11.8.2001 00:05
Expert says U.S. knows
embargo is fatally flawed
By RANDALL RICHARD
Journal Staff Writer
No one in America knows Baghdad's darkest secrets better than Scott Ritter.
For seven years -- from 1991 until late 1998 -- Ritter scoured the Iraqi capital, along with the rest of the country, in a methodical search for Saddam Hussein's weapons of mass destruction.
By the time his search ended, Ritter's multination team of arms experts had managed to locate and destroy more Iraqi weapons than were destroyed in all the bombing raids and tank assaults during the Persian Gulf war.
But the more the point man for the United Nations inspections discovered about Iraq, the less he was able to justify America's policy toward it.
Nothing, it seemed to Ritter, made any sense.
Why, he wanted to know, was his country embracing policies that made a mockery of everything America stood for -- policies that he felt rewarded tyranny and punished the innocent.
The answer, he decided, was in the White House and the halls of Congress.
And so Ritter set out for Washington.
With the same tenacity he used to such great effect in Iraq, Ritter searched for the rationale for the policies he believed were humanitarian disasters in the making.
What he found was as frightening as anything he had unearthed in Baghdad -- a rationale so devastating in its implication that it needed, like Saddam Hussein's weapons of mass destruction -- to be exposed for all America to see.
Washington's dirty little secret, says Ritter, is that America's decision makers -- both in the White House and Congress -- knew perfectly well that U.S. policy toward Iraq was destined to fail, that it is only strengthening Saddam Hussein while punishing everyone forced to live under his regime.
Ritter, unlike many opponents of the sanctions, refuses to get into what he considers a numbers game. Whether the death toll from the U.S.-led sanctions is in the millions or the tens of thousands, he says, is not the point.
Clearly, he suspects, many of the numbers cited by the anti-sanctions activists are grossly exaggerated.
"There is no doubt in my mind that the Iraqi government exaggerates the numbers, and I think it is horribly irresponsible to run around and quote figures as though you're an authority -- saying 1.5 million or 2.1 million have died.
"But likewise, I think it's brutally irresponsible -- morally irresponsible -- to say there is no one dying in Iraq.
"There are people dying in Iraq. A lot of people. And they're dying because of the economic sanctions.
"You had a nation that had a very effective water-purification system -- and they don't have that anymore. You had a nation that was used to getting the drugs it needed to treat basic ailments. You had a nation that was feeding its people well. You had a nation of healthy children.
"And suddenly -- boom! Overnight, you have filthy water, you have too little medicine, you have too little food."
The reality, says Ritter, is that people are dying needlessly because of the sanctions and Saddam Hussein is exploiting those deaths ruthlessly.
"Saddam Hussein wins when the Iraqi people die. He waves it around the world, and his government scores propaganda points off of it."
But equally shameful, says Ritter, is that America's political leadership knows precisely how and why its policy toward Iraq has failed and it refuses to do anything about it.
During a visit to Washington
last April, says Ritter, it was Sen. Charles Hagel of Nebraska, a fellow Republican and a man for whom Ritter has the utmost respect, who had the courage to admit to offical Washington's political cowardice.
The problem, Ritter says he was told, is that even members of Congress -- himself included -- who despise Saddam Hussein but recognize that the sanctions regime is wrongheaded and "in disarray" are caught in a political trap, and one that is often of their own making.
' "We portrayed this man (Saddam Hussein) as a demon,' " Ritter says Hagel told him. " 'So any step to moderate our approach is a sign of weakness. And, politically speaking, a sign of weakness is the kiss of death.' "
But the coup de gr in Hagel's lecture in real politick, says Ritter, was when the senator looked him in the eye and wearily proclaimed: "Scott, don't expect any profile in courage moments out of anybody in Congress on this issue."'
Ritter, who had been hearing much the same from the leading Democrats in Congress was nonetheless shattered.
"Here's Chuck Hagel -- Vietnam War hero -- a man who has been decorated for heroism under fire -- cowering in the face of the domestic political quandary that we've created about Iraq."
The problem, says Ritter, is that official Washington -- with the help of an eager and overly simplistic press -- has so "dumbed down" the Iraqi issue for the American public that U.S. policy is frozen in the public hysteria about Hussein that official Washington worked so hard to create.
But fear of looking weak, according to Ritter, is not the only reason for maintaining the 10-year-old sanctions -- restrictions that now permits Iraq, under strict supervision, to purchase certain foods and medicines, but only through a bank account administered by the United Nations.
"Wake up world. This is a ridiculous arrangement -- a horrible inefficient arrangement. It's stupid. Iraq is not a refugee camp. But that's what the United States and Great Britain want to create, sort of a giant, internal refugee camp so the United States can exploit the notion of a repressed Iraqi people."
At Brown University's
Watson Institute for International Studies, they are working with the United Nations, under a grant from the Swiss government, to find an alternative -- a way to punish Saddam Hussein and his henchmen without inflicting pain, or worse, on the general population.
What they're trying to come up with is a way to implement a comprehensive program of "targeted sanctions" -- a sanctions regime similar, but far more palatable to the international community than the so-called "smart sanctions" endorsed earlier this year by the United States and Britain but abandoned in July by the U.N. when Russia threatened to veto it.
Researcher Sue Eckert, who is working on the project with Thomas Bersteiker, the institute's executive director, hopes to present a list of specific recommendations and guidelines to the United Nations within the next several months.
The focus of the institute's work is to provide the international community with legal and administrative tools it needs to make those targeted sanctions work.
