Pre-Ramadan Bombings of Iraq Bring UNSCOM Inspections and Failed U.S.-U.K. Policy to Dead End

By Ian Williams

The pre-Ramadan bombings of Iraq were not authorized by the United Nations, but what is equally important is that they were evidently counterproductive. In effect, they ended any hope of Iraqi cooperation with UNSCOM, while postponing indefinitely any reimposition of the inspection regimes.

There is little doubt that Iraq had indeed been thwarting the U.N. Special Commission inspection teams and even less doubt that its chairman, Richard Butler, was going to report so to the Security Council. Equally, the U.S., which had been avoiding confrontation during the summer so conspicuously that it led inspector Scott Ritter to resign, now wanted action. Of course, one would be shocked, shocked, if the change in attitude had had anything to do with the impending impeachment of President Bill Clinton.

A Predictable Reaction

At the U.N., the reaction was predictable. The U.S. and Britain, acting like a pair of vigilantes, had no sanction from the U.N. Security Council for their punishment of Iraq, and faced the active opposition of three other veto-wielding members, China, France and Russia, which is why they did not rush to get a council decision.

On the other hand, condemnation for the bombing was rather half-hearted. Even those who have defended him in the past thought that Saddam Hussain had been pushing his luck, and had insulted Secretary-General Kofi Annan, and the U.N. itself, for ripping up the February Memorandum of Understanding that Annan negotiated with the support of Iraqi allies. What is more, none of his Arab defenders like the idea of the Iraqi dictator having access to weapons of mass destruction.

The bombing was, therefore, doubly ineffective, since it alienated the British and Americans from the middle ground at the U.N., while proving, as many had predicted, to be the death knell for the U.N. inspection regime. Frustrated by the almost inevitable outcome of a short-term policy designed more to disarm the U.S. Senate than the Iraqis, many hard-liners in Washington have now turned on poor Kofi Annan.

Annan foolishly thought his job was to secure implementation of U.N. resolutions rather than further the new American policy of bombing at all costs, and various administration leaks now take him to task for mediating with Saddam Hussain up to the last minute. A.M. Rosenthal, Israel’s out-of-control junkyard dog at The New York Times, called the secretary-general Saddam Hussain’s “greatest single asset at the U.N.”

The U.N. cannot condone an attempt to overthrow a government.

Such attackers are almost as short-sighted as their Iraq policy, of course, since Annan would be unable to function as secretary-general if he were to carry out American policy rather than U.N. policy. He would also suffer from the pronounced disability that no one seems sure from day to day what the administration’s policy is.

After the Ramadan attacks, the predictably unpredictable Saddam Hussain decided that it would be a good time to challenge the air exclusion zones. It must be said that he is on impeccable legal grounds—these zones were never authorized by the United Nations, whose legal advisers checked international law and found no backing for it.

Even so, the Iraqi president-for-life sacrificed the lives of his pilots and anti-aircraft personnel to give the Americans and the British an excuse to continue bombing. Thus they were able to give the people back home the impression that something was being done about Iraq, while hoping that none of the voters noticed how futile it was.

American abuse of UNSCOM also cost Richard Butler’s credibility dearly. The Australian chairman has been demonized by the Iraqis almost from the day he took office. In fact his predecessor, Swedish diplomat Rolf Ekeus, was served up almost as many problems by the Iraqis, but he did not respond to provocation in the same robust Antipodean manner as Butler.

However, in the New Year, leaks to U.S. journalists made it clear that U.S. intelligence services had misused UNSCOM to do their own spying. In fact the Iraqis had been saying that for years, but they had no evidence, and tend to assume that everyone is a spy for someone, anyway.

The leaks unmistakably exposed the vulnerability of UNSCOM, which is technically a U.N. body but relies overwhelmingly on U.K. and U.S. funding and technical resources to do its job. So the information that the U.S. was gathering for UNSCOM on Iraq’s effort to protect its weapons systems was inextricably mixed with information about the protection of Saddam Hussain, since the same personnel carried out the two operations. It appears that the U.S. was stingy with what information it chose to pass on to UNSCOM as well.

