A Farewell to
Arms Control
By Scott Ritter
07/07/07 "Truthdig
" -- -- The organization that was at the center of the
maelstrom of the Iraqi weapons-of-mass-destruction fiasco,
responsible for bringing the world to the brink of war on no
fewer than a half-dozen occasions during the 1990s, and then
unable to prevent a war in March 2003, has departed the
global scene. It left not with a dramatic flair befitting
its former status, but rather with barely a whimper, reduced
to nothing more than a historical footnote in the grand
tragedy that has become Iraq. The United Nations Monitoring
and Verification Inspection Commission (UNMOVIC), successor
to its more accomplished parent, the United Nations Special
Commission on Iraq (UNSCOM), was found to be redundant by an
act of the United Nations Security Council, which created
its disarmament mandate over 16 years ago when it passed
Security Council Resolution 1687 in April 1991. The United
States and Great Britain had been trying to close down the
weapons inspection operation since the invasion of Iraq,
citing the demise of Saddam Hussein and the occupation of
Iraq by coalition forces as evidence that the U.N.-mandated
inspection process was now moot.
In a way, the U.S.-British position has merits, as I for
one, having led numerous inspections inside Iraq from 1991
to 1998, would have a hard time imagining the inspection
teams operating in a safe and effective manner inside the
insurgent-ridden Iraq of today. But the issue of the ongoing
relevance of U.N. weapons inspections goes far beyond a
simple matter of inspector security. What really galled the
U.S. and British officials were the inconvenient truths
about Iraq’s disarmed status, something a continued viable
inspection operation would officially register in
politically damaging fashion. The lies and distortions
concerning the threat posed by Iraqi WMD promulgated by the
governments of George W. Bush and Tony Blair have been
blasted into the background of domestic discourse in both
the United States and Britain by the ongoing cacophony of
violence exploding from occupied Iraq today, more than four
years after the invasion.
While the ongoing violence is widely seen by most rational
humans as a tragedy of enormous proportions, for those who
lied their way into this illegitimate war by fabricating a
nonexistent threat the continued surge of violence in Iraq
provides a welcome buffer from any probing into the corrupt
foundation of fabrication and deceit upon which the
precarious structure of this pre-emptive war of aggression
continues to be constructed. With the U.S. Congress,
Republicans and Democrats alike, growing increasingly
discontent with the status quo in Iraq, anything that
prompted a renewed examination of why America and its few
remaining allies are trapped in the quagmire would be most
unwelcome. This is the true reason behind the demise of
UNMOVIC-politics, nothing more or less.
The reality was, and is, that nothing could have been done
to save UNMOVIC once Bush decided to activate his unilateral
dream of regional conquest in the Middle East. Having made
international law, and by extension the Security Council of
the United Nations, irrelevant to U.S. foreign policy
objectives, there was no chance that an organ of the
Security Council-the weapons inspection process-could
continue to be seen as relevant. Truth be told, UNMOVIC was
always a red-headed stepchild in the world of disarmament
affairs. It was born of illegitimacy, derived from a
political need on the part of the United States to be seen
as promoting U.N.-mandated disarmament in Iraq even after
orchestrating the demise of UNMOVIC’s predecessor, UNSCOM.
When a major candidate for national office in the United
States, former Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney, can claim
that the reason the United States found itself in Iraq in
2003 was that the government of Saddam Hussein had barred
the UNMOVIC inspectors from entering Iraq, and not be held
accountable for his ignorance-willful or otherwise-it only
underscores the continued denigration of the U.N. inspectors
that has occurred throughout their long and labored tenure.
Republicans are not the only ones guilty of misrepresenting
the truth regarding Iraq and weapons inspections; President
Bill Clinton had the gall to claim that Saddam Hussein had
refused to cooperate with weapons inspectors in December
1998, evicting the WMD sleuths from Iraq on the eve of the
72-hour bombing campaign known as Desert Fox. Clinton knew
full well that his administration had deliberately created a
provocation against the Iraqis, seeking to inspect a Baath
Party headquarters, and once it became clear the Iraqis
would accede to this outrageous demand, it was Clinton, not
Saddam, who ordered the inspectors out of Iraq, seeking to
cover his tracks with a bombing campaign that ostensibly
targeted “WMD sites,” but which in reality was a thinly
disguised assassination attempt against the Iraqi president.
A leading candidate for the Democratic nomination for
president, Hillary Clinton, continues to uphold the fiction
of her husband’s policy in Iraq, much to the detriment of
truth.
Weapons inspectors have always found themselves aware of an
all too inconvenient reality, one that postulated the
possibility of a compliant Iraq, disarmed in accordance with
the mandate set forth by the Security Council, and as such
ready to rejoin the family of nations as intended by all
Security Council resolutions passed on the subject. It was
the unilateral policy objectives of the United States,
centered as they were on regime change in Baghdad, which
made the realization of Iraq’s disarmed status undesirable.
Truth, in the form of a verifiable report regarding the
ultimate disposition of Iraqi WMD, was the enemy of a policy
that hinged on the maintenance of the perception of Iraqi
noncompliance regarding its disarmament obligations. UNSCOM
was in a position to issue such a report by 1996, but
American intransigence prevented that from happening.
UNMOVIC could have pushed for a similar closure in early
2003, but it too found that the truth of Iraq’s WMD was not
a message anyone, least of all the United States, was
prepared to receive.
