The US, the Inspection on Iraq Weapons and the Iraq War

The United States successfully overthrew the Taliban regime in Afghanistan, but Bin Laden disappeared, and this outcome to some extent downgraded the US victory of the war on terrorism. Thus, the

207 Resolution 1540 (2004), at the UNSC Website: http://disarmament2.un.org/Committee1540/Res1540(E).pdf.

208 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_invasion_of_Afghanistan.

209 Resolution 1333, http://daccessdds.un.org/doc/UNDOC/GEN/N00/806/62/PDF/N0080662.pdf?OpenElement.

210 http://www.afnorth.nato.int/ISAF/index.htm.

211 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_invasion_of_Afghanistan.

US attention was turned to another greater challenger in the Middle East, Saddam Hussein, whose administration was accused as the supporter of Al-Qaeda and the seeker for Weapons of Mass Destruction.

Actually, the logic of the next move in the American “war on terrorism” was that Saddam’s hatred of the US and his possession of WMD created a ready source of state-based weaponry for a dangerous, ubiquitous but stateless enemy such as bin Laden’s al-Qaeda network.²¹² In many ways the final, delayed campaign of the First Persian Gulf War, arose in part because the Iraqi government failed to cooperate fully with UN weapons inspections in the years following the first conflict.²¹³ Accusing Iraq of failing to abide by the terms of the 1991 cease-fire (by developing and possessing weapons of mass destruction and by refusing to cooperate with UN weapons inspections) and of supporting terrorism, the president and other officials suggested that the “war on terrorism” might be expanded to include Iraq and became more forceful in their denunciations of Iraq for resisting UN arms inspections, called for “regime change” in Iraq.²¹⁴

Indeed, the US policy of regime change in Iraq was behind the crisis within the Security Council over whether inspections or war were the way to secure Iraq’s disarmament.²¹⁵ Based on the UNSC Resolution 687, the UN Special Commission (UNSCOM) was established to supervise the Iraqi observation of the disarmament provisions in 1991. Since then on, the UNSCOM and the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) have been inspecting the Iraqi WMD until December 1998, when Iraq suspended the cooperation with the United Nations. The reason lay in such a fact that the UNSCOM helped the US collect useful military information in Iraq, and at the same time it severely relied on national information, particularly intelligence from the United States to assess Iraq’s chemical and biological warfare program.²¹⁶ The UNSCOM was designated as an impartial organization, but the crucial political problem underscored by UNSCOM transformation was that there were no barriers to prevent either the collection of the information or its use by the United States for its own purposes, possibly including bombing raids aimed at undermining the Ba’ath regime.²¹⁷

The suspension of Iraq’s cooperation with the United Nations led to the Operation Desert Fox. After the intense negotiations, the Security Council passed Resolution 1284 and created a new arms monitoring body, the United Nations Monitoring, Verification and Inspection Commission (UNMOVIC) in December 1999. In 2001, negotiations sporadically took place between the UN and Iraq over the read-mission of inspectors in the new body.²¹⁸ Beginning in September, 2002, an Iraq disarmament crisis emerged due to

212 Michael Dunne, “The United States, the United Nations and Iraq: ‘multilateralism of a kind,’” International Affairs, Vol.

79, No. 2, 2003, p. 270.

213 “Persian Gulf Wars”, see the Columbia Encyclopedia, “Persian Gulf Wars,” at the Website of HighBeam Encyclopedia, http://www.encyclopedia.com/html/P/PersGWar.asp.

214 The Columbia Encyclopedia, “Persian Gulf Wars,” at the Website of HighBeam Encyclopedia, http://www.encyclopedia.com/html/P/PersGWar.asp.

215 Glen Rangwala, Nathaniel Hurd and Alistair Millar, “A Case for Concern, not a Case for War”, edited by Michael L. Sifry and Christopher Cerf, The Iraq War Reader, History, Documents, Opinions, p. 457.

216 Susan Wright, “The Hijacking of UNSCOM”, edited by Michael L. Sifry and Christopher Cerf, The Iraq War Reader, History, Documents, Opinions, p.186.

