Abstract
The historic U.N. mission to disarm Saddam Hussein's weapons of mass destruction remains at a stalemate. U.N. inspectors left Iraq two years ago, as U.S. and British bombs were about to fall, and they have not returned since. The Security Council has created a new United Nations Monitoring, Verification, and Inspection Commission to carry on the work of the U.N. Special Commission (unscom), but Iraq has refused to accept the new commission. As the United Nations struggles to complete its disarmament mandate in Iraq, it may be helpful to reflect on the lessons the unscom experience may hold for future disarmament efforts in Iraq and elsewhere.
When Saddam Hussein ended all cooperation with unscom in December 1998, Baghdad was finally free to pursue its military ambitions without international interference. According to former unscom chairman Richard Butler, the result—“the removal of all disarmament inspections and the shutdown of all monitoring systems”—was a triumph for Saddam Hussein and a major setback to the cause of disarmament.
Butler argues in The Greatest Threat: Iraq, Weapons of Mass Destruction, and the Crisis of Global Security that the U.N. experience in Iraq will significantly influence future disarmament efforts, and that it has a direct bearing on the goal of achieving a global regime for the elimination of nuclear weapons. If the United Nations could not certify disarmament in a relatively small and economically devastated country like Iraq, what hope is there for monitoring and enforcing a worldwide ban on nuclear weapons?
The implications of unscom's demise are disturbing, but they are not as dire as Butler suggests. The lesson of the unscom experience is not that disarmament is impossible, but that it is unlikely to be achieved solely through coercive and punitive means. The fault in Iraq was not with the process of disarmament but with the politics of the Security Council, which was held hostage by the United States. Washington refused to acknowledge that the commission was making progress and it was unwilling to reciprocate on those occasions when Iraq conceded to U.N. demands. The United States showed by its actions that it was more interested in containing Iraq militarily than it was in an effective U.N.-administered disarmament process.
Unscom and its partner agency, the International Atomic Energy Agency (iaea), made a great deal of progress in the “destruction, removal, or rendering harmless” of Iraq's nuclear, ballistic missile, chemical, and biological weapons programs. Although Iraq repeatedly tried to deceive and disrupt U.N. weapons inspections, unscom nonetheless succeeded over the years in locating and dismantling much of Iraq's weapons capability.
In 1998 the iaea could certify that “Iraq has satisfactorily completed … its full final and complete declaration of its clandestine nuclear program.” Unscom likewise reported that “there are no indications that any weapons-usable nuclear materials remain in Iraq” and “no evidence in Iraq of prohibited materials, equipment, or activities.” Although concerns remain about gaps in the information Baghdad provided and weapons components that remain unaccounted for, most observers agree that the Iraqi nuclear threat has been effectively neutralized.
Iraq's ballistic missile programs were also largely eliminated. According to unscom reports, efforts to inspect and dismantle missile capabilities yielded “significant results.” All but two of the 819 Scud missiles known to have existed at the start of the Gulf War were accounted for, and no evidence was uncovered of any successful indigenous development or testing of prohibited long-range missiles.
Much of Iraq's chemical weapons capability was located and destroyed as well. Unscom reported “significant progress” in this area, and it was able to close and dismantle Iraq's prime chemical weapons development and production complex.
Scott Ritter, one of Butler's lead inspectors and author of his own book on the experience, Endgame, concluded in a June 2000 article in Arms Control Today that as of 1997 “Iraq had been disarmed.” According to Ritter, Iraq “no longer possessed any meaningful quantities of chemical or biological agent … and the industrial means to produce these agents had either been eliminated or were subject to stringent monitoring. The same was true of Iraq's nuclear and ballistic missile capabilities.”
Butler admits that progress was achieved. “In the chemical and missile areas,” he writes, “[Iraq's] declarations had improved and were almost full, final, and complete.”
Butler told Russian officials in Moscow in December 1998 that the final accounting of Iraq's weapons of mass destruction could be completed within six to eight weeks if Iraq cooperated. While major uncertainties remained in the area of biological weapons (which is inevitable given the dual-use character of many biological agents and equipment), by 1998 the job of disarming Iraq was nearly complete.
It is difficult to understand why unscom, in light of the progress it had made in the biological area, continued to push aggressively at the margins in an unrealistic effort to achieve final, certifiably complete disarmament. The unrelenting and increasingly hostile pursuit of this objective yielded steadily diminishing returns—both politically and in terms of actual disarmament. It also led to the erosion of political support for UNSCOM's mission and a splintering of the international coalition arrayed against Saddam Hussein.
Russia, France, and other Security Council members began to press for the completion of the commission's work and the lifting of sanctions. Sergey Lavrov, Russia's U.N. ambassador, called for closing the files in areas like nuclear weapons, with a consequent easing of some of the sanctions measures. The idea was to match the completion of various disarmament tasks to the gradual lifting of sanctions as a way of encouraging Iraqi cooperation.
