Appendix 3 to the hearing of
the House International Relations Committee

February 25, 1998

Kofi Annan's Flawed Agreement

By David A. Kay

New York Times
February 25, 1998

Koffi Annan, the Secretary General of the United Nations, was far too optimistic yesterday when he said, "I think I can do business" with Saddam Hussein.

True, Mr. Annan has avoided an immediate crisis with Iraq. And President Clinton has given guarded approval to the agreement Mr. Annan brokered with Tariq Aziz, Iraq's Deputy Prime Minister.

But there are reasons to believe that the agreement won't work. Not only because Saddam Hussein has a history of ignoring such pacts, but ilso because the agreement is itself fundamentally flawed.

The inspections of the eight presidential palaces are to be conducted by a new group, the sixth subcommittee of the United Nations Special Cornmission (known as Unscom).

It's not clear yet what the exact line of authority will be. But according to the pact, members of the group will be appointed in consultation with Richard Butler, the head of Unscom, and the Director General of the International Atomic Energy Agency. Although the head of the team would report to Mr. Butler, he would be appointed by the Secretary General, according to news reports.

In any case, Mr. Annan clearly assumes the ultimate responsibility for this special inspection team. In doing so, he takes on two incompatible roles: bail bondsman for Mr. Hussein — vouching for his adherence to the inspection agreement — and leader of the international coalition to make Mr. Hussein abide by the inspection agreement.

This arrangement could allow Iraq to play the inspection teams against one another. The "good" team, led by the Annan appointee, could well find nothing wrong, because after a freeze of more than four months on inspections, Mr Hussein's Government will have been able to move any evidence from the presidential palaces.

Mr Butler's teams, on the other hand, may still demand access to more than 50 other sensitive sites. Iraq could try to frustrate these efforts by painting the teams as "troublemakers" and by demanding that they operate under the same rules as Mr. Annan's team.

This kind of thing has happened before. For the last six years, Iraq has challenged Unscom to behave more like the International Atomic Energy Agency teams, which did not find the Iraqi nuclear program in the 1980's.

It could well be that no inspection system has much chance of working. Iraq has gone all out to acquire weapons of mass destruction and to defeat international attempts to unmask and block those efforts. Even after seven years of the most intrusive arms inspections ever to be imposed on a country, Unscom is still unsure of the extent of the Iraqi weapons program. To date, Iraq has filed more than a dozen supposedly complete disclosures of its prohibited weapons, and each one has been shown to be false.

The monitoring system did not detect the Iraqi Government's efforts after the Persian Gulf war to develop new missiles, nor did it unearth the previously unknown biological weapons program. Both of these came to light only as a result of the defection of two of Mr. Hussein's sons-in-law, who were later lured back to Baghdad and killed. Given their fates, it would be unwise to count on future relatives, equally knowledgeable but naive, coming forward with new information.

Inspection teams may not work that well, but Mr. Annan's latest proposal could set back even the modest progress that Unscom has made. Buying time before turning to military action is worthwhile only if that time is invested in trying to change Iraq's political situation.

By signaling that one can do business with Saddam Hussein, Kofi Annan has essentially blocked any opportunity for political change.