217 Ibid., pp.188-89.

218 http://www.unmovic.org.

claims that Iraq did not fully comply with previous UN resolutions.²¹⁹ Finally, Iraq announced in September 2002 that the UN inspectors could return, but Iraqi slowness to agree on inspection terms and US insistence on stricter conditions for Iraqi compliance stalled the inspectors’ return. The Resolution 1441 of the UN Security Council, passed unanimously on 8 November 2002, was long and detailed, but its message was clear, “Iraq has been and remains in material breach of its obligations under relevant UNSC resolutions” concerning WMD and ballistic missiles, and consequently Iraq must “begin to comply with its disarmament obligations” within a given time-frame and subject to nine paragraphs of governing conditions, specifically by fully cooperating with UNMOVIC and the IAEA and reporting accurately its own inventories to the Security Council. Failure by Iraq to take the “final opportunity” offered by UNSCR 1441 to rectify the “continuous violations of Iraq’s obligations” would lead to “serious consequences” for Iraq.²²⁰

The stalemate of the Iraq-UN relations and the debates in the Security Council finally led to a division between great powers. The USSR and European powers chose to support the United States in the Gulf War because the latter did not stick to the regime change in Iraq. Both Russia and France have huge interests of oil and military sales with the Saddam Hussein administration. Since the Bush government decided that the regime change was the primary objective in this war on terrorism, it was very easy to predict that these two permanent members would veto the US actions in the Security Council. Of course, as we elaborated before, the United States has dominated the agenda of the Council since the terrorist attack, and passed many favorable resolutions, but this did not mean it could manipulate the Council. Arab governments have been unsatisfied with the US double standard on Middle East issues, and they also worried about their domestic stability and the consequences of the US democratic plan for their regimes.

Despite a number of criticism and suspicions from France, Germany, Russia and Arab countries, the US and its main friend, the Britain continued to enhance their military forces around Iraq, and accused that Iraq had been cheating the international society on the issue of WMD. They also tried to get the legitimacy from the UNSC mandate. Secretary of State Colin Powell gave a long speech in the Council on February 5^th, 2003 with the aim at convincing the UNSC members that Saddam Hussein had supported the Al-Qaeda and threatened international peace and stability. According to his speech, “Last November 8, this council passed Resolution 1441 by a unanimous vote. The purpose of that resolution was to disarm Iraq of its weapons of mass destruction. Iraq had already been found guilty of material breach of its obligations, stretching back over 16 previous resolutions and 12 years.”²²¹ “My colleagues, we have an obligation to our citizens, we have an obligation to this body to see that our resolutions are complied with. We wrote 1441 not in order to go to war, we wrote 1441 to try to preserve the peace. We wrote 1441 to give Iraq one last chance. Iraq is

219 http://www.whitehouse.gov/news/releases/2002/09/20020912-1.html.

220 Michael Dunne, “The United States, the United Nations and Iraq: ‘multilateralism of a kind,’” p. 274.

221 Colin Powell, “Presentation to the UN Security Council: A Threat to International Peace and Security”, see http://www.whitehouse.gov/news/releases/2003/02/20030205-1.html.

not so far taking that one last chance.”²²² But the speech of Colin Power failed to convince Russia and France.

Then, on February 24^th, 2003, the US and Britain, co-sponsored by Spain, proposed a draft resolution on Iraq to the Security Council. But after failing to win the explicit approval and make sure that Russia and France would not veto the draft, the United States gave up presenting the draft to the Security Council.

President Bush issued an ultimatum to Saddam Hussein on March 17, and depended on the temporary alliance to launch the war. As the appendix 6 shows, the US has gotten about 30 countries’ support for the military action, which was actually similar to that in the Gulf War. Ground forces (almost exclusively Anglo-American and significantly smaller than the large international force assembled in the first war) began invading the following day, surging primarily toward Baghdad, the southern oil fields, and port facilities.²²³ It was not very long for the US to defeat the Iraqi military, and at the middle of April 2003, American army and the world was surprised to find that the Iraq troops and government disappeared or collapsed in the Capital. On May 1^st, American president Bush declared that the war was ended. The United States and its allies finally changed the Iraqi regime. Indeed, the United States did not convince France and Russia, two important UNSC permanent members, to get the mandate of the Council, but that only meant it could not manipulate the organization. Actually, the United States rallied a great deal of support for a very difficult mission and had great impact on setting the agenda of the Council, though some important countries tried to maintain the Hussein regime and the veto right permitted them some privileges.