France called for maintaining a vigorous arms embargo but lifting all civilian trade sanctions. The main objective, Paris argued, should be to end the confrontation with Iraq in a way that provided reasonable assurances against the development of weapons of mass destruction while encouraging the normalization of political relations. Under the French proposal, U.N. inspectors would give up the increasingly frustrating and fruitless pursuit of weapons verification inside Iraq and concentrate instead on monitoring Iraq's borders and transit points to prevent the import of weapons or military-related technology. Better to continue some form of arms monitoring without sanctions, French officials argued, than to continue sanctions without inspections.
The United States adamantly refused to consider any easing of pressure on Iraq, however, and the worst fears of the French were confirmed. Unscom was ejected and inspections came to a halt but the sanctions remained in place. The United Nations lost its ability to monitor Saddam Hussein's weapons programs, yet the suffering of the Iraqi civilian population continued.
French rollerbladers perform on the tarmac at Baghdad's Saddam International Airport on September 22. Their Paris-to-Baghdad flight was the first to break the embargo.
Throughout the U.N.'s decade-long confrontation with Iraq, Washington has maintained a relentlessly punitive and militarized policy. It has threatened or used military force frequently, including the intensive air attacks of December 1998. In the last two years, Washington has conducted regular bombing raids. Its aim is not to enforce the Gulf War cease-fire resolution and achieve Iraqi disarmament, but to remove Saddam Hussein from power—a policy President Clinton made clear in November 1997 when he declared that “sanctions will be there until the end of time, or as long as [Saddam Hussein] lasts.” Secretary of State Madeleine Albright made a similar point in a March 1997 speech at Georgetown University, asserting that the United States disagreed with the Gulf War cease-fire provision stipulating that sanctions would be lifted when Iraq complied with U.N. weapons inspections.
Given these realities, Iraq had no incentive to make concessions or to cooperate with inspectors. With no hope or expectation of reaching a political agreement, Baghdad relied instead on familiar strategies of obstruction and resistance, attempting to wear down U.N. resolve and widen the growing political differences within the Security Council.
Unscom's travails reflect the limits of what can be accomplished through coercive disarmament. The assumption underlying the mission was that intrusive weapons inspections, carried out in a highly technical and often prose-cutorial manner, could succeed in locating and dismantling all of Iraq's weapons capabilities. But the experience of the past decade casts grave doubt on this assumption. A regime determined to resist will always find ways to obstruct and impede externally imposed controls. Even a program as large as UNSCOM's, which employed as many as a thousand people and carried out hundreds of inspection missions, could not completely guarantee the elimination of all weapons capabilities. While the commission was generally successful, it could not certify with absolute certainty the unambiguous disarmament of Iraq.
If the unscom experience in Iraq demonstrates the limits of coercion, lessons from other countries show the value of incentives and political bargaining. Most of the progress toward denuclearization achieved in recent decades has resulted from negotiated agreements and voluntary decisions by sovereign political leaders. Nuclear reductions by the United States and Russia, the decisions by Ukraine, Belarus, and Kazakhstan to give up the nuclear weapons on their soil, South Africa's disavowal of the bomb, the mutual inspection agreement signed by Argentina and Brazil—these and other denuclearization decisions resulted not from externally imposed pressures but from political bargaining and internal calculations of self-interest. Inducements and conciliatory gestures have been more effective than coercive pressures in convincing regimes to denuclearize.
The most important test case for achieving disarmament is not Iraq but North Korea. In the 1994 Agreed Framework, the United States, South Korea, and Japan agreed to provide North Korea with fuel oil, less-proliferation-prone nuclear power plants, and the beginnings of diplomatic recognition. In return North Korea agreed to halt its nuclear production and reprocessing activities and to permit on-site monitoring to confirm its nuclear freeze. To date the Agreed Framework has been successful, and the North's nuclear program remains shut down.
In 1999 and 2000 the United States again resorted to incentives-based bargaining, this time to halt the testing of long-range ballistic missiles. In September 1999 the United States and North Korea announced a preliminary agreement in which Washington promised to begin lifting sanctions in exchange for Pyongyang's commitment to suspend ballistic missile tests. In June 2000, just before an historic summit between North and South Korea, Washington followed through on its pledge and officially ended many of the trade sanctions that had been in place since the Korean War. Pyongyang confirmed its commitment to refrain from ballistic missile tests and displayed unprecedented openness toward South Korea.
In North Korea, incentives-based bargaining proved successful in achieving nonproliferation and disarmament objectives. In Iraq, by contrast, the United States has employed only coercive measures. Washington has refused to consider any easing of the draconian economic sanctions that have strangled Iraq over the past decade, and it has maintained constant military pressure. The result has been confrontation and stalemate, with UNSCOM caught in the crossfire.
The demise of UNSCOM teaches that efforts to achieve disarmament in Iraq (and globally) will not succeed if they rely solely on coercive methods. Disarmament is possible, but it requires political bargaining and flexibility. It depends on the use of carrots as well as sticks. Most of all it requires the United States to respect the United Nations and the decisions of the Security Council, and to work cooperatively with other nations to achieve disarmament through political means rather than attempting to enforce it solely through military force and economic strangulation.