If
You Had Seen What I Have Seen
By Scott Ritter
11 October , 2004
lndependent/UK
It
appears that the last vestiges of perceived legitimacy regarding the
decision of President George Bush and Tony Blair to invade Iraq have
been eliminated with the release this week of the Iraq Survey Group's
final report on Iraqi weapons of mass destruction. The report's author,
Charles Duelfer, underscored the finality of what the world had come
to accept in the 18 months since the invasion of Iraq - that there were
no stockpiles of WMD, or programs to produce WMD. Despite public statements
made before the war by Bush, Blair and officials and pundits on both
sides of the Atlantic to the contrary, the ISG report concludes that
all of Iraq's WMD stockpiles had been destroyed in 1991, and WMD programs
and facilities dismantled by 1996.
Duelfer's report
does speak of Saddam Hussein's "intent" to acquire WMD once
economic sanctions were lifted and UN inspections ended (although this
conclusion is acknowledged to be derived from fragmentary and speculative
sources). This judgement has been seized by Bush and Blair as they scramble
to re-justify their respective decisions to wage war. "The Duelfer
report showed that Saddam was systematically gaming the system, using
the UN oil-for-food program to try to influence countries and companies
in an effort to undermine sanctions," Bush said. "He was doing
so with the intent of restarting his weapons program once the world
looked away." Blair, for his part, has apologised for relying on
faulty intelligence, but not for his decision to go to war. The mantra
from both camps remains that the world is a safer place with Saddam
behind bars.
But is it? When
one examines the reality of the situation on the ground in Iraq today,
it seems hard to draw any conclusion that postulates a scenario built
around the notion of an improved environment of stability and security.
Indeed, many Iraqis hold that life under Saddam was a better option
than the life they are facing under an increasingly violent and destabilizing
US-led occupation. The ultimate condemnation of the failure and futility
of the US-UK effort in Iraq is that if Saddam were released from his
prison cell and participated in the elections scheduled for next January,
there is a good chance he would emerge as the popular choice. But while
democratic freedom of expression was a desired outcome of the decision
to remove Saddam from power, the crux of the pre-war arguments and the
ones being reconfigured by those in favour of the invasion center on
the need to improve international peace and security. Has Saddam's removal
accomplished this?
To answer this question,
you have to postulate a world today that includes an Iraq led by Saddam.
How this world would deal with him would be determined by decisions
made by the US, Britain and the international community in the months
leading up to the March 2003 invasion of Iraq. One of the key historical
questions being asked is what if Hans Blix (who gives his own view,
right) had been given the three additional months he had requested in
order to complete his program of inspection? Two issues arise from this
scenario: would Blix have been able to assemble enough data to ascertain
conclusively, in as definitive a fashion as the Duelfer ISG report,
a finding that Saddam's Iraq was free of WMD, and thus posed no immediate
threat; and would the main supporters of military engagement with Iraq,
the US and Britain, have been willing to accept such a finding?
The answer to the
first point is that Blix and his team of inspectors were saddled with
a complicated list of "cluster issues", ironically assembled
by Duelfer during his tenure as head of the UN weapons inspectors, that
would have needed to be rectified for any finding of compliance to be
made. These "clusters" postulated the need for Iraq to prove
the negative, something that is virtually impossible to do. We now know
that Iraq's WMD were destroyed in 1991. The problem wasn't the weapons,
but verification of Iraq's declarations. The standards of verification
set by Duelfer-Blix were impossible for Iraq to meet, thus making closure
on the "cluster" issues also an unattainable goal. This situation
answers the second point as well. Since the inspection process was pre-programmed
to fail, there would be no way the US or the UK would accept any finding
of compliance from the UN weapons inspectors. The inspection process
was rigged to create uncertainty regarding Iraq's WMD, which was used
by the US and the UK to bolster their case for war.
It appears that
there was no way short of war to create an environment where a finding
of Iraq's compliance with its obligation to disarm could be embraced
by the US and British governments. The main reason for this was that
the issue wasn't WMD per se, but Saddam. The true goal wasn't disarmament,
but regime change. This, of course, clashed with the principles of international
law set forth in the Security Council resolutions, voted on by the US
and UK, and to which Saddam was ostensibly held to account. Economic
sanctions, put in place by the UN in 1990 after Saddam's invasion of
Iraq and continued in 1991, linked to Saddam's obligation to disarm,
were designed to compel Iraq to comply with the Security Council's requirements.
Saddam did disarm, but since two members of that Security Council -
the US and the UK - were implementing unilateral policies of regime
change as opposed to disarmament, this compliance could never be recognised.
Sadly, when one speaks of threats to international peace and security,
history will show that it was the US and Britain that consistently operated
outside the spirit and letter of international law in their approach
towards dealing with Saddam.
This blatant disregard
for international law on the part of the world's two greatest democracies
serves as the foundation of any analysis of the question: would the
world be better off with or without Saddam in power? To buy into the
notion that the world is better off without Saddam, one would have to
conclude that the framework of international law that held the world
together since the end of the Second World War - the UN Charter - is
antiquated and no longer viable in a post-9/11 world. Tragically, we
can see the fallacy of that argument unfold on a daily basis, as the
horrific ramifications of American and British unilateralism unfold
across the globe. If there ever was a case to be made for a unified
standard of law governing the interaction of nations, it is in how we
as a global community prosecute the war on terror. Those who embrace
unilateral pre-emptive strikes in the name of democracy and freedom
have produced results that pervert the concept of democracy while bringing
about the horrific tyranny of fear and oppression at the hands of those
who posture as liberators.
If Saddam were in
power today, it would only have been because the US and Britain had
altered course and joined the global community in recognising the pre-eminence
of international law, and the necessity of all nations to operate in
accordance with that law. The irony is that had the US and Britain taken
this path, and an unrepentant Saddam chosen to defy the international
community by acting on the intent he is alleged to have harboured, then
he would have been removed from power by a true international coalition
united in its legitimate defence of international law. But this is not
the case. Saddam is gone, and the world is far worse for it - not because
his regime posed no threat, perceived or otherwise, but because the
threat to international peace and security resulting from the decisions
made by Bush and Blair to invade Iraq in violation of international
law make any threat emanating from an Iraq ruled by Saddam pale in comparison.
Scott Ritter is
a former UN weapons inspector in Iraq (1991-1998) and the author of
'Frontier Justice: Weapons of Mass Destruction and the Bushwhacking
of America', published by Context Books
©2004 Independent
Digital (UK) Ltd