October 1999

Richard Butler has been the most prominent of Australians on the international scene, courtesy of his chairmanship of the United Nations Special Commission on Iraq (UNSCOM) from June 1997 until June this year.

Those following the Iraqi situation became accustomed to the urbane, distinctively Australian accent of the UN’s chief point man in Iraq. A tall poppy, he has attracted much carping and opportunistic criticism from those who resent his success, dislike his style or who see him as an instrument of US policy.

UNSCOM, empowered by the Security Council to dismantle Iraq’s stocks of weapons of mass destruction, and related research programmes, was created with an anticipated lifespan of twelve months. That was about one hundred months ago. Nonetheless, during the first six years, according to Butler, UNSCOM enjoyed significant though not unqualified success.

In January 1997, Kofi Annan became UN Secretary-General. It was Annan who sought out his friend, Richard Butler, to succeed Sweden’s Rolf Ekeus as UNSCOM chairman. Butler, it was hoped, could complete the difficult job.

Butler, in Melbourne a month ago was candid about the successes and failures of UNSCOM as well as his views on the sequel to last December’s Operation Desert Fox, since which UNSCOM has been banned by the Iraqis from fulfilling its mandate.

"UNSCOM had two jobs", said Butler, settling into a sofa in Melbourne’s Park Hyatt. "One was to deal with the past, the other was to deal with the future. The past is called disarmament, the future is called monitoring, to ensure that Saddam does not make illegal weapons again in the future."

"Now on disarmament, we were able to account for, destroy, or take away substantial portions of his missile force, the same with his chemical weapons force; we were not at all successful regarding biological weapons. On the nuclear side, he was six months away from making a bomb when we arrived, and that was stopped. So what remained was potentially quite important: small in quantity, but maybe larger in importance, and that worried me a lot. That’s why when the Iraqis asked me to be satisfied with what we had, declare them disarmed, that it’s all over, to declare victory and go home, I said I would not do that."

Certainly UNSCOM has succeeded to the point that the worst and most immediate danger has been averted. "We and our colleagues at the International Atomic Energy Agency had been able to conclude that Saddam was well under way to making an atomic bomb, that we got there in time, and that was stopped," reiterates Butler with a sense of partial fulfillment. "Now in our absence from Iraq over the past year, I am sure he’s put back together the required people, think about this, to design a bomb, look into the ways of gaining the material they need to make it. I suspect they are out there looking for those now."

Butler sees the gravest risks in the demise of UNSCOM and one senses he still feels at one with the unit he headed until last June. "That’s what’s really depressing. We’ve not done monitoring for a year and quite frankly, I think it would be foolish to assume that they’re not doing it again."

"How quickly can they make an atomic bomb? I don’t know, but the International Atomic Energy Agency says between six months and two years. The point about our absence is that there’s no-one there to see whether or not they’re doing it. And that’s what is very worrying."

We put it to Butler that unanimity surrounded UNSCOM’s mandate at its inception but that, somewhere in 1997, that consensus within the Security Council dissipated, never to return. Why had the five permanent members, who had once unanimously approved UNSCOM’s work, ceased to agree on the task being completed to the satisfaction of all concerned?

Butler raises an eyebrow. "Well [the problem] started in October 1997, so your date is quite right. I think what happened was that people grew tired of the recurrent Iraq crises. People became very worried about the impact of sanctions on the ordinary Iraqi people. I think, too, that there was a growing concern in the Council about a unipolar world dominated by American policy and the perception that American policy had been predominant with respect to Iraq and maybe even obsessional with respect to Saddam. Then we had a new Secretary-General who was pretty dedicated to the idea of peace at all costs. I have no problem with the idea of peace. I have a bit of a problem with the concept of peace ‘at any cost’, especially if you’re dealing with a dictator."

In view of their past friendship, Butler’s commentary is richly ironic. For it was Annan who pulled the rug from under Butler when Saddam provoked a crisis in October 1997. This crisis was no different in kind from previous ones: Saddam refused to co-operate with UNSCOM, and the US threatened reprisals.

But in effect, it was dramatically different: the Security Council split for the first time. Although in clear contravention of the relevant Security Council resolutions, Iraq barred UNSCOM from inspecting its sites and facilities.

Annan defused the crisis by flying to Baghdad and, like Neville Chamberlain before him, walked away with a piece of paper, uttering homilies about the virtues of diplomacy. Again like Chamberlain, he was feted at the time for saving lives and having averted a war, yet his deal was revealed as a failure within a couple of months. Butler seems to accept the analogy but is uncomfortable about emphasising it.

"Others have said that", replies Butler with some circumspection. "I’ve tried to avoid that because I didn’t want to put petrol on the fire. I simply couldn’t agree that the way you deal with a dictator addicted to weapons of mass-destruction is to try to paper over differences with diplomacy. The Security Council must together collectively say to Saddam, ‘if you want to be a part of this world community, you’re going to have to do what we’ve told you have to do for nine years now, which is to give up these weapons’. That’s of substance. That’s not diplomacy. I parted company with Kofi Annan’s belief that you could deal with the problems posed by a man like Saddam and his weapons by simple diplomacy."

Saddam, of course, never intended UNSCOM to see certain suspected sites, just as he hoped to withhold vital information on his stocks of offensive material. He succeeded in both. Be that as it may, where does this leave us now? There appears now a change in US policy from one of periodic confrontation with Saddam to one of low-level, continuous military action. Butler believes the change has some importance.

"The essential aspect of US policy has been to continue to insist that Iraq must continue to obey the disarmament law. I don’t think that policy has changed. The means that are used to recommend it have varied, partly because the US has found itself more and more in a minority of one. Other members of the Security Council have really started to walk away from their own resolutions and decisions and say ‘Maybe the time has come to be nicer and easier upon Iraq’. The US continues to use on an almost daily basis small-scale force in the no-fly zones and I think that’s actually proving to be important but the US has had to recognise there is almost no support for large-scale use of force against Iraq."

Butler believes that a move towards actively seeking the overthrow of Saddam could produce the right results, but is less confident on the chances of effecting change in Baghdad. "I have no idea whether it’s possible or not. Is it desirable? Absolutely. Would it have the desired effect? That’s less clear".

UNSCOM was embroiled in controversy over the use of foreign intelligence services in discharging its mandate. However, of Iraq’s closest neighbour Butler informs us firmly that UNSCOM never approached Iran for help. "Sorry it’s an unsatisfactory answer, but there’s not much I can say about that. I had a sense that they were standing on the sidelines applauding, but I didn’t have a lot of direct contact with them and certainly didn’t ask them for their assistance."

Could all this, the rigmarole of nine years and the present danger to which Butler has alluded, have been avoided if Desert Storm had taken the war to the gates of Baghdad? Yes, but that option, in Butler’s judgement, was never available, and his answer says something of the centrality of law and procedure in his thinking.

"It was simply not possible to go all the way to Baghdad. It would have destroyed the coalition. It would have gone beyond the mandate the Council gave the coalition, which was to reverse an invasion, not to change the government in Baghdad. You imagine the signal that would have sent in the Arab world. That suddenly you’ve got the ability of a coalition from outside to intervene and change the government because you don’t like its complexion. That’s almost against the Charter of the UN. There were also other military reasons too... Today, if exactly the same factors prevailed, the sensible politician, like George Bush, would take exactly the same position and say it’s too hard, we can’t do it.

"Would it have been preferable? We wouldn’t have had to go through these nine years, obviously, but that’s wishful thinking. In real terms, it wasn’t possible."

Copyright © AIJAC 1999
Last Updated 3 September, 2001