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Update
from AIJAC
Blix,
Bush and Iraq
January
31, 2003
Number 01/03 #12
With the
Israeli election on, Updates has had to neglect an astonishingly important
week in the struggle to disarm Saddam's Iraq. We attempt to remedy that
today. First, UN
Inspections chief Hans Blix gave a damning report, accusing Iraq of
offering no substantive cooperation in disarmament. Then US President
Bush gave a State
of the Union address in which Iraq was a major topic. There's a great
deal of good analysis out there, but here are just a few good pieces from
the last week:
First, The
New Republic had a terrific editorial on both the Blix report and Bush''s
speech and argues that moderate anti-war critics elude the central question
of what to do about Iraq if war is not to be contemplated. To read this
analysis, CLICK HERE
Next, British
Columnist Melanie Philips, writing in the Daily Mail, takes on
some of the central myths put forward by anti-war critiques,
HERE
And finally,
New York Times veteran columnist William Safire puts forward all
the latest evidence of a link between Saddam's Iraq and Al-Qaeda. Given
the tendency of some in Australia to make the false claim that there is
no link between Iraq and terrorism, this one should be required reading
for anyone who wants to pontificate on the subject. To read it, CLICK
HERE.
Some of the
material in the Safire piece is further elaborated in this report
from Jonathan Schanzer of The Washington Institute for Near East Policy.
Readers may also wish to read the letter
in support of US policy on Iraq by eight European leaders, which was
reported but not reproduced in the Australian media today. Other
good pieces on Bush's policy come from Mortimer
Zuckerman of US News and World Report and top foreign policy
writer Lawrence
Kaplan and William Kristol, while columnist James Lileks has a hilarious
take on the addiction of some to a UN Stamp of Approval.
Time
Out
by the Editors
Post date:
01.30.03
Issue date: 02.10.03
When President
Bush first publicly contemplated going to war with Iraq, some members
of his administration said he need not obtain approval from Congress before
doing so. But liberals insisted, rightly, that a war would lack constitutional
or popular legitimacy if the president did not first receive explicit
authorization from Congress. Bush complied. Later, some administration
officials maintained that the United States could attack Iraq without
giving Saddam Hussein one more chance to disarm peacefully through U.N.
weapons inspections. But liberals argued, again rightly, that a final
push for inspections was necessary to demonstrate that the United States
desired war only as a last resort. And Bush complied again, persuading
the U.N. Security Council to unanimously approve Resolution 1441, which
offered Iraq a "final opportunity" to dismantle its nonconventional weapons.
Bush may now dismiss the importance of these steps--"America's purpose
is more than to follow a process," he said in his State of the Union address.
But, in fact, so far the process of disarming Saddam has gone exactly
as liberals rightly demanded.
The day before
the president's address, the world received what should have been the
final word on that process in the form of a report by chief U.N. weapons
inspector Hans Blix. Blix's verdict is positively devastating. Iraq, he
writes, "appears not to have come to genuine acceptance, not even today,
of the disarmament which was demanded of it." Blix produces a litany of
noncooperation: Iraq has failed to provide a full accounting of its weapons,
as demanded; it has denied private interviews with its scientists; it
has hidden crucial documents in private homes; and it has whipped up demonstrators
to harass the inspectors with slanderous charges. (Some, hilariously,
have described this report as "mixed." By this standard, Saddam's record
of aggression is also mixed--we must consider the lengthy list of countries
he has not invaded.) All these actions unquestionably fulfill the definition
of a material breach agreed to under Resolution 1441.
So we now
have reached the conditions under which, according to the standards once
urged by most liberals, the United States must disarm Iraq by force. Yet
the moderate, respectable opponents of the war--those who claimed they
would favor military action if other steps failed--remain, for the most
part, unmoved. Their predominant view now is that the only thing preventing
a bloodless disarmament of Iraq is Bush's precipitous rush to war. Senate
Minority Leader Tom Daschle summed up this sentiment when he asked this
week, "How are our efforts to deal with this threat helped by short-circuiting
an inspections process we demanded in the first place?"--as if the inspections
were being stymied by Bush rather than by Saddam. It is now clear that
Bush's critics didn't mean what they said all along: The mask of nuanced
criticism has been pulled off the moderate antiwar position, exposing
it for the abject pacifism it truly is.
