The instant news anchors and all-day television talkers might place the onus for Wednesday night’s air assault against Iraq squarely on both Saddam Hussein, for obstructing United Nations weapons inspectors, and Bill Clinton, who faces the biggest crisis of his presidency.
That analysis, though, ignores a stream of fumbling and deception that has plagued seven years of UN efforts to discover Iraq’s well-concealed ballistic missiles, as well as its efforts to manufacture chemical, biological and nuclear weapons.
So why now? Administration officials said that several factors influenced the timing, including UN Special Commission Chairman Richard Butler’s declaration Tuesday that Iraq has continued to obstruct the work of UN inspectors.
U.S. and British leaders also wanted to avoid offending friendly Mideast countries by launching military action during Ramadan, the monthlong Muslim holy period that begins this weekend. Further, military officials said they wanted to attack without warning, before Hussein could disperse his military forces.
For UN inspectors, though, the time for military action was months ago, when Hussein blocked their efforts to expose one of his darkest secrets: the testing of chemical and biological weapons.
It was at the notorious Abu Ghraib prison, southwest of Baghdad, that Hussein’s guards last January stopped UN biological weapons experts from gaining access to records the inspectors believed would have confirmed Iraq’s use of political prisoners to test such deadly elements as anthrax, VX gas and other nerve agents.
“They were never going to reveal what was inside Abu Ghraib,” said a senior UN weapons inspector. “But I think a decision had already been made to stonewall us.
“For all practical purposes we haven’t been able to do our jobs for the last year, year and a half. Certainly since August it has been a joke.”
The stand-off at Abu Ghraib began a testy period of threats and half-measures, tedious negotiations, unsteady agreements and, finally, Wednesday’s use of force.
The extended crisis has resulted from the Clinton administration’s reluctance to use force, the UN Security Council’s inability to act resolutely and Iraq’s failure to contain the zeal with which it taunts its Western enemies.
Only a month ago, the administration threatened to carry out “substantial” airstrikes against Iraq if Hussein persisted in denying UN inspections. A deal was struck as planes were on their way to their targets, and Hussein promised to comply.
Clinton on Wednesday gravely recalled that pledge, and Hussein’s failure to keep it.
“In halting our airstrikes in November, I gave Saddam a chance, not a license,” the president said. “If we turn our backs on his defiance, the credibility of U.S. power as a check against Saddam will be destroyed.”
In answer to charges that the administration was using the airstrikes to stall a vote in the House of Representatives to impeach the president, Defense Secretary William Cohen said he would not jeopardize his reputation and the lives of American soldiers simply to improve the president’s prospects.
“I am prepared to place 30 years of public service on the line to say the only factor that was important in this decision is what is in the American people’s best interest,” Cohen said Wednesday night. “There were no other factors.”
Those who have watched the Iraq crisis unfolding in the years since the 1991 Persian Gulf war, however, have argued that months of delaying has allowed Hussein to dismantle and conceal his military production facilities.
“Iraq shuffles the deck every 30 days as it is,” Scott Ritter, a former UN inspector and a vocal critic of the UN inspection process, said in a recent interview. “When we go in, we’ve been put under pressure to carry out a quick inspection, to be forced to leave before we’re done. There is some concern that they have certain production capacity that’s been dismantled and is in hiding right now.”
As part of the peace agreement that ended the gulf war, Hussein agreed to allow teams of UN-designated experts to find and destroy the munitions and machinery that produced his weapons of mass destruction. From the start, the Iraqis tried to deceive UN inspectors.
Inspectors arriving at the front entrance of military sites, for instance, looked on as Iraqi guards burdened with boxes of documents exited through the back. Machinery was removed and carted away or buried in the desert. Iraqi scientists and military officials blatantly lied to the teams, who used documents, information from high-level Iraqi defectors and photographs taken from intelligence satellites to uncover Iraq’s missile and nuclear weapons-making activities.
In 1995, the UN teams came into substantial evidence that Iraq had an active chemical and biological weapons program, something that Hussein’s top aides had long denied.
In the course of their work, the UN inspectors have destroyed 40,000 chemical weapons, 700 tons of chemical weapons agents, 48 missiles and 30 warheads that could carry chemical or biological weapons.
By March 1997, inspectors had begun to examine not just evidence of weapons, but Iraq’s efforts to conceal them. That, said a senior inspector who asked not to be named, “made the Iraqis very, very nervous.”
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“The decision not to reveal anything to the commission was made in early 1997, and this was also about the time that the more confrontational sessions with Scott (Ritter) and his group started.”
By last January, defectors and intelligence reports from the U.S., Britain and Israel had given the inspectors enough evidence to suspect that Hussein had used political prisoners held at Abu Ghraib prison as human guinea pigs to test his chemical and biological weapons.
The records at the prison, the inspectors believed, would verify those suspicions. Iraq, however, refused the UN team access, launching a contentious year of cat-and-mouse.
On Jan. 27, Clinton warned Hussein not to “defy the will of the world,” by denying access to the inspection teams. The next month, the U.S. and Britain began to bolster their military forces in the Persian Gulf region, while UN Secretary General Kofi Annan struck a deal with Iraq by promising to work to lift economic sanctions in place since 1990.
That concession, though, failed to improve access for inspectors, and by last August, Iraq used the UN’s refusal to lift sanctions as a pretext for halting all UN inspections.
Another crisis was averted, at least for a day, on Oct. 30, when the UN agreed to yet another Iraqi request, this one for a comprehensive review of the inspection process.
The UN refused to lift sanctions, however, and Iraq, on Oct. 31, cut off access to UN monitors, who were posted in Iraq to police sites that inspectors had previously identified as useful to Hussein’s military apparatus.
In mid-November, Iraq averted strikes by U.S. and British fighters, bombers and cruise missiles when Hussein promised to give the UN teams new, unfettered access to his weapons programs. Clinton agreed to the deal, saying that he would strike without warning if the Iraqi leader failed to comply with his promise.
Perhaps predictably, that’s just what Saddam Hussein did, leading to Wednesday’s bombing attacks.