legality, its justification, its political implications, and the costs of the war itself.
Such an invasion would constitute an important precedent, being the first test of the new doctrine articulated by President George W. Bush of "preemption," which declares that the United States has the right to invade sovereign countries and overthrow their governments if they are seen as hostile to U.S. interests. All previous large-scale interventions by American forces abroad have been rationalized--albeit not always convincingly to many observers--on the principle of collective self-defense, such as through regional organizations like the South East Asia Treaty Organization (SEATO) or the Organization of American States (OAS). To invade Iraq would constitute an unprecedented repudiation of the international legal conventions that such American presidents as Woodrow Wilson, Franklin Roosevelt, Harry Truman, and Dwight Eisenhower helped create in order to build a safer world.
This policy report attempts to encourage popular debate by raising a number of concerns that challenge some of the key rationales and assumptions behind such a military action. One of the seven fallacies is that there is no proof that Iraq is developing weapons of mass destruction.
Despite speculation--particularly by those who seek an excuse to invade Iraq--of possible ongoing Iraqi efforts to procure weapons of mass destruction, no one has been able to put forward evidence that the Iraqis are actually doing so, though they have certainly done so in the past. The dilemma facing the international community is that no one knows what, if anything, the Iraqis are currently doing.
In the aftermath of the 1991 Gulf War and the subsequent inspections regimen, virtually all Iraq's stockpile of weapons of mass destruction, delivery systems, and capability of producing such weapons were destroyed. Inspectors with the United Nations Special Commission (UNSCOM) were withdrawn from Iraq in late 1998 before their job was complete, however, under orders by President Clinton prior to a heavy four-day U.S. bombing campaign. The Iraqi government has not yet allowed them to return. Prior to that time, UNSCOM reportedly oversaw the destruction of 38,000 chemical weapons, 480,000 liters of live chemical weapons agents, 48 missiles, six missile launchers, 30 missile warheads modified to carry chemical or biological agents, and hundreds of pieces of related equipment with the capability to produce chemical weapons.
In its most recent report, the International Atomic Energy Agency categorically declared that Iraq no longer has a nuclear program.
In late 1997, UNSCOM Director Richard Butler reported that UNSCOM had made "significant progress" in tracking Iraq's chemical weapons program and that 817 of the 819 Soviet-supplied long-range missiles had been accounted for. A couple dozen Iraqi-made ballistic missiles remained unaccounted for, but these were of questionable caliber. Though Iraqi officials would periodically interfere with inspections, in its last three years of operation, UNSCOM was unable to detect any evidence that Iraq had been further concealing prohibited weapons.
The development of biological weapons, by contrast, is much easier to conceal, due to the small amount of space needed for their manufacture. Early UNSCOM inspections revealed evidence of the production of large amounts of biological agents, including anthrax, and charged that Iraq had vastly understated the amount of biological warfare agents it had manufactured. In response, UNSCOM set up sophisticated monitoring devices to detect chemical or biological weapons, though these devices were dismantled in reaction to the U.S. bombing campaign of December 1998.
Frightening scenarios regarding mass fatalities from a small amount of anthrax assume that the Iraqis have developed the highly sophisticated means of distributing these bioweapons by missile or aircraft. However, there are serious questions as to whether the alleged biological agents could be dispersed successfully in a manner that could harm troops or a civilian population, given the rather complicated technology required. For example, a vial of biological weapons on the tip of a missile would almost certainly either be destroyed on impact or dispersed harmlessly. To become lethal, highly concentrated amounts of anthrax spores must be inhaled and then left untreated by antibiotics until the infection is too far advanced. Similarly, the prevailing winds would have to be calculated, no rain could fall, the spray nozzles could not clog, the population would need to be unvaccinated, and everyone would need to stay around the area targeted for attack.
Although Iraq's potential for developing weapons of mass destruction should not be totally discounted, Saddam Hussein's refusal to allow UN inspectors to return and his lack of full cooperation prior to their departure do not necessarily mean he is hiding something, as President Bush alleges. More likely, the Iraqi opposition to the inspections program is based on Washington's abuse of UNSCOM for intelligence gathering operations and represents a desperate effort by Saddam Hussein to increase his standing with Arab nationalists by defying Western efforts to intrude on Iraqi sovereignty. Indeed, the Iraqi defiance of the inspections regime may be designed to provoke a reaction by the United States in order to capitalize on widespread Arab resentment over Washington's double standard of objecting to an Arab country procuring weapons of mass destruction while tolerating Israel's nuclear arsenal.
A far more likely scenario for an Iraqi distribution of biological agents would be through Iraqi agents smuggling them clandestinely into targeted countries. This is what led to some initial speculation, now considered very doubtful, that the Iraqis were behind the anthrax mail attacks during the fall of 2001. To prevent such a scenario requires aggressive counterintelligence efforts by the United States and other potentially targeted nations, but this type of terrorism is not likely to be prevented by an invasion. Indeed, a U.S. invasion could conceivably encourage rogue elements of Iraqi intelligence or an allied terrorist group to engage in an anthrax attack as an act of revenge for the heavy Arab casualties resulting from U.S. bombing. One of the frightening things about biological weapons production is the mobility of operations. A "regime change" engineered by the U.S. would not necessarily ensure the closure of labs producing such weapons, since they could easily be relocated elsewhere or even continue to operate clandestinely in Iraq.
U.S. officials have admitted that there is no evidence that Iraq has resumed its nuclear, chemical, or biological weapons programs.
Finally, Saddam Hussein has demonstrated that he cares first and foremost about his own survival. He presumably recognizes that any effort to use weapons of mass destruction would inevitably lead to his own destruction. This is why he did not use them during the Gulf War. In the event of a U.S. invasion, seeing his overthrow as imminent, and with nothing to lose, this logic of self-preservation would no longer be operative. Instead, such an invasion would dramatically increase the likelihood of his ordering the use of any weapons of mass destruction he may have retained.
Saddam Hussein's leadership style has always been that of direct control; his distrust of subordinates (bordering on paranoia) is one of the things that has helped him survive. It is extremely unlikely that he would go to the risk and expense of developing weapons of mass destruction only to pass them on to some group of terrorists. If he does have such weapons at his disposal, they would be for him and nobody else. In the chaos of a U.S. invasion and its aftermath, however, the chances of such weapons being smuggled out of the country into the hands of terrorists would increase. Currently these weapons, if they do exist, are under the control of a highly centralized government unlikely to provoke an attack by passing on the weapons to terrorist groups.
The serious moral, legal, political, and strategic problems with a possible U.S. invasion of Iraq require that the American public become engaged in the debate over the wisdom of such a dramatic course of action. What is at stake is not just the lives of thousands of Iraqi and American soldiers and thousands more Iraqi civilians but also the international legal framework established in the aftermath of World War II. Despite its failings, this multilateral framework of collective security has resulted in far greater international stability and far less intergovernmental conflict than would otherwise have been the case.
During the 2000 election campaign, George W. Bush scored well among voters by calling for greater "humility" in U.S. foreign policy, decrying the overextension of U.S. military force, and criticizing the idea that the U.S. armed forces should be engaged in such practices as "nation-building" in unstable areas. As president, Bush has made a remarkable reversal of this popular position and appears eager to embark on perhaps the most reckless foreign military campaign in U.S. history.
(Professor
at the University of San Francisco
and Middle East analyst at Foreign Policy in
Focus)
(From FPIF)