The editorials
of The New York Times are a good showcase of the intellectual incoherence
of the liberal war critics. The Times is worth dwelling on not only because
of its great influence but also because its opposition to war is carefully
calibrated, closely matching the views of mainstream Democrats rather
than those of angry street demonstrators. In fact, as the Iraq debate
raged last fall, the paper's editorials professed to share the same goals
as the administration. Last September the Times declared, "What really
counts in this conflict ... is the destruction of Iraq's unconventional
weapons and the dismantling of its program to develop nuclear arms." The
Times stressed that Iraqis must cooperate actively, not merely fail to
put up resistance, in order to avoid war. Iraq "must provide a full and
accurate list of its unconventional weapons programs," the Times insisted
on November 9. The following month it added that, to succeed, the inspectors
"will need cooperation from knowledgeable Iraqis." Indeed, in its November
editorial the Times explicitly sanctioned a unilateral war if Iraq failed
to actively disarm: "If Baghdad violates any of these provisions [emphasis
added], Washington should insist that the Security Council enforce its
decision. Only if the council fails to approve the serious consequences
it now invokes--generally understood to be military measures--should Washington
consider acting alone."
The time
to "judge Baghdad's overall cooperation and decide whether Iraq can be
disarmed by peaceful means alone," the Times noted in late December, would
be when Blix offered his report to the Security Council after the first
60 days of inspections. Now that moment has arrived-- and with it undeniable
proof that Baghdad has not offered the active cooperation deemed essential
by the Times. You might think, then, that the paper would cite its previous
criteria and endorse war. Not at all. Instead, the Times has already raised
the bar. An editorial published the day after Blix's report pleaded that
"the inspectors should be granted additional time" so they can "produce
evidence that would mobilize an international consensus for additional
steps." This echoed the logic of the previous Sunday's editorial, which
declared, "There are some threats and some causes that require fighting
even if America has to fight alone, but this isn't one of them." Disarmament,
which the paper previously called "the unwavering goal" and "the lodestar
of American and United Nations policy," has been reduced to a mere preference
to be undertaken only if or when international opinion embraces it.
The most
curious feature of moderate anti-war sentiment, at the Times and elsewhere,
is its refusal to engage with the central question: Would Iraq, if permitted
to rebuild its nuclear, biological, and chemical arsenal, pose a threat
to the United States? We believe the answer is yes. The example of North
Korea demonstrates that when a hostile, irrational state obtains nuclear
weapons, it immediately intimidates its neighbors, opens the possibility
of passing such weapons to terrorists or other enemy regimes, and leaves
the United States with few diplomatic tools to work with other than appeasement.
Saddam's megalomaniacal aspirations and repeated pattern of aggression
make him an even less attractive candidate to join the nuclear club than
Kim Jong Il.
Antiwar liberals
do not dispute this logic, they elide it. Liberals' most pervasive intellectual
tic has been to argue against war on the grounds that somebody else is
against it. Usually, that somebody else is our international allies, whom
war critics have granted not merely consultation but full veto power over
any military action. Earlier this week, the Times threw up another impediment:
"The American public has not signed on," argued Sunday's editorial--an
odd new standard, given that the paper has previously endorsed interventions
both real (Kosovo) and hypothetical (Rwanda) that notched even lower levels
of public approval. But if a nuclear-armed Iraq does pose a threat, then
surely it's a threat worth diffusing, not only through inspectors but,
if need be, unilaterally or without overwhelming public support.
Recently
antiwar liberals have found yet another way to oppose the war without
seeming to oppose the war: They say the United States should wait and
"let the inspections work." Waiting would indeed be worthwhile if it boosted
the odds of gaining world support for war or of Iraq's agreeing to disarm.
But the truth is that, in either case, delaying is likely to have the
opposite effect.
Nobody seriously
disputes that Iraq is in material breach of the U.N. disarmament resolutions.
The logic of waiting, after a dozen years of Iraqi refusal to disarm,
is that somehow Saddam will become "more" in material breach. But Iraqi
violations to date hardly constitute a technicality. Weapons inspections
simply can't work against the will of the host country. Previous inspectors
owed whatever breakthroughs they achieved to conditions--such as the unexpected
defection of Saddam's brother-in-law--that are unlikely to be repeated.
