U.S. POLICY TOWARD IRAQ

Hearing of the Committee on Foreign Relations
Before the Subcommittee on Near Eastern and South Asian Affairs

March 01, 2001

Letter to President Clinton

UNITED STATES SENATE, Washington, DC, March 22, 2000. President WILLIAM J. CLINTON The White House, Washington, DC.

DEAR MR. PRESIDENT:

As the UN Security Council continues to press to ensure Iraqis compliance with its international inspection obligations, and officials of your administration actively review policy options on Iraq, we are writing to express our deep concern about the ongoing humanitarian crisis there, and to urge greater US efforts at the United Nations to address it.

We have been heartened by recent press reports that you are considering ways to ease the devastating effects of the sanctions on the Iraqi people. Although the current oil-for-food program (expanded under Security Council Resolution 1284, adopted in December, 1999) provides for some infrastructure repairs, as a temporary relief program it cannot adequately provide the longer-term planning and investment required to restore Iraq's civilian infrastructure to a level necessary to meet even the most basic civilian necessities. Those longer-term infrastructure improvements, coupled with expanded and accelerated humanitarian relief, are key to addressing the ongoing crisis.

We recognize that Iraq poses a series of complex problems. On the one hand, we are confronted with the Iraqi government's persistent refusal to meet its inter- national obligations with regard to Weapons of Mass Destruction (WMD), as well as its record of wholesale human rights abuses. On the other, the comprehensive UN sanctions regime has contributed to a humanitarian crisis that has seriously affected the health and well-being of millions of innocent Iraqis. It is clear that the policies of the Iraqi government have greatly compounded and magnified the humanitarian crisis, and that the government does not intend to make the welfare of its civilian population its priority. While the Iraqi government bears the lion's share of responsibility for the unnecessary civilian suffering due to its refusal to comply with the UN weapons inspection program—a refusal underscored by recent widespread, though largely speculative, media reports about its possible efforts to rebuild certain of its WMD capacities—this does not excuse the international community from its own humanitarian obligations.

As one distinguished international human rights monitoring group recently ob- served, "The Iraqi government's callous and manipulative disregard for its humanitarian obligations is not something the Security Council can reasonably expect will change. Rather, it is a reality the Council must take into account in deciding the appropriate means of securing the government's compliance with its disarmament demands."

The Iraqi government has proven indifferent to the suffering of its own people; we cannot afford to be similarly indifferent. Thus we believe that the administration should take urgent steps to better reconcile enforcement of its disarmament objec- tives in Iraq with its obligation to minimize harm to innocent Iraqi civilians and to ensure protection of their most basic rights.

The Security Council's own report last year on the deteriorating humanitarian sit- uation; the comprehensive UNICEF survey on child health; and reports from other relief agencies in the field, including the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC), make clear that a public health emergency persists in many areas of the country, and that efforts under the oil-for-food program to alleviate these conditions have been woefully inadequate. Indeed, a senior ICRC official recently warned that the increasingly precarious situation in the public infrastructure posed an imminent threat to the survival of those hospitals still functioning.

We believe it is critical that we do what we can now to address directly this public health emergency. This requires restoring Iraq's civilian economic infrastructure in order to bring child mortality rates and other public health indicators back as close as possible to the levels that existed prior to the embargo. With this in mind, we strongly urge your administration to take the following initiatives:

First, in the Security Council and the Sanctions Committee, push to implement immediately the recommendations of the report of the Council's humanitarian panel last March. Many of these recommendations, such as pre-approval of humanitarian items and using oil-for-food funds to purchase local Iraqi products and to hire and train Iraqi workers and professionals to undertake civilian infrastructure repairs and maintenance, are in Resolution 1284, but are conditioned on further steps by the Council or the Committee. We are pleased to note that the Sanctions Committee has begun the preapproval process for humanitarian items and urge you to take steps to ensure that these measures are implemented without further delay.

Second, take all necessary steps to persuade the Security Council and its Sanc- tions Committee to take more seriously its acknowledged obligation to monitor the humanitarian impact of the sanctions, especially on vulnerable sectors of the population such as children and the elderly. If necessary, we believe you should press for an independent monitor such as a Special UN Rapporteur to assess the impact of the sanctions and the effectiveness of the oil-for-food program in addressing that impact, and to scrutinize the practices of the Iraqi government with respect to distribution of aid to its own people. You should also insist on greater transparency in the deliberations and decisions of the Sanctions Committee. While we recognize there may be circumstances in which decisions of the committee must remain internal matters, we believe its decision-making process should be made more transparent, and thus less susceptible to charges of politicization.

