By Walter Pincus
Washington Post Staff Writer
Thursday, January 8, 2004; Page A17

The United States should bring U.N. inspectors into the probe of Iraq's weapons programs to accurately understand how effective the United Nations was in using inspections, sanctions and monitoring to constrain Saddam Hussein, concludes a new study by the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace.

The report, to be released today, also criticizes the Bush administration's public assessments of the danger posed by Hussein's Iraq in the months leading to the war. It describes as "questionable" and "unexamined" the threat cited by administration officials that Iraq or another rogue state would turn over chemical, biological or nuclear weapons to terrorists.

More logical, the Carnegie report said, is the possibility that terrorists could get such weapons from "poorly guarded stockpiles in Russia and other former Soviet states" or countries such as Pakistan and North Korea, where "instability, corruption or a desperate need for cash could allow terrorist groups to gain access to nuclear weapons or materials."

The solution Carnegie proposes is to make security of nuclear weapons and materials "a much higher priority" for U.S. national security policy.

Much of the Carnegie report examines prewar intelligence reports and statements by administration officials about Hussein's Iraq.

For example, the report said that in mid-2002, "official statements of the threat shifted dramatically toward greater alarm regarding certainty of the threat and greater certainty as to the evidence." The National Intelligence Estimate (NIE) produced by the administration for Congress in October 2002, it said, "went far beyond the consensus intelligence assessments of the preceding five years." It adds, "The declassified NIE contained 40 distinct caveats or conditions usually dropped by officials" in their public statements.

On ABC's "Nightline" program last night, Secretary of State Colin L. Powell was asked about the administration's prewar statements and about the failure of the United States' Iraq Survey Group, led by David Kay, to find weapons of mass destruction.

Powell said he had worked to convey as accurate a picture as possible in public comments, given the limited information available before the war. He emphasized that intelligence, and the fact that Hussein's government had used chemical weapons in the late 1980s, "led us to the conclusion, led the intelligence community to the conclusion that they still had intent, they still had capability and they were not going to give up that capability." How many weapons were there, he said, "we'll find out when Dr. Kay finishes his work."

The Carnegie report noted that the United States has resisted allowing U.N. weapons inspectors -- who have seven years of experience in Iraq -- to participate in the work of its Iraq Survey Group. That resistance, the report said, interferes with the goal of figuring out whether years of sanctions and U.N. weapons inspections worked, and might work again in another country.

"The role and impact of each of the several constraints imposed on Iraq need to be isolated and clarified so that useful lessons can be drawn," the report said. "The United States and the United Nations should collaborate to produce a complete history of Iraq's WMD and missile programs."

The report urges U.N. Secretary General Kofi Annan to study the U.N. inspection history in Iraq to determine the success of visits to suspected weapons sites, and to investigate better ways to use technology and intelligence. Both these areas were problematic while U.N. inspectors were operating in Iraq before the war.

Results of such a study could help in carrying another of the report's recommendations to the U.N. Security Council: consideration of creating a permanent inspection agency to monitor proliferation of chemical and biological weapons material.

Currently, the International Atomic Energy Agency studies nuclear weapons issues, but only in countries that have signed the nuclear nonproliferation treaty. The U.N. Monitoring, Verification and Inspection Commission was established to look into Iraq's chemical and biological programs and its missile systems. Some nations believe that agency should be retained and given a broader mission.

The Carnegie report also urges the Security Council to make it a violation of international law for any nation to transfer weapons of mass destruction to any other government, regardless of whether those nations have signed nonproliferation treaties.

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Iraq 'faces severe health crisis'

The people of Iraq may have poorer health for generations as a result of the war, according to a report.

Medical charity Medact says this year's conflict disrupted immunisation programmes and destroyed water systems, increasing levels of disease.

Environmental degradation and smoke from oil fires are adding to the health problems of Iraqis, it reports.

Continuing insecurity in Iraq, along with the breakdown of public health services, are exacerbating the problem.

Death toll

Entitled Continuing Collateral Damage: the health and environmental costs of war on Iraq, the report estimates that between 22,000 and 55,000 people - mainly Iraqi soldiers and civilians - died as a direct result of the war.

