Iraq and the exit of the UN weapons inspectors in December 1998 http://www.arabmediawatch.com/iraq/mythofunscom98.htm
In April 1991, at the end of the Gulf War, the United Nations Security Council established
an ad hoc Special Commission, UNSCOM, to carry out on-site inspections of Iraq's biological, chemical and
missile capabilities, and to destroy (or monitor the Iraqi destruction of) any facilities that were found.
UNSCOM carried out inspections intermittently in Iraq until December 1998. During this period, UNSCOM often
complained that the Iraqi authorities were obstructing its monitoring work. Iraq, in turn, claimed that
UNSCOM was overly intrusive, especially in its attempts to search so-called "presidential sites"
without giving any prior notice; and that its arms inspections teams included US "spies".
On 15 December 1998, Richard Butler, the Executive Chairman of UNSCOM, reported
to the Security Council that Iraq had failed to grant UNSCOM full and unconditional access to (at least)
four sites in Iraq. In anticipation of the airstrikes that the US and UK governments were threatening,
Butler ordered weapons inspectors to be withdrawn on the following day, December 16. Airstrikes -
"Operation Desert Fox" - immediately followed.
These events were reported accurately at the time by most major media outlets. For example, Josh
Friedman wrote in the New York Times on 17 Dec 1998:
"While
the 133 [UN humanitarian] workers had been left behind, more than 185 others, most of them arms inspectors,
had been evacuated yesterday by air to neighboring Bahrain and by car to Jordan ... Butler abruptly pulled
all of his inspectors out of Iraq shortly after handing Annan a report yesterday afternoon on Baghdad's
continued failure to cooperate with UNSCOM".
The chronology
on UNSCOM's own website reports this event:
16
Dec 1998: The Special Commission withdraws its staff from Iraq.
In withdrawing the arms inspectors, Richard Butler acted
unilaterally: he did not wait for the Security Council to assess his report and to make any decisions in
consequence of it. It was widely reported at the time that Peter Burleigh, US ambassador to the UN, had
"advised" Butler to withdraw his staff from Iraq immediately. The events are recounted in more
detail in Butler's book, Saddam Defiant: (2000):
"I
received a telephone call from US Ambassador Peter Burleigh inviting me for a private conversation at the US
mission [...] Burleigh informed me that on instructions from Washington it would be 'prudent to take
measures to ensure the safety and security of UNSCOM staff presently in Iraq.' I told him that I would act
on his advice and remove my staff from Iraq."
Given that the chain of events is so well established, it
is surprising that many commentators and politicians have claimed since 1999 that Iraq "expelled"
the weapons inspectors in December 1998. This mistake has been made not only by hawks such as President
George W. Bush in his State
of the Union address
("the axis of evil" speech), Dick
Cheney
(before he became vice-president), Alexander
Rose,
the Canadian right-wing Washington correspondent of the National Post, and the editorial
writers of the Sunday Times.
It has also been repeated by those who have shown concern for the humanitarian situation in Iraq, such as
the International
Committee of the Red Cross, Liberal Democrats foreign affairs spokesperson Menzies Campbell, and the
usually superb Guardian Middle East editor Brian
Whitaker.
The BBC often makes this mistake, and usually acknowledges its error when it is pointed out to them.
It was hardly unpredictable that the Iraqi regime would
refuse after December 1998 to re-admit the arms inspectors who had been withdrawn so that Iraq could be
bombed. Ironically, Iraq has been giving the same reason that the US offered in December 2001 for refusing
to sign up to a convention that would be effective in prohibiting biological weapons: on-site inspectors are
unacceptable because they would spy.
In the present climate of tension in relations between
Iraq and other countries - with widespread speculation that the US will justify military attacks on Iraq in
terms of the absence of arms inspectors - a valid account of the events that led to that absence would seem
especially important.
I thought you might be interested in a few words of
comment on the developing crisis which might be useful in campaigning.
The standard line is that this is a crisis about Iraq's Weapons of Mass Destruction (WMD) programmes, caused
by Iraqi non-compliance with UN resolutions. Therefore, the argument goes, Iraq will only comply if
major military threats are made, and anyway as Saddam has never complied so far, we have to be prepared to
go to war to get rid of him.
However, in December 1998, the UN weapons inspectors reported that:
- Iraq's nuclear weapon programme had been eliminated 'efficiently and effectively'
- the elimination of Iraq's chemical weapon and missile capabilities was almost complete
- disarmament work remained in the biological weapon area
- Iraq had still to provide further information in all
areas
- Iraq had agreed in principle to long-term monitoring but not to a specific system.
[On the other elements of UN Security Council Resolution 687, Iraq has recognised Kuwait, has returned some
but not all Kuwaiti property, has returned some but not all missing persons, is paying compensation though
it has denied liability in principle, has not sponsored international terrorism for 10 years according to
the CIA but has denied ever sponsoring it and has not fully agreed to servicing all of its external debt]
In other words, far from simply not complying, Iraq had complied with most of what had been asked of it
(however grudgingly). It is a fantasy that, as is so often said, Iraq will never comply as long as Saddam is
in charge. The UN resolutions allow for partial relaxation of sanctions in reward for partial compliance but
this was never offered.
Indeed, before this report was delivered to the Security Council, the US and Britain brought about the
withdrawal of UN inspectors and launched their Operation Desert Fox bombing of Iraq without Security Council
approval. Iraq has refused to allow the inspectors related to resolution 687 back ever since.
If US policy really was driven by the need to disarm Iraq of WMD then it has been irrational. Their response
to incomplete but extensive compliance has been to label it non-compliance, bomb Iraq and call for the
overthrow of Iraq's leader. This hardly creates any incentive to comply any further. There has always been a
significant thread of US and British opinion who have feared that Iraq will comply because sanctions might
then be lifted.
If US policy is rational, then disarmament of Iraq's WMD has not been its priority: instead, the priority,
stated all along has been to keep the pressure on for as long as it takes to get rid of Saddam Hussein (as
Mil Rai puts it, leadership change, not regime change, which they are actually very frightened of, as
indicated by their response to the 1991 uprising: they want rid of him, not the brutal system that runs
Iraq). If Iraq had complied fully despite the bombing, maybe the US would have been forced to accept the
lifting of the sanctions. That is indeed my guess. But it is also possible that the US would have been able
to ensure that Iraq was never declared to be fully in compliance. And it doesn't change the point that US
policy makes no sense if it is meant to be aimed at prioritising getting rid of Iraq's WMD. The official US
policy objective of overthrowing Saddam represents non-compliance with the very UN resolutions with which
Iraq is meant to comply. The leadership change agenda has fundamentally undermined the
arms control agenda.
The dominant framing in coverage is very much a crisis of Iraqi WMD non-compliance. The reality is that the
crisis is one of continuing US non-compliance and unwillingness to respond to Iraqi compliance with most of
what has been asked of it. To put it bluntly, we are going to war on the basis of lies (some of the
people making the argument for war now know what the truth is) and self-deception (some of them believe
their own propaganda).
Best wishes
Dr. Eric Herring
Senior Lecturer in International Politics
Department of Politics
University of Bristol
10 Priory Road
Bristol BS8 1TU
England, UK
Office tel. +44-(0)117-928-8582
Mobile tel. +44-(0)7771-966608
Fax +44-(0)117-973-2133
http://www.bris.ac.uk/Depts/Politics
eric.herring@bristol.ac.uk