Global Views: Iraq Update

September 26, 2002

by Robert Nolan

As leaders from the United Nations weapons inspection team prepare to negotiate the terms of their upcoming mission to Iraq, international and domestic debate concerning the use of force continued throughout the week. Top officials from the United States, including Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld, traveled to Poland, where they briefed NATO members on the Iraqi threat –- a trip that followed the long-awaited release of British Prime Minister Tony Blair's dossier outlining Iraq's weapon's capabilities. While the diplomatic assault from the world's most vocal proponents of action against Baghdad has won some concessions, Russia and Germany have yet to sign on to calls for a new UN resolution authorizing the use of force. Meanwhile, in the United States, partisan politics and harsh words from President George Bush to the U.S. Senate have stifled congressional debate surrounding a resolution authorizing the use of unilateral force against Iraq.

Blair's Dossier

British Prime Minister Tony Blair's dossier, released earlier this week by Britain's Joint Intelligence Committee, was met with mixed reactions from the international community. The report's thesis, which British officials say is intended to reinforce a policy of “disarmament” in Iraq, is that “the policy of containment is not working.” While critics argued that the report was unoriginal and revealed little, if any, evidence against Iraq, the dossier does bring to light a number of issues that have received little attention until now. According to the New York Times, the report claims that Iraq has tried to purchase uranium supplies from Africa, and that Saddam Hussein is capable of deploying chemical and biological weapons to neighboring countries “within 45 minutes of an order to use them.” On the issue of nuclear weapons, however, the intelligence report was less alarmist than many American officials have been on the subject. It claims that due to severe restrictions on imports in place since the Gulf War “Iraq would not be able to produce a nuclear weapon,” if sanctions remained in place.

Supporters of going to war with Iraq claim that the report gives further evidence of the need for regime change in Baghdad. “Not since the publication of Kanan Makiya's Republic of Fear has there been such a damning indictment of Saddam Hussein's regime as the dossier released on Tuesday by British Prime Minister Tony Blair,” read an editorial in the Jerusalem Post. The publication of the report also preceded a telling editorial in the state-run China Daily that warned Iraq that it faces a “last chance” to avoid a military confrontation for its actions.

Critics of an immediate attack on Iraq, however, believe that the report justifies a continuation of the previous policy of containment. If Iraq's capabilities allow Saddam only to “lash out with biological and chemical weapons against his civilian population, and we could suppress a good deal of that with aggressive inspections, it seems to me a better choice than taking him on immediately,” said Leonard Spector of the Monterey Institute's center for proliferation studies, in a New York Times report. Others, such as the Asia Times Sanjay Suri have called the dossier “less an intelligence assessment that seeks to describe than it is a political manifesto that seeks to persuade.”

But it took the British press to point out what appears to be a widening gap between a U.S. policy of regime change and a British policy of disarmament, and the delicate manner in which Blair's dossier addresses the differences. “The most impressive part of Mr. Blair's statement was the passionate endorsement he produced of his close cooperation with a U.S. President of a different philosophical outlook,” says a report from the Times of London. “He has performed his task with skill, but the job is far from done.” Indeed, it will take more of this kind of diplomacy to bridge a widening gap over a proposed U.S. and British resolution that leaders hope to submit to the United Nations as early as next week. Until then, Blair will continue to advocate disarmament through the UN in hopes of bringing on skeptic Security Council members like Russia and France -- and appeasing his hawkish American allies. While a report from the Independent quotes one British official as pointing out that “the most crucial task is to get something that all five countries can agree on,” European diplomats want to ensure that “in no way can it [the resolution] contain triggers that would allow one member state to rush off to war.”

Courting NATO

International debate surrounding Iraq also dominated NATO meetings in Warsaw, Poland, initially intended to discuss the creation of a NATO reaction force and the organization's role in the war on terror. Briefings from U.S Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld and John McLaughlin of the CIA attempted to link the two issues to Iraq, with some success. “We provided our allies with an intelligence briefing on the Iraqi threat that it poses to the world,” said Rumsfeld. “The deputy director Central Intelligence presented a detailed discussion of Iraq's weapons of mass destruction programs and its support for terrorists. Everyone is on notice. All now have a clear understanding of the threats that are posed.”

Rumsfeld also said that there were ties between Iraq and al Qaeda, and boasted support from a number of nations, although he refused to say which. “You can be certain that if and when the president decides to do something, there will be other nations that will be assisting,” he said. When asked which nations promised support, Rumsfeld said that it was up to those countries “to say what they want to say.” Some took him up on the offer. A report from the Associated Press claims that Italy, Spain and Poland gave signs that they would offer full support to the United States, as well as to a “strongly worded” UN resolution that would threaten Iraq with force should it fail to fully comply with weapons inspectors.

But Rumsfeld and other American officials present failed to win over a key ally in Germany, which continues to defy American policy regarding regime change and insists on working only through the United Nations. “I still return to my old opinion,” said German Defense Minister Peter Struck. “A political solution has priority over a military intervention, and I had the impression that there's a growing agreement with our position.” The U.S. has accused German Chancellor Gerhard Schroeder of winning his recent reelection by running on an anti-American platform -- a move that Rumsfeld claims has “poisoned” the relationship between Germany and the United States.

The American delegation was also frustrated by Russia, whose Defense Minister Sergi Ivanov attended the second day of NATO talks in Russia's new capacity as an alliance partner. Ivanov argued that weapons inspectors should be given time to do their job before threatening Iraq with military force. “I believe a few months of work will be quite sufficient to reach a final verdict,” he said. Ivanov also made a case for Russia's self-proclaimed war on terror in neighboring Georgia and Chechnya. “We have incontrovertible proof that the Georgian authorities are not taking effective action against this international terrorism,” he told the Polish newspaper Rzeczpospolita, according to a Reuters report. “Our president has openly said that if Russia is again a victim of aggression we will have no other option but to strike and destroy the terrorists.” According to The Economist, “Russia may be holding out for American concessions” in its own battle against Georgian and Chechen insurgents.

“Regarding Iraq”

The Bush administration's attempts to win a Congressional resolution approving the use of unilateral force against Iraq also hit a number of setbacks this week, most recently over a verbal skirmish between President Bush and Senate Majority Leader Tom Daschle. President Bush accused the Senate of stifling a homeland security bill and said the Senate was “not interested in the security of the American people.” Daschle responded by accusing Bush of “politicizing” the debate over homeland security, causing many to wonder how the rift will affect Bush's desire to get a Congressional resolution on Iraq passed before mid-November elections. According to the Washington Post, roughly one-third of Democratic House members support President Bush on Iraq, while in the Senate, that number is much higher.

Recent announcements by National Security Advisor Condoleeza Rice that tie Iraq to al-Qaeda are likely to help the president gain even more support in Congress. “We know that Saddam Hussein has a long history with terrorism in general, and there are some al-Qaeda personnel who found refuge in Baghdad,” she said on The Online New Hour, attributing intelligence to detainees from the war in Afghanistan. “We know too, that several of the detainees, in particular some high-ranking detainees, have said that Iraq provided some training to al-Qaeda in chemical weapons development.”

The most vocal Democratic criticism of the Bush administration's Iraq policy came this week from former Vice President Al Gore. Gore said that Bush had squandered the good will and support of America's allies, and was creating an atmosphere of “fear, anxiety and uncertainty, not at what the terrorists are doing, but at what we are going to do.”

According to the most recent CNN poll, Americans remain somewhere in the middle. 51 percent of Americans believe that President Bush “has explained clearly what's at stake for the United States in Iraq,” up from 37 percent last month.