Global Policy Forum

By Charles Duelfer*

President Bush has said that Saddam Hussein must accept the return of the United Nations weapons inspectors . . . or else. This may not be a bad position -- so long as Hussein continues his flat refusal to accept the new U.N. weapons inspectors. The risk is that if he begins to feel a noose tightening around his regime and his neck, he may well accept a dialogue with the United Nations over accepting inspectors. There are two big problems with such an outcome.

First, defining the Iraqi problem in the limited terms of compliance with restrictions on weapons of mass destruction misses the broader risks posed by the regime to its own people and neighbors. Leaving the Iraq issue in the Security Council is a sure way to wrap a line around our propeller should we wish to address the Iraqi threat directly. It is easy to imagine Secretary General Kofi Annan feeling obligated to engage in a potentially endless dialogue with Baghdad to avoid war. He did this before, in 1998, producing an agreement with Hussein to permit the former weapons inspectors access to sensitive presidential areas under very limited conditions. (The agreement was broken later that year.) Certainly some members of the Security Council (such as Russia, France or China) would push him hard to engage in a process that would, so long as it continued, inhibit unilateral action by the United States. The clear objective of many in the Security Council is to contain the United States.

Baghdad has become quite astute at playing its tune in the Security Council. It combines defiance with a plea about the harm the council's resolutions have inflicted on innocent Iraqi citizens. At the same time, Iraq has skillfully used its oil contracts to give some Security Council members a strong interest in preserving the current regime, rather than condemning it for non-compliance or for its track record of invading other countries and using chemical weapons. The State Department's effort to get approval for the so-called "smart sanctions" has been going on for nearly a year, during which time Iraq's strength and influence in the region have continued to grow.

The second major risk of asking Hussein to accept inspectors is that the negotiations by the United Nations to get them into Iraq would almost certainly lead to a compromise on their freedom of action, which would not allow credible work to be done. Bear in mind that even when the aggressive previous inspection team, UNSCOM, was in Iraq, it could not fully monitor or prevent Iraq from engaging in prohibited activities. Presumably, this was why the Clinton administration conducted four days of bombing in December 1998.

The new inspection organization was created after a year of contentious negotiations in the Security Council between the United States and the United Kingdom and the supporters of Baghdad, Russia and France. It is a more U.N.-like organization intended to be more diverse, transparent and sensitive to cultural circumstances in Iraq.

This is all well and good, but the resolution contains no performance criteria to demand that the monitoring system be extensive enough for the chairman to make a firm judgment about whether Iraq is continuing work on weapons of mass destruction. All the organization must do is deploy some sort of monitoring system and report what it finds. Any system Iraq would accept is not likely to be intrusive enough to determine what Iraq is doing. Nevertheless, if Kofi Annan came to an agreement with Hussein there would be tremendous enthusiasm on the part of some council members to declare success. Washington would be hard-pressed to declare the terms inadequate. Once again we would have kicked the Iraq problem down the road without addressing the fundamental threats posed by the regime.

The U.N. Security Council may be valuable for some problems, but its utility for addressing the growing risks of the regime in Baghdad are limited. Its resolutions do limit Iraq's expenditures of its vast oil wealth. They do not address the threat of this regime to its own people, to regional states or to the United States, nor do they even prevent Iraq from acquiring weapons of mass destruction.

Washington needs to be explicit in stating the near-term and long-term risks presented by the regime in Baghdad. A decision to center U.S. policy toward Iraq in the U.N. Security Council will be an explicit decision to live with those risks -- for better or worse. Is that the intention? Before Sept. 11, we were awaiting a comprehensive Iraq policy. The president's statement about accepting weapons inspectors reminds us that we are still waiting.

*The writer was the deputy chairman of UNSCOM from 1993 until 2000 and is currently a visiting scholar at the Center for Strategic and International Studies.

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