Today a decade after Operation Desert Storm, Saddam Hussein has freed himself from controls over his weapons of mass destruction. He is rebuilding his chemical and biological weapons and the nuclear weapon, which was almost within his grasp in 1990, is back on his drawing board, front and center. He is extending the range of his missiles that could carry these weapons to Israel, Iran or beyond. Any use of these weapons, directly or through terrorist action in major cities—New York or London—could kill millions. The world would be thrown into chaos. And the ensuing disaster will be all the more tragic because it could have been avoided.
Civilization may face no greater enemy than Saddam Hussein, and yet, as Richard Butler makes clear in his gripping and terrifying The Greatest Threat, the major powers allowed Saddam to face them down. Richard Butler was not the type to surrender to the Iraqis, not when he knew what was at stake. As the head of UNSCOM, the special United Nations Commission that was supposed to regularly inspect Iraq for weapons violations, Butler was the world's "sheriff"—the one person on the ground with the authority to shut the Iraqis down if he caught them cheating. But that authority was undermined behind his back. Kofi Annan, in the name of diplomacy, agreed to Hussein's outrageous demands and then claimed victory. Russia's Foreign Minister took secret payoffs from the Iraqis in exchange for his support. The French, eager to do business with the dictator, undercut American efforts to force Hussein to comply. Butler found himself the target of a major Iraqi and Russian propaganda campaign and, ultimately, alone.
The Greatest Threat tells the inside story of the UN's failed attempt to stop Saddam and explains the terrible cost of that failure. It also presents a striking new vision for how Iraq's weapons of mass destruction program—and such programs in general—can be stopped. An arousing, disturbing and important work. The Greatest Threat is essential reading for anyone who cares about the fate of the globe.
Ambassador Richard Butler was appointed to lead UNSCOM on July 1. 1997. From 1992-1997, Butler was the Australian Ambassador and permanent representative to the United Nations. In 1994. Butler was elected President of the Economic and Social Council of the United Nations, in 1995 he chaired the Canberra Commission on the Elimination of Nuclear Weapons, and in 1996 Butler led the United Nations to adopt a comprehensive nuclear test ban treaty. Butter is now Diplomat in Residence at the Council on Foreign Relations. He and his wife live in New York.
Contents
Acknowledgments / xi
Map of Iraq and Surrounding Regions / xiv
Introduction / xv
1. A Glimpse of Terror / 1 2. Peace as a Career / 12 3. To Disarm Saddam / 34 4. The Summons / 55 5. What Honeymoon? / 72
6. The Russians Make Their Move / 93 7. The Resistance Stiffens / 111 8. Kofi Annan Goes to Baghdad / 127 9. Road Map to Nowhere / 155 10. The Five-Dollar Bet / 169
11. The Final Deception / 187 12. Desert Fox and the Twilight of UNSCOM / 200 13. Son of UNSCOM / 222 14. Conclusion: The Principle of the Exception / 233
Notes on Sources / 243
Index / 249
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
Very many people deserve thanks and recognition for the part they have played in this book and, far beyond that, over the years in their work in arms control and disarmament and for the help and friendship they have given me. Some of them are named in the text that follows but, of necessity, not all. I thank them all and hope they will stay the course and stay well.
At this point, my deepest gratitude goes to the men and women of United Nations Special Commission, all of them. Their work for UNSCOM and the sacrifices they made were unique. That they were treated wrongly in the end was a product of flawed politics. History will do them justice. It was the greatest privilege of my professional life to have worked with them. And I will never forget their friendship and solidarity.
This book was prepared at the Council on Foreign Relations, New York, the place I went to as Diplomat in Residence when my time at UNSCOM ended. The president of the Council, Les Gelb, offered me that place, for which I was and remain deeply grateful. Les and the organization he and its chairman, Pete Peterson, brilliantly lead deserve its recognition as the premier institution for die study of international relations and security issues, certainly in the English-speaking world.
The Council on Foreign Relations houses the journal Foreign Affairs, also a product which has no equal. I am indebted to its editor, James Hoge, for his advice, assistance, and comments on my manuscript.
