Source: Keynote speech by Jessica Mathews to the International Peace Academy
Weapons of Mass Destructions and the United Nations
What happened in Iraq? The Success Story of United Nations Inspections
Delivered at the International Peace Academy Conference, "Weapons of Mass Destructions and the United Nations: Diverse Threats and Collective Responses," on March 5, 2004
This is an extraordinarily important moment for the United Nations. Before attention is lost in the controversies over the war itself and in the challenges of its aftermath, the United Nations must capture, clarify and publicize the record of international inspections in Iraq: for itself, for member governments and for the public. Was the process encompassing UNSCOM, the IAEA and UNMOVIC from 1991 to 2003, a success? Or was it the bumbling embarrassment, the “sham,” portrayed by top American officials and still understood that way by the American public—and perhaps by the public elsewhere?
I’d like to offer you today our assessment—that of myself and my colleagues Joseph Cirincione and George Perkovich at the Carnegie Endowment—reached over several years of study and involvement with the process. The bottom line is that it was a success, a rather striking international success, that stands out in the record of recent decades. However, it is a success studded with weaknesses that need to be understood and corrected and one about which there are still many unanswered questions. It is also a success that because it is not yet recognized is not fully real. Without concerted effort right now, the record of what actually happened, and its very real promise for the future could easily be lost.
In the surging controversy over British and American intelligence failures in Iraq, a critical fact is still largely unnoticed: While the national intelligence services were getting it wrong, United Nations inspectors were getting the picture largely right.
In 1991 to 1998, UNSCOM and the IAEA—while facing unrelenting Iraqi opposition and obstruction—successfully discovered and eliminated most, if not all, of Iraq’s unconventional weapons and production facilities, and destroyed or monitored the destruction of most of its chemical and biological weapon agent. Iraq’s most secret program—its biological weapons program—was discovered through painstaking detective work and reported to the Security Council four months before the defection of Saddam Hussein’s son-in-law, Hussein Kamel. UNSCOM also uncovered covert transactions between Iraq and more than 500 companies from more than 40 countries—a body of work that assumes fresh significance in the light of recent disclosures of the A.Q. Khan network. And, inspectors put in place a mechanism to track and block banned exports and imports.
In the months immediately preceding the war, United Nations inspectors’ assessments of Iraq’s programs were remarkably close to what has since been found, and far more accurate than American or British prewar beliefs. UNMOVIC was only permitted to operate for less than four months, and only for a matter of weeks at full strength. But to the best of present knowledge, the inspectors were in fact in the process of finding and beginning to dismantle what was there.
This record suggests a number of lessons—positive and negative—and a number of questions that need answering.
First, it appears that international restraints—sanctions, the procurement investigations and the export/import controls together with core inspections—worked together as a package in a way that is not yet understood, and that this package was considerably more effective than has been appreciated then or since.
Second, even though UNSCOM and the early IAEA inspections operated under a degree of Iraqi obstruction that the Security Council never should have tolerated, inspections’ greatest area of weakness lay in New York, not in Iraq. Iraq played a highly effective game of divide and conquer in the Security Council, playing the P-5 off against each other until political support was so undermined that inspections were forced to a halt in 1998. The lesson is clear. Political unity backing inspections is as important as technology and expertise on the ground and the Security Council is not now set up to provide it. Inspections should not again be launched without more settled political support behind them. I will have more to say on that a bit later.
It should hardly need adding that the Security Council should never again allow rules of the game that tilt the playing field so steeply in favor of the miscreant and against its own agents.
Third, the relationship between any future international effort of this type and national intelligence agencies needs thorough review and careful thought. It is almost a waste of time to undertake something like this if the international effort does not have the technology to protect itself against penetration by the intelligence agencies of the target country. There must be established means set up for two-way communication between the inspectorate and national intelligence agencies—means that will fully protect the information provided, protect against penetration and misuse by the governments providing information as well as by the target, and allow feedback at both ends as discoveries are made and defectors, for example, come to light. If international inspections are to be undertaken again there needs to be an established set of rules that do not need to be invented day by day and which allow a much more confident and easy flow of information.
Still pending in the Iraq case is the rather urgent question: How much of what inspectors knew did United States intelligence know and, if there was key material the United States didn’t learn, why not? For example, UNSCOM discovered in 1991 that Iraq’s nerve gas weapons were no longer potent enough for battlefield use because Iraqi scientists were incapable of keeping the agent stable for very long. Why then was the United States treating these same weapons as a threat 12 years later? How much of the more than 30 million page archive produced by the United Nations and IAEA inspectors was sifted by United States analysts before the war?