In true, the weapons inspectors were more often than not
their own worst enemy when it came to making a clear
presentation of the facts. The successful infiltration of
the weapons inspection process by American and British
officials tasked with shaping a picture of Iraqi WMD that
dovetailed with the notion of a recalcitrant and dangerous
Saddam meant that even while UNSCOM inspectors on the ground
were collecting and certifying the data that pointed toward
the truth, the inspectors’ leadership in New York was
successful in navigating the inspection vehicle in a
completely different direction: The establishment of fact
would have little bearing on a process in which proving the
negative had become the standard for any final judgment. It
was all fine and dandy for the inspectors to document what
they knew about Iraq’s WMD programs; the problem came when
they were called upon to bring to closure that which they
did not know, and given the timely insertion of fabricated
intelligence into the system by the United States and
others, there was a considerable body of unknowns from which
to draw upon when making the case that the inspectors’ work
had not yet run its course. “Proving the negative” became a
disease which infected the entire process, casting doubt
where once there existed certainty and clouding over any
logical interpretation of the available facts with shadows
and whispers of conspiracy and subterfuge.
This disease consumed UNSCOM in its final days, and went on
to infect UNMOVIC as well. Even now, with the nails all but
hammered in place on UNMOVIC’s coffin, the head of UNMOVIC,
Demetrius Perricos, continues to point to a “residue of
uncertainty” about Iraq’s disarmed status, saying there are
people, material and intellectual know-how which still need
to be monitored. One would expect the Bush administration
and its defenders to leap on any suggestion by a senior U.N.
official that Iraq was somehow not disarmed. Yet not even
Bush and his coterie of blood-stained warmongers will
breathe credibility into the fanciful mental meanderings of
a captain whose ship has already sunk.
History has certified the work of the inspectors as being
technically brilliant, and politically disastrous. Two
things can be said of the U.N. inspection experience in
Iraq. First, international inspections, properly led and
equipped, can achieve meaningful disarmament results even
under the most arduous of conditions. The second is that
multilateral inspection regimes will always fail if the
entirety of the body mandating the inspections fails to come
to a singular agreement on the scale and scope of the
disarmament mission. American (and to a lesser extent
British) embrace of regime-change policies which were not
contained in the U.N. mandate regarding Iraq meant the
political death of the inspections. These are pure truths
which need to be recognized and acted upon if any future
multilateral international approach to disarmament and arms
control is ever to reach fruition. So long as the United
States continues to behave as if it has sole authority to
deviate from the framework of international law set forth by
the United Nations, there can be no hope for any meaningful
progression in the field of threat reduction born of arms
control and disarmament. Indeed, the opposite will occur-a
world grown wary of American treachery will seek to acquire
the means to deter, and perhaps even push back, what it sees
as an American unilateral domination of the globe.
While it is difficult to predict the future, what can be
said with absolute certainty is that the passing of UNMOVIC
represents far more than a political stain on those who
claim to embrace global nonproliferation but in reality
smother it. The political aspects of the aggregate of
failure which combined to sink UNMOVIC have been underscored
above. The true tragedy of UNMOVIC’s demise rests not with
bad policy, but rather with the loss of irreplaceable
technical expertise. I do not refer to the library of
inspection data derived from the 16-year disarmament saga in
Iraq; this data is tainted by the political corruption of
the inspection process. What I lament is the passing of
potential, both realized and future, represented by the
proactive work of some of the world’s greatest
nonproliferation minds.
For the past seven years, UNMOVIC, led by the intrepid
Russian weapons inspector Nikita Smidovich, has built an
unprecedented program of training of international weapons
inspectors. The qualification standards certified through
this comprehensive training process has led to the creation
of a cadre of international experts in the field of
nonproliferation. Smidovich created a network of training
opportunities in facilities in Canada, Argentina,
Switzerland, Germany, Russia and Britain, to name a few. The
hundreds of inspectors who have completed this training
stood ready to go anywhere in the world at a moment’s notice
to investigate whether a given manufacturing process was
legitimately utilized or instead covertly diverted for
illegitimate use. This inspection capability far exceeded
anything the world would ever need in Iraq, and had great
potential for pre-emptive application in any number of
proliferation trouble spots, from Iran to North Korea and
beyond. For an annual cost of a few million dollars, the
inspection potential created by Smidovich and others,
operating under the umbrella of UNMOVIC, had the potential
to prevent conflicts costing untold billions.
This capability is now forever lost with the demise of
UNMOVIC, proof positive that the real problems confronting
the world’s collective peace and security continue to be
undermined by an American administration willing to exact
any price in order to win cheap political points. Americans
rightly measure the cost of the Iraq war in terms of dead
and wounded American service members. Some even spare a
thought for the hundreds of thousands of Iraqi casualties.
But scant few will reflect on the potential harm done to
future generations of Americans, and others around the
world, as we bid a silent farewell to meaningful arms
control.
Scott Ritter was a Marine Corps intelligence officer from
1984 to 1991 and a United Nations weapons inspector in Iraq
from 1991 to 1998. He is the author of numerous books. His
latest is “Waging Peace: The Art of War for the Antiwar
Movement” (Nation Books, April 2007)
Copyright © 2007 Truthdig
Click
on "comments" below to
read or post comments
Comment
Guidelines
Be succinct, constructive and
relevant to the story.
We
encourage engaging, diverse and
meaningful commentary. Do not
include personal information such
as names, addresses, phone
numbers and emails. Comments
falling outside our guidelines
– those including personal
attacks and profanity – are
not permitted.
See our complete
Comment
Policy and
use
this link to notify us if you
have concerns about a comment.
We’ll promptly review and
remove any inappropriate
postings.
Send Page To a Friend
In accordance
with Title 17 U.S.C. Section 107, this material
is distributed without profit to those who have
expressed a prior interest in receiving the
included information for research and educational
purposes. Information Clearing House has no
affiliation whatsoever with the originator of
this article nor is Information ClearingHouse
endorsed or sponsored by the originator.)
|