My writing project and my place at the Council has been direcdy supported by the generosity of: Joseph H. Flom, Yue-Sai Kan, Stephen M. Kellen, The Albert Kunstadter Family Foundation, Mr. and Mrs. Leonard A. Lauder, Ronald Lauder, Nina Rosenwald, Paul and Daisy Soros, Donald and Barbara Tober, Stanley A. Weiss, Ezra Zilkha, and Mortimer B. Zuckerman. I thank them for their faith in me and this project. I hope its result will not disappoint them. Their support was crucial.
Also, at the Council and as a consequence of the financial support to which I have just referred, I was provided with a research assistant, Leonardo Arriola, a recent master’s graduate from the Woodrow Wilson School at Princeton University. Leo worked tirelessly with me in the research and preparation of the manuscript. He is a fine product of the United States and his Mexican family, gifted with intelligence, civility, and humor. I am certain we will all hear much more of him in the future.
Writing a book, in contrast to the speeches and documents that were the stuff of my career as a diplomat, was a new task for me and not easy. The way was smoothed through the assistance of the remarkable Karl Weber, whose clear sight of language and ideas is extraordinary. He was generously provided to me by my publisher, PublicAffairs, the head of which, Peter Osnos, and senior editor Geoff Shandler, played their part in preparing this book at the highest levels of their craft.
Something of a leap of faith was required from others in their agreement to support this book, and key among those who made that leap were my literary agent Amanda Urban of International Creative Management and Lord Weidenfeld of Weidenfeld and Nicolson, London.
Among those who read my drafts and whose critical judgment made a difference were: Dr. Rachel Bronson, Olin Fellow for National Security Studies, Council on Foreign Relations, New York, whose extensive consideration of the draft was immensely helpful; Jacqueline Shire, a former officer of the U.S. State Department and UNSCOM; and the remarkable A. M. Rosenthal, whose distinguished career at the New York Times spanned fifty-five years and who is widely regarded as having shaped the modern form of the newspaper during the fifteen years in which he was its managing editor. Former Deputy Executive Chairman of UNSCOM, Charles Duelfer, also offered useful comments.
Early and hard work in physically preparing the original draffs was done by Fiona Gosschalk, a young Australian woman who had given wonderful assistance to my wife and me when I was Australian ambassador to the United Nations. My family’s resettlement from official to private life in New York was generously facilitated by Mr. Lewis Rudin, We thank him.
I am grateful for the protection given me by the security officers of the United Nations, led by their chief, Mike McCann. Two of those officers, in particular, were close to me and deserve my special thanks and recognition: Dennis Grimm and Moataz Mohamed Khalil.
I thank the members of my family, especially my wife and children, for their loving support and forbearance during the UNSCOM period. My father was always very worried about my safety while I was in Iraq. In that sense he probably came to share the Russian view, although for his own reasons, that it was best that I stop doing it. My mother, who in 1983 cried when I was made Australian Ambassador for Disarmament, explaining that her tears were not because I’d been made an ambassador, but because it was for disarmament, she had no fears for my safety in Iraq because she was then deep into Alzheimer’s disease. She is now at peace.
INTRODUCTION
The greatest threat to life on earth is weapons of mass destruction—nuclear, chemical, biological.
These weapons do not exist in nature. They have been made by man, generally as the result of sophisticated research and complex, costly processes. Ironically, they are the product of some of the highest science, knowledge that should be applied to saving life rather than ending it.
The community of nations has recognized this threat; indeed, perhaps its most important achievement in the second half of the twentieth century was the weaving of a tapestry of treaties designed to contain and then eliminate it. This work was never easy, and its implementation has been challenged repeatedly. The most determined and diabolical of such challenges has been that mounted by the dictator of Iraq—Saddam Hussein.
For almost two decades, he has sought to acquire these weapons and the means of their delivery. In most cases, he has been successful and even took the further step of actually using them. This included their use against the people of Iraq. He shares with Adolf Hitler the infamy of having used chemicals for genocidal purposes.
Ten years ago, in response to this challenge to law and civilization, the community of nations isolated Iraq and imposed upon it stringent requirements for the removal of its weapons of mass destruction. That effort produced some good results, but it was opposed, root and branch, by Saddam. Every step in disarmament; every discovery and destruction of weapons and the means to make them, was achieved in the face of Iraqi concealment, deception, lying, and threats. The result is that, notwithstanding the massive amount of time and resources that were devoted to this job, it is not known, accurately, what capability for making and using weapons of mass destruction Saddam retains.