There has been a reported increase in maternal mortality rates, acute malnutrition has almost doubled, and there is an increase in water-borne diseases and vaccine-preventable diseases
Dr Sabya Farooq
Report author

It says that mines and unexploded bombs continue to kill and maim.

The report says that the conflict and its aftermath have put the most vulnerable in society - women, children and the elderly - at risk.

A quarter of a million children were not vaccinated against measles once the conflict started.

Although immunisation campaigns have resumed, it has not been possible to confirm if these children received the jab.

Dr Sabya Farooq, author of the charity's report, told the BBC: "It's mainly the ongoing violence and insecurity which, in addition to the breakdown of public health services, is posing the main risk to public health.

"There has been a reported increase in maternal mortality rates, acute malnutrition has almost doubled from 4% to 8% in the last year and there is an increase in water-borne diseases and vaccine-preventable diseases."

Data collection

Measuring what is happening to the Iraqi people's health is proving very difficult, the report says.

The United Nations and many aid agencies have only a minimum presence in the country and so cannot carry out the data collection necessary to initiate public health policies.

In its conclusion, the report recommends that the occupying powers allow the UN to play the central role in peacekeeping and in the humanitarian and reconstruction process.

Medact is a British-based grouping of health professionals which aims to highlight the health impacts of conflict, poverty and environmental degradation, and work to eradicate them.

Story from BBC NEWS:
http://news.bbc.co.uk/go/pr/fr/-/1/hi/world/middle_east/3259489.stm

Published: 2003/11/11 09:41:56 GMT

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Twin vision of empire

The differences between Europe and the US are exaggerated. To the rest of the world, they look much the same

Gary Younge
Monday February 10, 2003
The Guardian

It is with great bemusement that I absorb abuse from white, rightwing Americans, who hark back to the declaration of independence of 1776 as justification for their Euro-bashing, and to the second world war to justify military aggression.

They badger me as though their own reference points represent the sole prism through which global events could possibly be understood. As if the struggle for moral superiority between Europe and the US could have any relevance to someone whose ancestors were brought to the Americas as slaves and whose parents and grandparents lived through the war under colonisation.

"If it wasn't for us you would be speaking German," they say. "No, if it wasn't for you," I tell them, "I would probably be speaking Yoruba."

As the diplomatic process over a possible war in Iraq approaches its endgame, the spat between Europe and America is an unwelcome diversion. There are some disputes, we are led to believe, that have a significance beyond themselves alone. Rows with origins in one place and ramifications in many others, which produce not a victor in a single clash but help shape a trend in the bigger scheme of things. Sometimes, as in the conflict between the Soviet Union and the US during the cold war or between cricket (slow, colonial, in decline) and basketball (fast, commercial, on the rise) in the Caribbean, the broader themes are obvious. With others, as with the rivalry between Tony Blair and Gordon Brown or Blur and Oasis, it is difficult to see quite what relevance the disputes hold beyond the immediate outcome and the immediate participants.

The quarrel between Europe and the US falls into the latter category. Those who understand it as a battle between a Europe that is peace-loving, multilateral and sophisticated and an America that is belligerent, isolationist and brash make too much of the differences and too little of the similarities.

As negotiations unfold in the coming weeks, such distortions will become increasingly crucial. By mistaking European pragmatism for principle, it leads many to pin hopes on a European resistance that will almost inevitably falter under US pressure. By underestimating the domestic pressure that George Bush is under to make his case, it obstructs the potential for solidarity with the growing number of Americans who oppose war.

That does not mean that the differences are not significant. Most of Europe is embarking on a grand, multilateral project to build an ever enlarging EU. Meanwhile, the Bush administration spent its first 100 days pulling out of the Kyoto accords and reneging on the 1972 treaty banning germ warfare. Nor does it mean that the differences are not important. Whoever emerges with the upper hand in this particular conflict could well be a matter of life and death for millions of Iraqis. But what we are seeing now is not a clash between two competing world views but the testing of the balance of forces within the same one.

The split between Europe and the US is strategic, not moral. There is nothing inherent in European political culture that makes it more liberal and less imperial than America. European leaders and commentators are right to criticise the US for its brutality and imperialist pretensions. But they must do so with sufficient self-awareness to see what most of the rest of the world has seen: that their nations have acted in similar and even more pernicious ways whenever they have had the opportunity.

