Global Policy Forum

By Richard Butler

Richard Butler led the UN Special Commission to disarm Iraq in 1997-99. He was previously Australian ambassador to the UN and is now diplomat-in-residence at the Council on Foreign Relations, New York

The first missile of the Gulf War, which was launched 10 years ago today, was more than an action to expel Saddam Hussein's army of occupation from Kuwait.

It was the palpable sign that the Cold War had ended. If anyone doubts this, they should recall the impotence of the West in the face of the brutal Soviet invasions of Hungary in 1956 and Czechoslovakia in 1968.

Then-president George Bush (to be known, for the sake of clarity, after midday next Saturday as George I) declared that the formation of a coalition of 29 countries, including Australia, and their action against Iraq signalled that "a new world order" had dawned. It was significant that this was not a coalition of which the Soviet Union was a part.

The rationale for the Gulf War was to reverse a flagrant violation of international law. Saddam's invasion had been just that. In fact, Iraq's annexation of Kuwait as the 19th province of Iraq remains the only instance of a member state of the UN seeking to absorb a fellow member. It violated a cardinal principle of the UN charter.

The Realpolitik of the war was that it was to shore up global stability, including energy (oil) stability, and was only possible because the Soviet Union had been diminished as a global power. The motives for individual countries in joining the coalition were various, to say the least. As usual, Realpolitik had its dark side; its winners and losers, many of whom would later lose their taste for the fight.

The war against Saddam was legal, having the full blessing of the UN Security Council. Moscow acquiesced in this, very unhappily. It is significant that no comparable action has been mounted since; something which was glaringly evident eight years later when NATO, knowing that it could not obtain Security Council agreement for its action against Slobodan Milosevic over Kosovo (Russia and China would have vetoed), ignored the council and acted extra-legally.

Following the stunningly successful Gulf campaign, the Security Council established cease-fire conditions with unique features – a detailed requirement for the removal of all of Iraq's weapons of mass destruction, backed by the heaviest sanctions ever designed.

Ten years later, it is instructive to consider where matters now stand.

Iraq's weapons of mass destruction capacity has been significantly contained. Had the arms control actions not been taken, Iraq would possess nuclear weapons, an array of devastating chemical and biological weapons and long-range missiles to carry them. What Saddam would have done with them is beyond rational calculation.

The people of Kuwait had their sovereignty returned to them. They rebuilt their devastated country and the 250 oil wells that were set alight in a vindictive act of ecological warfare by the retreating Iraqi army.

For most of the past decade, other peoples of the region, with real reason to fear Saddam, have been able to sleep a bit easier.

Put simply, a tyrant with imperial ambitions had been slowed down. But there is now another side to those events 10 years later. Saddam is still there, and his take on the events of 1991 is that he won the war. Incredible though it may seem, this is the official Iraqi version, which claims that Bush, having recognised the valour and might of the Iraqi Republican Guard, surrendered. Saddam has boasted often that Bush is gone, Margaret Thatcher is gone, he even mentions Mikhail Gorbachev – but then proclaims he is still in power.

This trashing of the salient truth, and its broad acceptance at the level of the street in many Arab countries, illustrates the connected problems posed by Saddam and his weapons capability; the continuing travails of Israel and the Palestinians; the role of the Middle East and energy in world politics.

As a consequence of enthusiastic Russian support in the Security Council, Saddam has now been free of arms control for the past two years. Credible evidence strongly suggests that he has been hard at work redeveloping his weapons of choice – nuclear, chemical, biological.

Three days after the current fighting between Israelis and Palestinians began, Saddam stated a willingness to intervene to fix the problem of Israel. He made clear his approach to solving one of history's more complex problems by saying that the only reason Israel was able to act as it is was that for too long "Arab swords had been allowed to rust in their sheaths". He offered Iraqi military action against Israel.

The sanctions that supported the disarmament effort are no longer effective. Worse, they are now widely regarded as helping Saddam stay in power as they enable him to portray himself as the elemental battler for Iraq against the rest of the world.

Saddam has built a massive black market in oil, leading to his regime being awash with money, no small portion of which goes to his military and weapons.

On the legal oil trade, he is acutely aware that as Iraq possesses reserves second only to those of Saudi Arabia, any decision by him on volume pumped or withheld can instantly change the world price.

Saddam is not defeated. Sadly, the same is not true for 20 million ordinary Iraqis. They live under a regime the political currency of which is terror, and they continue to bear the crushing burden of Saddam's preference for weapons and power over bread and medicines. If at any time during the past 10 years Saddam had wanted sanctions removed, he could have achieved this by surrendering his weapons of mass destruction.

His refusal to make that choice and his sheer persistence has dissolved the Gulf War coalition and divided the great powers. The most sinister aspect of the latter has been seen in Russia and France's evident preference for resisting a world of one superpower over ensuring the enforcement of rules on Iraq's weapons of mass destruction, which they helped write.

The new president Bush, George II, is about to enter a new world. It will not be the new world order of which his father spoke. It doesn't exist.

In his election campaign, George W. Bush signalled that he favoured a national interest-based, unilateralist view of the exercise of US power. Whether intended or not, in many ways he painted exactly the picture that the detractors of the US and the opponents of a post-Cold War world dominated by one superpower (the French call it the hyperpower) point to as dangerous.

To solve this problem, he should start where his father left off with Saddam. He must make clear to the Russians and the French that whatever their allergy to US power may be, it must not be expressed in their support of Saddam. The weapons of mass destruction issues are too dangerous to all. Arms control of Saddam must be restored and if that means rethinking the role of sanctions, the US should be prepared to entertain such thinking. This would be a true exercise of great power.