The U.N. policy is to disarm Saddam Hussain. The U.S.’s now-avowed policy is to topple him. While most U.N. members would doubtless offer a silent prayer of relief if he were to disappear mysteriously in a puff of smoke, they cannot condone an attempt to overthrow a government, since that is the sort of thing the U.N. was supposed to put a stop to.

The only threat the U.N. had to secure Iraqi cooperation was the continuation of sanctions. But since the U.S. has made it clear at various points that regardless of what everyone else thought, it would veto lifting sanctions while Saddam Hussain was in power, there was little or no incentive for Iraq to cooperate. Baghdad was, rightly, confident that no one would or could attempt to intensify the sanctions.

Taken together, the leaks about American abuse of UNSCOM, the bombing, and the lack of honesty or clarity about the dividing line between U.S. and U.N. policies on sanctions and inspections, now mean that it is almost inconceivable that anything like UNSCOM will be allowed back into Iraq.

Ironically, the point about the damage the sanctions are doing to Iraqi civilians seems finally to have sunk home in Washington. In January U.S. Ambassador to the U.N. Peter Burleigh suggested that the ceiling on oil-for-food exports be lifted. This conceded the principle without, however, giving much in practice, since low crude prices and the poor state of the Iraqi infrastructure after nine years of sanctions have made it impossible for Iraq to pump enough oil to meet even existing permitted levels.

More to the point, Burleigh’s proposal came as a riposte to a French proposal that makes a lot of sense—if the purpose is to enforce U.N. resolutions rather than overthrow the regime in Baghdad. Previous French proposals have been vulnerable to accusations of expediency, and even pandering to Saddam Hussain. This one, however, seems firmly grounded in reality.

Paris’s plan calls for long-term monitoring and preventive effort to stop Iraqi re-armament under a “renewed” control commission that would also monitor dual use imports. Oil exports and their revenues would be monitored but not restricted, and other sanctions would be progressively lifted as the Iraqis proved their cooperation.

French Foreign Minister Hubert Vedrine stressed French commitment to ensure that Iraqi weapons programs were indeed curtailed. He explained that whatever successes UNSCOM had had in the past, there had been no great steps forward for two years.

The French plan certainly makes more sense than the absence of policy from the U.S. and U.K. side. Indeed, there are even potential fissures between London and Washington.

British participation in the bombing raids on Iraq is based on a desire to force Baghdad to comply with the inspection regime. For its part, Washington seems to regard the inspections as just an excuse to use military harassment to destabilize the Iraqi government. The ironic result of the bombings, therefore, is that sanctions in their present form, and the UNSCOM inspections, are both less likely to survive than ever before.

The Other Sanctions

Other sanctions regimes are still in place however. The implied deadline of the 10th anniversary of the Lockerbie bombing in December went by without much movement toward lifting the Libyan sanctions by producing the two Libyan bombing suspects for trial.

Under pressure from the British, the U.S. had agreed that the U.N. should call Tripoli’s bluff and allow the trial of the suspects in the Pan Am case to be tried in The Hague under Scottish judges and Scottish law. Libya said yes, since, after all, it was their suggestion to begin with. But Libya then backed out when it became plain that, if convicted in an international tribunal, the suspects would serve their time in Scottish rather than Libyan prisons.

Since then, there has been a regular traffic of U.N. and Libyan officials between Scotland and Tripoli to explain to and reassure the Libyans that the two would not be interrogated by, or even approached by, British or American intelligence services, and that Libyan officials would have as much contact as they wanted.

However, Colonel Qaddafi is sending out his traditionally confusing signals. In December Kofi Annan went to Libya to intervene personally, but without immediate results, despite being kept waiting for hours and then taken off into the desert by night to meet the eccentric leader where, Qaddafi apparently reasoned, no one could carry out an attack on his life. Meanwhile planes were waiting to bring the two suspects out—but they waited in vain.

The situation remained as confused as ever. The Libyans produced a document showing some $23 billion in losses due to sanctions imposed over the Pan American bombing, which should give them an incentive to cooperate. And in this case there is no American veto to jeopardize the promise that sanctions will be suspended as soon as the two suspects are on their way to The Hague for trial. So the ball is in Qaddafi’s court—as soon as he decides by which rules he wants to play.

Ian Williams is a free-lance journalist based at the United Nations and author of The U.N. for Beginners, available from the AET Book Club.