Without that humility in tone and historical perspective they open the door to those on the right in the US, who dismiss accusations of American wrongdoing as little more than sour grapes that Europe is no longer at the helm. Before long they are arguing not about democracy, human rights, poverty and fair trade but which empire was more benign.

This kind of bickering between the powerful has little interest to most of humanity. The difference between Europe and the US is significant and has been accentuated in recent months, but to the vast majority of the developing world American domination represents a development in the narrative of European empire, not a break from it.

At times it can even appear like an improvement. Even as anti-American sentiment is growing in France, there have been anti-French demonstrations in the former French colony of the Ivory Coast, where a peace deal brokered by France has been greeted with opposition. Last week, as the French expressed their scepticism at secretary of state Colin Powell's presentation to the security council, protesters in the capital, Abidjan, waved American flags and placards saying: "Bush please help Ivory Coast against French terrorism." The fact that America backed the very deal they were demonstrating against shows how great is the confusion and how little there is to choose between the two powers.

So long as the French, Russians, Germans and Chinese are arguing for more time for the weapons inspectors, we should support them. But we should be under no illusions as to how long that opposition will last. The more inevitable war appears, the more likely both the French and the Russians will be to cut a deal, in order to protect their interests. If America's push for war is motivated by oil, then France and Russia's push for peace is no less so - both have lucrative contracts in the region that they are keen to preserve.

Even as the French rail against US hegemony, they are carefully preparing an exit strategy. The day before Powell presented his case to the security council, a French nuclear-powered aircraft carrier, the Charles de Gaulle, headed off for three weeks of manoeuvres in the eastern Mediterranean, including joint exercises with America's USS Harry Truman.

The key factor in stopping the war remains public opinion. That is what has delayed the bombing thus far, shoring up the rhetoric from European leaders and slowing down the pace of the Bush administration. The toughest test for that opposition will come if the security council lends its imprimatur to military action in a second resolution. Rather than being sidetracked by transatlantic rifts, we must argue now that while a second security council resolution would make war legal, it would not make it moral.

While it is vital that military action should take place only within international law, those laws have any credibility only if they are applied fairly, adhered to universally and executed consistently. While Powell excoriated Iraq for flouting the wishes of the international community, the UN's world court ruled unanimously that the US should stay the execution of three Mexicans on death row in Texas and Oklahoma. The US has disregarded the court in the past and is likely, on this issue, to do so again.

Both Europe and America sold arms to the Iraqi regime and have constantly shown more interest in the oil reserves under its soil than the human rights abuses that have taken place on top of it. We should support those western governments that urge caution, but we should not rely on them. We should side not with Europe or America but with the Iraqi people against both Saddam Hussein and a war that will inflict untold misery upon them and make us more vulnerable to terrorist attack than ever before.

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From: http://www.snopes.com/politics/quotes/gulfwar.asp

In 1998, former President George Bush and Brent Scowcroft, National Security Advisor during the Bush administration, collaborated on the book A World Transformed, a political history covering significant world events which occurred during the first three years of Bush's presidency (1989-1991): the collapse of the Soviet empire, the unification of Germany, Tiananmen Square, and the Gulf War.

In Chapter 19, which discusses the aftermath of the 1991 Gulf War (also known as "Desert Storm," the military operation to liberate Kuwait from occupation by invading Iraqi forces), they wrote:

Trying to eliminate Saddam, extending the ground war into an occupation of Iraq, would have violated our guideline about not changing objectives in midstream, engaging in "mission creep," and would have incurred incalculable human and political costs. Apprehending him was probably impossible. We had been unable to find Noriega in Panama, which we knew intimately. We would have been forced to occupy Baghdad and, in effect, rule Iraq. The coalition would instantly have collapsed, the Arabs deserting it in anger and other allies pulling out as well. Under the circumstances, there was no viable "exit strategy" we could see, violating another of our principles. Furthermore, we had been self-consciously trying to set a pattern for handling aggression in the post-Cold War world. Going in and occupying Iraq, thus unilaterally exceeding the United Nations' mandate, would have destroyed the precedent of international response to aggression that we hoped to establish. Had we gone the invasion route, the United States could conceivably still be an occupying power in a bitterly hostile land. It would have been a dramatically different -- and perhaps barren -- outcome.

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