Third, we urge you to press the Security council to establish an international criminal tribunal mandated to investigate, indict, and prosecute Iraqi leaders and former officials against whom credible evidence exists of war crimes, crimes against humanity, and genocide. Such an initiative will at a minimum help enforce the continued political isolation of the government, even as steps are taken to lessen the economic isolation that has impoverished much of the population. It represents the kind of targeted sanction that should be directed against those responsible for those Iraqi policies we want to change. In addition, we believe you should press for multilateral steps to further isolate regime officials by freezing any of their remaining assets abroad, restricting their travel and that of their family members, increasing political and diplomatic pressure on any nations who may be allowing, directly or indirectly, transfers of sanctioned materials, and taking any other similar steps you deem necessary.

Finally, we urge you to endorse a relaxation and restructuring of the economic embargo on Iraq, while continuing and even tightening where possible strict prohibitions on military imports. Such a restructuring would permit import of a broader range of nonmilitary goods in order to allow the revival of the civilian economy. We recognize that an important goal of the present sanctions is to block the government's access to foreign exchange which could be used to finance imports for military and weapons-development purposes. We support that objective, but we do not believe the current approach is justifiable, or even sustainable. Instead, we believe the administration should, while maintaining current commercial and military flight restrictions, work with its Security Council partners to establish a new regime. Some variation of a proposal made recently by Human Rights Watch, which would make Iraqi imports liable to inspection at all major ports of entry, seems to us worthy of consideration. We recognize that some new expense would be required by such an effort, and would assume that it would be funded out of Iraq's export revenues, just as UNSCOM expenses have been since 1991.

Rather than a system geared primarily to deciding what to allow in, the efforts and resources of the international community under an alternative approach like this would be redirected primarily to keeping out of Iraq military goods and prod- ucts likely to be used for military purposes. While the current lists of prohibited items—from the Missile Control Technology Regime, the Schedules of Chemicals of the Chemical Weapons Convention, or the List of Dual Use Goods and Technologies and the Munitions List of the Wassenaar Arrangement, for example—should be maintained, relaxing import restrictions on certain categories of civilian-use items not on such lists would be an important step. Maintaining close yet transparent Security Council scrutiny of contracts to import items that have dual-use applications, coupled with a strong end-use monitoring regime, would further help. We assume such an approach would require development of an expanded list of items which, once the general category is licensed for import, need not be further approved by the Sanctions Committee, but rather only by the Secretariat under its routine review process. Of course, this would have to be coupled with an end-use monitoring program which includes UN monitoring teams on the ground, in order to prevent diversion of such items for nefarious purposes.

This new approach does not represent a fail-safe means of containing Iraqis pro- liferation threat, or ensuring compliance with relevant Security Council obligations. But we must point out that neither does the present arrangement. Baghdad still has access to limited amounts of foreign exchange, and we understand that there are no border inspections of goods entering the country except, ironically, those already cleared by the Sanctions Committee. We understand further that any such changes to the current regime would require a considerable investment, politically as well as financially. There is no painless or cost-free way of addressing the Iraq's government's unwillingness to abide by its disarmament commitments. The point is that the pain and cost should not continue to be borne primarily by millions of ordinary innocent Iraqis.

Mr. President, you and Secretary Albright have repeatedly observed that our quarrel is not with the Iraqi people. We agree. But regrettably our Iraq policy has too often had its most devastating impact on those Iraqis who bear no responsibility for the policies that we are trying to sanction, and change. We have an obligation, under the UN Charter and the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, not to destroy or undermine the right of a people to an adequate standard of living, freedom from hunger, and the highest attainable standards of health. For this reason we urge you to adopt the recommendations we have made in this letter, which in our view strike a better balance between legitimate nonproliferation concerns and those involving our humanitarian obligations to the people of Iraq—and may even be more effective in securing Iraqis eventual compliance than the current arrangement.
Thank you for your consideration.

Sincerely,
PAUL D. WELLSTONE,
United States Senator.
RUSSELL FEINGOLD,
United States Senator.