Clearly, says Eckert, the Iraqi people are suffering under the existing sanctions.
What is in dispute, she says, is who is responsible for that suffering.
Eckert says that under the U.N.'s oil-for-food program, which allows Iraq to sell crude oil for approved humanitarian supplies, Saddam Hussein has no incentive to alleviate the suffering of his people.
Over the years, she says, he has found enough unscrupulous oil dealers willing to pay kickbacks for so much black market Iraqi oil that he and his cronies are never lacking for cash.
By some estimates, as much as a billion dollars in Iraqi oil is being smuggled out of the country each year, much of it through Iraq's oil-poor neighbors, such as Turkey, which depends on the illegal trade to help keep its economy afloat.
More than 60 percent of Iraq's oil, Ritter is quick to point out, ends up in America. In fact, in an eyebrow-raising story in June, The Washington Post reported that two foreign subsidiaires of a company run by Vice President Dick Cheney had supplied more than $73 million in oil production equipment, including spare parts for drilling equipment, to the Iraqi government.
Although legal, as long the equipment is sold through the oil-for-food program, Cheney had categorically denied during last year's presidential campaign that he had ever done business with Saddam Hussein.
Eckert says that one
of the ironies of the existing sanctions is that while Iraq's assets have been frozen by the international community, Saddam Hussein's personal assets have not.
Targeted sanctions, she says, would change all that -- providing a mechanism for nations to take a variety of punitive measures against Iraq's leaders, including freeze their assets, without imposing similar hardships on the general population.
Eckert says targeted sanctions also would go a long way in denying Saddam Hussein his propaganda advantage without abandoning the U.N.'s need, as she sees it, to maintain control of Iraq's purse strings.
Such sanctions, she says, virtually would eliminate the embargo on civilian goods but would continue to deny the Iraqi military a host of "sensitive items" for as long as Baghdad refuses to allow U.N. weapons inspectors back into the country.
Although Eckert and Ritter share a concern over the humanitarian impact of the existing sanctions regime, they part on the issue of Iraqi sovereignty and on America's intention, which, as Ritter sees it, is to deny it at all costs, even if it means creating public hysteria over Iraq's military threat to its neighbors and the rest of the world.
When it comes to the decade-old argument that, painful as they may be, sanctions are the only way to stop Saddam Hussein from building, virtually overnight, weapons of mass destruction, Ritter is not bashful about expressing his determination:
It simply cannot be done.
"The facilities that produce these weapons were built over two decades at a cost of tens of billions of dollars -- and with access not only to money, but technology," he says.
"The entire capability of the state was applied to these projects. And we eliminated them -- and I dare anybody to say we didn't. We did. I can prove it. It's been proven. These factories are gone. The capabilities are gone."
The suggestion that Iraq could rebuild its chemical and biological weapons program quickly, says Ritter, is based on lies and misinformation and is just another cynical effort by Washington to justify a failed policy.
"Can they make chemical agents?
"Yes.
"Could they put it in a artillery shell?
"Yes.
"Now, can Iraq build weapons of mass destruction today?
"The answer is no.
"Study chemical weapons. They only work if they are used in massive quantity. They have to be popped over a huge area. That's why, when you're talking about artillery barrages, you're talking about tens of thousands of chemical rounds going down range -- creating a concentrated cloud of nerve agent or choking agent that dissipates rapidly.
"So what I call a weapon isn't just a singular entity. A weapon is a systematic approach to employment of a chemical or biological agent.
"A nuclear bomb?
"They don't have one. They can't build one. And anybody who says they can just doesn't know what he's talking about. Those facilities have been destroyed. The technologies have been eliminated. The only way Iraq can get a nuclear bomb the next 10 to 15 years is if they buy one intact."
What Ritter finds
especially offensive about U.S. policy toward Iraq is that it endures because "these are brown people we're talking about -- these are Arabs, these are Muslim -- and, quite frankly, we are a racist nation.
"I'm very pro-Israel, so don't take what I'm saying wrong, but if we did anything that resulted in the death of three Israeli children because we prevented medicine from flowing into Israel -- or we interfered with the supply of food -- there would be a hue and cry like you have never heard.
"But here we are, executing a policy that has killed anywhere from 300,000 to 1.5 million people. Who knows? Even if you take the lower number, it's a lot of people. But no one is crying about it."
It should not be surprising, says Ritter, that Washington manages to keep pumping out what he feels are the same lies and half-truths for years and the American public keeps buying it.
The responsibility for that, says Ritter, now a media consultant, lies with the U.S. media.
"The media is very much to blame. A lot of media people take this on as the flavor of the week. They do their LexusNexis search, get their downloads, do their interviews and then write their stories."
"We don't report on the reality of Iraq. Or the failure of the policy. Why? Because it's too complicated. It requires an intellectual approach to telling the story and the acceptance that there is an audience intellectually qualified to absorb the story.
"So, we automatically dumb everything down for the American public -- and that's a mistake. And people believe what you write. And that's the scary thing. They accept it at face value.
"We've got to hold you to a higher standard. You've got to hold yourself to a higher standard. You've got to trust the American people to be able to understand what you're giving them. We've got to raise our standards across the board, and when that happens -- well, I'm a firm believer in the basic, innate ability of the American people to do good.
"As a nation, we are not evil. We're not going to sit back and purposely kill Iraqi children and carry out illegal acts. That's not what we do. We're a moral country. We get outraged by this sort of thing."
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