It would be ideal if Saddam could be persuaded to make a clean breast
of it and disarm voluntarily. But letting his current recalcitrance continue
indefinitely is probably the worst imaginable strategy to persuade him
to do so. Allowing Iraq's current noncooperation to go unpunished would
codify it as the new baseline, and only a more flagrant defiance would
then constitute a casus belli. The level of defiance most objectors seem
to have in mind is the "smoking gun." But the chance of finding such a
thing without Iraqi help is small. For one thing, Iraqi intelligence may
well have infiltrated the weapons inspectors, as it did with previous
U.N. teams. For another, it would take an astonishing blunder by Iraq
to allow inspectors to uncover a weapons program of real note. Suppose
the inspectors did get a tip on, say, a nuclear weapons plant and managed
to descend upon it unannounced. No doubt the Iraqis would simply refuse
the inspectors entry while they smuggled out or destroyed incriminating
evidence. The most incriminating thing Iraq will ever be accused of is
denying access to a sensitive site.
Indeed, the
supposition that any level of Iraqi defiance would spur the Security Council
to authorize war is ahistorical. During the 1990s, our non-British allies
compiled a record of consistent appeasement. After Iraq whittled away
at the prerogatives of weapons inspectors, going so far as to deem areas
as large as Washington "presidential palaces" and thus off-limits, China,
France, and Russia refused to back even a toothless resolution admonishing
Iraq for its lack of cooperation. After Iraq expelled the inspectors,
France and Russia opposed pinprick bombing. If they considered bombing
too strong a response to massive violations then, why would they support
the vastly stronger alternative of full invasion in response to weaker
violations now? It may be that our allies' reluctance to enforce Iraqi
disarmament stems in part from their distaste for Bush and his cowboy
style, disregard for environmental accords, and fondness for protectionism.
But the lack of commitment to Iraqi disarmament on the part of France,
Germany, and Russia long predates the Bush administration. And yet many
American liberals prefer to reside in an alternate universe where the
United Nations stands poised to defang Saddam if only the United States
would be just a bit more reasonable.
There is
one sentence in Tuesday's Times editorial that comes closest to expressing
the true sentiments of antiwar liberals: "The world must be reassured
that every possibility of a peaceful solution has been fully explored."
Consider the implications: The character of the Iraqi crisis is such that
there is always the possibility of a peaceful solution. At every point
in time, Saddam permits the minimal level of inspections cooperation he
can get away with. Whenever he is threatened, he backs down until the
crisis subsides, only to ratchet up his defiance later. The only logical
end to this cycle is Saddam's successful acquisition of a nuclear weapon,
at which point disarmament, forcible or otherwise, will no longer be an
option. Indeed, this would be the actual result of the policy favored
by antiwar liberals--whether they consciously desire it or not.
the Editors
†
Back
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------------------------------------------------------------------------
Iraq's
irrational appeasers
By Melanie Phillips
The Daily
Mail, January 27 2003.
This is a
critical week for the future of Iraq and the alliance between Britain
and America. Today, the UNís chief weapons inspector Hans Blix reports
to the Security Council on his progress.† Tomorrow, President George W†
Bush makes his seminal State of the Union address, and on Friday Tony
Blair is to meet him at Camp David for a council of war.
†
It is also a fateful week for the Prime Minister. For he now realises
that he has still failed to persuade the British public of the case for
war. According to a YouGov poll at the weekend, just over a quarter of
respondents said they were convinced that Saddam Hussein was sufficiently
dangerous to justify military action. And only one in five would support
war without UN backing.
†
Meanwhile, Mr Blairís self-appointed role as the bridge between the US
and Europe has been holed below the waterline by the declared hostility
to war of France and Germany.
†
President Bush, aware that opposition is also growing amongst the American
public, is saying the inspectors should be given more time. But the world
has already waited 11 years for proof that Saddam has destroyed his capacity
to build weapons of mass destruction.†
†
Mr Blair says that in the absence of a second UN resolution, war would
be justified if the inspectors said Iraq had obstructed them. But Mr Blix
says his report will be ëa mixed bagí ? in other words, it will provide
ammunition for both liberators and appeasers.
†
In this tumult, the Prime Minister has been criticised for not making
the case for war effectively enough. In fact, the case has been made,
but the public will not accept it.† Instead, myths have achieved the status
of killer arguments.