This lamentable fact is mirrored in the politics that has enabled Saddam to succeed in his defiance of international law. Three permanent members of the Security Council of the United Nations—the lawmaker and enforcer in this field—have decided to end any serious effort to disarm Saddam, to oblige him to conform with the law. Russia, France, and China have done this because they prefer to pursue their own national interests rather than to carry out their international responsibility. Also, in 1998, at a key moment of extreme defiance by Saddam, the secretary-general of the United Nations, in many respects the guardian of the law, sought to solve the crisis through diplomatic means substantially disconnected from the matters of substance—weapons of mass destruction and the authority of international law.
In addition, during my time at UNSCOM, members of the Security Council increasingly sought to shift political responsibility to me for their failure to enforce their own law. They asked me to make judgments about the threat posed by Iraq, an issue well beyond my mandate and one that they alone could settle. When I pointed out that they were asking me the wrong question, they resented it. When I gave them the facts as I knew them and for which I was competent and responsible, if they didn’t like these facts, they joined Iraq in charging that UNSCOM, not Iraq, was the problem.
Nowhere in my mandate was it stated that I should decide on or recommend military action. But in November 1998, the Security Council instructed me to produce a factual report on Iraqi compliance against a background where, if my report showed Iraq was not in compliance, there was likely to be military action by the United States and Britain. My job was to report on the disarmament facts. I did so and military action followed, in December 1998.
It could be argued that I should have deciphered the political code: report negatively on Iraq’s conduct and there will be war; if you don’t want that, don’t report negatively; this is not about facts, it’s about politics. I “read” the code, thought long and hard about it, and decided to report the facts because to do otherwise would have involved revising the record of the preceding seven years of work on disarming Iraq; and what was at issue was truly serious—weapons that remained unaccounted for.
At one stage in discussing the problems surrounding my December 1998 report, I explained to Secretary-General Annan that among my concerns was a situation in which we came to terms with the political demands to declare Iraq disarmed only to see, say a year later, the launch of a prohibited Iraqi missile. This would be a disaster as such and for the UN. We must stick to the facts. He seemed to agree.
The important aspect of this shabby passage of events is what it has revealed about the state of high international politics today. In addition to setting the record straight, this book suggests a way in which those politics may be changed in order to address the unique threat to humanity posed by weapons of mass destruction.
Saddam seized the opportunity these political machinations presented. He cut and ran, returning to the business at hand: building up a terrifying arsenal of weapons of mass destruction.While the full nature and scope of his current programs cannot be known precisely because of the absence of inspections and monitoring, it would be foolish in the extreme not to assume that he is developing long-range missile capability, at work again on building nuclear weapons, and adding to the chemical and biological warfare weapons he concealed during the UNSCOM inspection period. This reflects his track record, capabilities and intentions, and the scattered evidence that continues to emerge outside Iraq.
The failure to complete the task of disarming Saddam and the politics on which it has rested—including the failure of the Security Council to maintain its own authority—constitutes a serious crisis in global security.
…..
The Greatest Threat Richard Butler
PublicAffairs
PublicAffairs The Greatest Threat Iraq, Weapons of Mass Destruction, and the Crisis of Global Security Richard Butler
Published in the United States by PublicAffairs™, a member of the Perseus Books Group.
All rights reserved. Printed in the United States of America.
No part of this book may be reproduced in any manner whatsoever Without Written Permission Except In The Case Of Brief Quotations Embodied In Critical Articles And Reviews. For Information, Address PublicAffairs, 250 West 57TH Street, Suite 1321, New York, NY 10107.
Book design by Jenny Dossin.
Library of Congress Cataloging- in-Publication Data Butler, Richard, 1942- The greatest threat: Iraq, weapons of mass destruction, and The Growing Crisis of Global Security / By Rlchard Butler P. CM. Includes index ISBN 1-891620-53-3
1. United Nations. Special Commission on Iraq. 2. Iraq—Military policy. 3. Weapons of mass destruction— Iraq. 4. Arms control—Verification—Iraq. 5. Security, International. 6. World politics — 1989- I. Title.
DS79.755.B88 2000 327.i '745'o9567—DC21 00-029098
First Edition 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
The only thing necessary for the triumph of evil is for good men to do nothing. —Edmund Burke
