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Jewish World Review Sept. 27, 2005 / 23 Elul, 5765 Thinking outside the Saddam box By Jonathan Gurwitz
http://www.JewishWorldReview.com |
"Saddam Hussein needs to remain in his box — but we don't need a war to keep him there."
So wrote John J. Mearsheimer, professor of political science at the University of Chicago, and Stephen M. Walt, academic dean of Harvard's John F. Kennedy School of Government, on the op-ed pages of the New York Times in the run-up to the Iraq war in early 2003.
It was a popular refrain by anti-war critics. The arms inspections and economic sanctions established by the U.N. Security Council were working, they said. The threat posed by Saddam to the world, his neighbors and his own citizens was diminishing. And the international community could sustain the inspections and sanctions indefinitely.
"We should perpetuate this state of affairs by maintaining vigilant containment," Mearsheimer and Walt wrote, "a policy the rest of the world regards as preferable and effective."
If only it were so.
Saddam's weapons of mass destruction have proven to be illusory. The uniform belief that he possessed proscribed weapons, it should be noted, derived in large part from his failure even remotely to live up to the inspection and verification process created by the U.N. Security Council. In 2003, even war critics such as Mearsheimer and Walt considered Iraqi WMDs to be an accepted fact, a nuisance to be managed rather than destroyed in battle.
Now that the committee investigating the U.N. oil-for-food scandal has released its fourth interim report, we know the idea of keeping Saddam in a box was just as mistaken as his supposed possession of stockpiles of chemical, biological or nuclear weapons.
The U.N. investigation, led by former U.S. Federal Reserve Chairman Paul Volcker and empowered by Secretary-General Kofi Annan, conclusively demonstrates how the Baathist regime was gaming the U.N. system — to the financial benefit of some U.N. administrators and members and with the knowledge of many others.
Begin with the amount Saddam was able to skim from the program and divert for largely military purposes: $12 billion.
Of that, $226 million came in the form of surcharges. The Iraqi government sold oil to a preferred group of traders at below-market prices. The traders pocketed a handsome profit but had to share the spoils in the form of a kickback to Baghdad.
Then $1.6 billion came on the other side of the oil-for-food ledger in the form of kickbacks from companies selected to supply food, medicine and other humanitarian aid inside Iraq.
Saddam pocketed another $10.2 billion in illicit income by smuggling oil outside the oil-for-food program with the acquiescence of U.N. administrators and the complicity of Security Council members.
And who was it that was profiting from lucrative contracts to sell Iraqi oil and provide humanitarian aid? "Companies from Russia, France and China, all permanent members of the Security Council that were more sympathetic to Iraq's wish for an end to sanctions than the United States," the report notes, "were accorded highly favored access to Iraq's business under the program."
Russian companies garnered $19.3 billion in oil purchases, nearly one-third of all sales under the program and more than any other country. France came in second with $4.4 billion in oil purchases. Companies from the same countries conspicuously racked up an inordinate share of the humanitarian aid contracts as well.
In fact, as the Volcker report spells out, the entire oil-for-food program was a $100 billion profit-making enterprise. One-tenth of it ended up in Saddam's coffers, perpetuating his homicidal regime and strengthening his military. The rest went to buy influence in foreign capitals and at the United Nations to bring sanctions and inspections to an end and let Saddam out of his box.
In 2003, sanctions against Iraq were not working, the Baathist regime was getting stronger, not weaker, and the threat it posed was growing, not diminishing.
We now know the errors and costs of going to war in 2003. We will never know the errors and costs if we had allowed Saddam to buy his way out of a failing and corrupt policy of containment.
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JWR contributor Jonathan Gurwitz, a columnist for the San Antonio Express-News, is a co-founder and twice served as Director General of the Future Leaders of the Alliance program at NATO Headquarters in Brussels, Belgium. In 1986 he was placed on the Foreign Service Register of the U.S. State Department.Comment by clicking here.
© 2005, Jonathan Gurwitz |
Arnold Ahlert | |||||||||||