†
Myth number one is that no ësmoking guní has been found. But the west
doesnít have to produce a smoking gun. It is Saddam who is required to
produce the evidence that he has complied with the terms of the 1991 Gulf
War cease-fire.
†
This made it a condition that Saddam destroy his weapons of mass destruction
and prove that he had done so, because he was rightly considered a huge
menace to the world.
†
Repeatedly declaring his intention to become the leader of the Arabs,
he had already invaded and attacked a number of countries, posing a direct
threat to western interests. If he became armed with weapons of mass destruction,
this threat would then paralyse the west.
†
That danger has never gone away. Much US and British intelligence obviously
cannot be revealed, as it would compromise vital sources. But the burden
of proof lies not with the west but with Saddam to prove he has got rid
of the weapons we know he had.
†
Yet he has failed to produce a single document on the fate of his known
stockpile of deadly VX nerve gas, or the anthrax or botulinum he had amassed.
He has failed to explain his known attempt to procure enriched uranium
from abroad, or his manufacture of specific fuel for ballistic missiles
that he claims not to possess.†
†
In recent weeks, the inspectors have discovered chemical warheads ? showing
Saddam lied when he said he had no weapons of mass destruction ? along
with† 3,000 documents revealing his continuing efforts to build nuclear
weapons.†
†
We know he has issued his troops with chemical protection suits ? against
the effects of the weapons he says he hasnít got. Similarly, we know from
US intelligence that last autumn he ordered more than 1.2 million doses†
of the standard antidote for soldiers likely to be exposed to poison gas,
and 25 metric tons of powder which makes chemical dust weapons.
†
We know he has threatened his scientists with death if they talk, and
that he has hidden weapons in friendly countries such as Syria. Yet all
this evidence is simply dismissed by the British public.
†
The second myth is that he doesnít have the missiles to threaten us. But
missiles are not necessary. As we have seen from the ricin plot, terrorists
can easily be supplied with chemical or biological agents, and Saddam
is a godfather of terrorism.
†
The third myth is that President Bushís real agenda is to seize the Iraqi
oilfields. In view of the known threat posed by Saddam, this theory is
truly bizarre. Yes, oil is vital for the west; hence the Gulf War when
Saddam invaded Kuwait. It is Saddam who wages wars for oil.
†
In America, by contrast, the oil interest has meant until now that America
turned a blind eye to tyranny as long as the oil kept flowing. Indeed,
the oil interest still paralyses any action against Saudi Arabia, a fount
of world terror.
†
These myths are simply irrational. The key fact remains that Saddam has
refused to prove he is no longer a menace to our lives and our interests.†
So why do three quarters of us no longer believe this threat?
†
There are several explanations. The first is the passage of time since
the Gulf War, creating the belief that only a fresh invasion (or the discovery
of a nuclear missile with ëLondoní stencilled on its side) can justify
action.
†
The second is the widespread distrust of politicians as unprincipled opportunists.
But if that judgment is true here, why should President Bush be risking
his political future like this? Why should Mr Blair be setting himself
so dangerously against his party, his country and his important friends
in Europe?
†
The third is the failure to understand the reality of Islamist fascism.
Many believe this is merely Americaís war, and Britain is needlessly getting
involved. But look at what is now being unearthed by police in Italy and
Spain -- terrorist cells targeting cities all over appeasement-minded
Europe.
†
For the Islamist tiger ? being ridden by secular Saddam for all he is
worth ? is roaring its death threats to ëCrusaders and Zionistsí, or Christians
and Jews; in other words, to western civilisation in general.
†
This is constantly illustrated by the repeated Islamist attacks on Christian
communities around the world.† Yet few in Britain are aware of this persecution
because it is ignored, not only by the media but ? astonishingly ? by
the churches.
†
Instead, British clerics parrot the fashionable anti-Americanism which
invariably blames the west for the misdeeds of the third world, which
it casts as the helpless victims of western imperialism.
†
At a deeper level still, there is now a vast difference between American
and European attitudes. The US believes in itself strongly as a nation,
is deeply religious and is prepared to fight to defend its values. Europe,
by contrast, is post-nationalist, post-Christian (including many bishops)
and pacifist.
†
But in a battle between Islamists who are prepared to kill and to die
for their beliefs, and European liberals who have come to believe that
all war is bad and must be replaced by supra-national talking-shops and
peace at any price, there is no contest.†††
†
When a civilisation no longer has the stomach to fight for its existence,
and views its own self-defence as unwarranted aggression, it has signed
its own death-warrant.
