The U.S. Senate Hearings on Iraq
By Geoffrey
Kemp
From the August 4, 2002 edition of Al-Ittihad
On July 31st, 2001 the United States Senate Committee on Foreign Relations began two days of public hearings on U.S.-Iraq policy. The hearings have received a great deal of publicity because despite a great deal of talk and writing in the national media, including many leaks to the press about the Bush Administration’s plans, this is the first time the U.S. Congress has fully engaged on the subject since September 11th, 2001. It is likely that a much wider debate on the U.S. attack on Iraq will now occur and that the nature and substance of the debate will be more serious and less polemical that what has happened up to now.
The Senate hearings focused on a number of specific issues. How serious and how imminent is the threat posed by Saddam Hussein to the United States and its friends and allies? Are there diplomatic alternatives to war that deserve greater consideration? What will be the regional reaction to a U.S. war against Iraq? How many U.S. forces will be required to occupy and restore the country to stability after war? This author gave testimony on the third issue (regional responses) which will be the subject of another essay.
On the central question of the threat there is little dissent to the proposition that Saddam Hussein remains a dangerous man and that he is determined to reconstitute his weapons of mass destruction. If he procures nuclear weapons from one source or another he would be unlikely to use them against the U.S. or anyone, but would rather keep them as a deterrent, lest enemies, such as the United States, wish to use force to end his regime. Thus protected, he would be able to extend his hegemony over his neighbors and eventually restore Iraq to the status of a major Middle East power, free of sanctions and with sufficient resources to rebuild its conventional military power. There is concern that Saddam Hussein might be tempted to provide chemical and biological weapons to terrorist groups to attack the United States and its allies provided it could be done in such a way that there was no trace linking them directly back to Baghdad. There is no clear intelligence as to when and if Saddam will get hold of nuclear weapons. On the other hand, most analysts believe he already has chemical and biological weapons.
Although there is uncertainty as to the precise status of his weapons programs, most analysts agree that, absent rigorous UN inspections or a war, it is only a matter of time before Saddam achieves his geopolitical goals. Yet most also agree that regime survival is even more important to Saddam than weapons of mass destruction. For this reason some believe that as the U.S. war preparations become more serious Saddam Hussein will reluctantly allow inspectors back into Iraq to avoid his demise. On the second day of the Senate hearings, on August 1st, Iraq announced that it was willing to have further talks with the head of the UN inspections team, Dr. Hans Blix. The Bush Administration remains extremely skeptical that these talks can lead anywhere and see them as delaying tactic by Saddam to put off any U.S. decision on war. It is well known that the Europeans and the Russians and most U.S. Middle East allies want Washington to continue to pursue the inspection route if only to provide international legitimacy for the eventual use of force.
It’s difficult to see how the inspection regime can be any use even if it is allowed back, unless it is provided with open ended access anywhere, anytime, to all Iraqi facilities and is backed up by the threat of the use of force. The question is would Saddam ever agree to these conditions? He might if it was clear that the only alternative was his destruction. This would be best demonstrated if the United States deployed hundreds of thousands of ground troops to the region so that there could be no doubt that the U.S. had the capability to march into Iraq and end the regime. But the dilemma is that once such a large U.S. force is in the region, supposedly with the purpose of backing up an arms inspection regime, would the Bush Administration stop at this point? There are many voices in Washington who say once we have deployed all those forces at enormous cost we are not going to pull them out until Saddam Hussein’s regime is history. Yet U.S. allies will insist that the U.S. must give the inspections a fair chance to work. Herein lies one of the many dilemmas that will be debated in the coming weeks and months. Iraq will be on the agenda long after the U.S. Congressional elections in November 2002.
