Volume 1, Issue 3
July 2002

Iraq's Texas Two-Step

by Kelly Motz

Iraq and UN Secretary General Kofi Annan have just completed the third in a series of talks on the resumption of weapons inspections. On the surface, these talks are a mysterious exercise; they have not yielded any progress or signaled any change in Iraq's position.

Their puzzling nature leads one to suspect there is a second motive: to establish a channel of communication that can be used later, when war clouds may gather, to thwart US President George W. Bush's plans for military action. Iraq is dancing around the disarmament requirements of the UN Security Council in the hope of getting better treatment from a more pliant Secretary General.

Iraq has a history of going to the Secretary General when it can't get what it wants from the Security Council. Unfortunately, this tactic has sometimes worked. Back in October 1997, when inspectors were still allowed into the country, Iraq denied them access to eight vast areas that it dubbed "presidential sites." To avoid military retaliation from the United States, Iraq went to Annan and succeeded in negotiating a "Memorandum of Understanding" (MOU) that in fact hamstrung the inspectors.

Under the MOU, signed in February 1998, Annan agreed to require inspectors to take along representatives of a new "Special Group" of diplomats (babysitters chosen by Annan) on their inspections, and to notify Iraq in advance of any inspection and even of the composition of the inspection teams. The inspectors, of course, found nothing using these procedures, which amounted to a sell-out of the principles of immediate, unconditional and unrestricted access that had enabled the inspectors to do their jobs in the first place. Annan did all this under the rubric of Iraq's "sovereignty and territorial integrity," buzzwords that Iraq is still touting in the current series of talks.

Iraq chose to pursue the Secretary General again in November 2000, when Iraqi officials got Annan to meet with them on the sidelines of an Islamic summit in Qatar, where, according to the Iraqi foreign minister, Annan agreed to open a "comprehensive dialogue between the United Nations and Baghdad without preconditions." Three months later, Annan met Iraqi officials in New York to discuss the resumption of inspections and the lifting of sanctions. These discussions went nowhere, but a channel was opened, and Iraq had set an important precedent for stepping around the Security Council.

The talks over the past four months have revealed what Iraq hopes this channel will yield. Iraq wants it to be there if war becomes imminent. Saddam Hussein seems all but certain to propose a last-minute inspection deal to Annan - probably with Russian and French backing - before the tanks begin to roll. It was no coincidence that Iraq launched the talks when US rhetoric favoring an attack was at its height, and then postponed them when the United States became distracted by the Arab-Israeli inferno.

The problem with Iraq's tactics is that they are becoming transparent. And, Kofi Annan has run out of room to negotiate. The UN inspection organizations take their orders from the UN Security Council, not the Secretary General, and the United States is insisting on the point. In March, US Secretary of State Colin Powell made it perfectly clear that the Secretary General's leash is short in these talks: "It should be a very short discussion," Powell said, "the inspectors have to go back under our terms." His spokesman reiterated this position in May, saying "there is no need for a long discussion between the UN and the Iraqi government about this; Iraq's obligations are well known."

Thus, the talks can't produce anything useful - for now. What they can do is create the illusion of movement while Iraq avoids dealing with the Security Council.

While this side-stepping two-step continues, the threat from Iraq increases. Based on the last inspection reports, we know that Iraq has retained mass destruction weapon stocks and the means to make more. The most worrisome items include missing VX nerve gas and thousands of tons of other poison gases, great quantities of growth media for anthrax, missing aerial bombs and missile warheads intended for use with germ weapons, and up to 9 Scud-type missiles. Iraq has also kept its teams of weapon scientists intact. We also know that Iraq is rebuilding sites that before the Gulf war were making biological weapons, chemical weapons, ballistic missiles and working in uranium production. And we know Iraq is still running smuggling networks tasked to bring in what its weapon sites will need. What we do not know is how far along the path Iraq has gone. Every day that passes, the risk grows.