Back
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Clear
Ties Of Terror
By William Safire
New York
Times, January 27, 2003
WASHINGTON
- In the days following the Sept. 11 attacks, Secretary of State Colin
Powell could find "no clear link" between Osama bin Laden and Saddam Hussein.
One soon
appeared. On Sept. 24, 2001, I reported: "The clear link between the terrorist
in hiding [Osama] and the terrorist in power [Saddam] can be found in
Kurdistan, that northern portion of Iraq protected by U.S. and British
aircraft. . . . Kurdish sources tell me (and anyone else who will listen)
that the Iraqi dictator has armed and financed a fifth column of Al Qaeda
mullahs and terrorists. . . ."
The C.I.A.
would not listen. Through credulous media outlets, the agency - embarrassed
by its pre-Sept. 11 inadequacies - sought to discredit all intelligence
about this force of 600 terrorists. Called Ansar al Islam, and led by
Osama's Arabs trained in Afghanistan, they were sent in with Saddam's
support to establish an enclave in the no-flight zone. One assignment
was to assassinate the free Kurds who made up the only anti-Saddam leadership
inside Iraq.
Well armed
and financed by both Iraq and Iran, this affiliate of Al Qaeda has since
provided a haven for bin Laden followers exfiltrating from Afghanistan.
They tried to assassinate an articulate Kurdish leader, Barham Salih,
killing several bodyguards, but their target escaped and several killers
were captured. Our National Security Council members did not learn about
this bloody engagement, one of them told me a week afterward, until they
read about it in The Times.
The Kurds
induced the captives and some defectors to reveal that the Ansar cell
of Al Qaeda had begun producing poisonous chemicals for export. One product
was reported here to be a cyanide cream being smuggled through Turkey.
The operation was set up by a man with a limp, the informants said, a
key bin Laden lieutenant, Abu Musaab al-Zarqawi. ( I misspelled that name
a few weeks ago.)
The C.I.A.
continued to pooh-pooh any connection between Ansar and Saddam. But reporter
Jeff Goldberg of The New Yorker and more recently C. J. Chivers of The
Times went into Iraq and interviewed some of the captured terrorists.
Such reporting eroded the "no clear link" line put out by opponents of
action against Saddam.
Late last
summer, Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld declared publicly "There are
Al Qaeda in a number of locations in Iraq," which was met with a derisive
"no one's got proof" headline. The C.I.A. resisted a proposal to send
a covert force into Iraqi Kurdistan to destroy the secret chemical weapons
lab.
On Oct. 8
of last year President Bush made public a little more of what we learned.
"Some Al Qaeda leaders who fled Afghanistan went to Iraq," he told a Cincinnati
audience. "These include one very senior Al Qaeda leader who received
medical treatment in Baghdad this year, and who has been associated with
planning for chemical and biological attacks."
That was
Zarqawi. Long sought in Jordan for terrorist attacks (most recently the
assassination of the U.S. diplomat Laurence Foley in Amman), he joined
bin Laden in Afghanistan. After the Taliban defeat, Zarqawi slipped out
of that country through Iran and made his way to a Baghdad hospital, where
his injured leg was treated or amputated, certainly with the knowledge
of Saddam's mukhabarat secret police. He was then dispatched to Al Qaeda's
Ansar cell in Iraqi Kurdistan, reported the captives who worked with him
in the mountains, to create the terrorist poison laboratory.
British intelligence
believes the limping terrorist took one of his products, ricin, to Algerian
contacts in Turkey. This is a poison that can be delivered in warheads
and one well known to Iraqi chemists, who cannot speak to U.N. inspectors.
Two weeks ago, a British detective, Stephen Oake, was killed arresting
Algerians suspected of making ricin in North London.
American
"counterterrorism officials" are still in angry denial about the pattern
they refused to see that connects Qaeda terrorists in hiding with Iraqi
terrorists in power.
But even
the Bush administration's most reluctant warrior has come to accept the
validity of the link that embattled Kurds have been trying to warn us
of since Sept. 11: Saddam and the followers of bin Laden are bedfellows.
Iraq, concluded
Secretary of State Colin Powell this weekend in Switzerland, has "clear
ties to terrorist groups, including Al Qaeda."
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