Similarly, in Secretary Powell’s speech to the General Assembly on February 5, 2003, he pointed to “signature items” in satellite photos which, he said, were decontamination vehicles that proved the presence of chemical weapons. Yet inspectors who had visited the sites say these were water trucks and that they tried to so inform United States officials. Was this a valid technical disagreement, a failure of communication or, less relevant for our purposes today, had a decision been made by the United States not to know?
Fourth, if inspections are to be undertaken again, there needs to be a better understanding of the process by governments and by the public. In the Iraqi case, it was widely perceived as a hopeless chase after easily hidden needles in a haystack, and therefore easily ridiculed and undermined. David Kay, before he went to work for the government, wrote that “When it comes to the United Nations weapons inspection in Iraq, looking for a smoking gun is a fool’s mission…. Even the best inspectors have almost no chance of discovering hidden weapons sites such as these in a country the size of Iraq.” (1/19/03). Yet the perception that inspections consist of running from place to place is not the reality. Lengthy interviews, building relationships with key individuals, building up a story from individual to individual, procurement investigations, and highly technical analysis, sifting of paper, all of this is of the essence. Contrast Kay’s earlier comment with a recent one that suggests this reality. “If there are large stockpiles, they had to be produced by people, they had to be produced in facilities, and they would have left some indelible signs. Where are those people? Where are those facilities? Where are the documents, the importation and the other records of such large production? They have not been found.”
Fifth, another issue that needs to be evaluated is cost, and particularly, cost for result achieved. UNSCOM’s budget was $25-30 million per year. We do not yet have a firm number, but the announced cost of United States inspections over the past year is about $900 million, or roughly about thirty years worth of the international effort. UNSCOM was definitely under-equipped and the IAEA, as we all know, has been chronically underfunded for a decade, but even making a generous allowance for needed improvements, inspections look like a high productivity operation if properly designed and backed especially as compared to the quarter trillion dollar cost of the war and its aftermath.
For these reasons among others, we believe that the following needs to be done now.
First, the Secretary General should charter a detailed review of the inspections process—an after-action report. The relative value of site visits and analysis needs to be clarified. The various strengths and weaknesses—only a few of which I’ve referred to here—of this pioneering international effort need to be fully understood, including its human resources, access to technology, relations with national intelligence agencies, vulnerability to penetration, and more. It is important to look ahead—as we are doing today—but it would be an awful mistake at this moment to fail to look back. We’re taught from childhood to learn from our mistakes. It is equally valuable to learn from our successes (and a lot more pleasant).
Second, the United States and the United Nations should collaborate to produce a complete history and inventory of Iraq’s WMD and missile programs. To do so, UNMOVIC personnel should be working on the ground with the United States Iraq Survey Group. Both the United States and the United Nations should be seriously faulted for the failure to do so to date. The right people on the ground—a few dozen at most—could make a big difference. The UNMOVIC report released this week makes clear that it has not been contacted by the Survey Group and is not in any way working with them. As the United Nations is reinserted in the political transition in Iraq, one hopes that the relationship on this front, too, can be repaired.
Third, in this joint effort, particular attention should be paid to discovering which of the several international constraints on Iraq were effective and to what degree, and to how they worked as a package.
I should add that an accurate story of the United States and British intelligence failures can never be pieced together without the various investigations having full access to the United Nations archive. I know of no single one of the more than half dozen investigations now underway in Washington that is taking steps to do this. For its part, the United Nations should facilitate that access and cooperation.
Learning From the Past, Building Institutions for the Future
Let me turn now to a broader set of questions about the future. At the Carnegie Endowment we have been working for more than a year on a project aimed at developing a new international strategy; a broad set of policies and programs to prevent the use and continued spread of weapons of mass destruction. We are attempting to pull together the best ideas from individuals and groups in the U.S. and the best ones from abroad as well. My colleagues are today consulting with colleagues in Europe on this subject. The strategy will be presented in draft form for international discussion in June at our international non-proliferation conference and based on the feedback then and in the weeks following, rewritten and released before the end of the year.
I would like to briefly mention a few of the measures and principles we are pursuing—most relevant to our subject today.
The most obvious, of course, is that based on the outcome of the work I’ve just described, we believe that serious consideration should be given to the creation of a permanent United Nations inspections and monitoring body. Inspections are not a panacea. Indeed no magic bullet will be found effective against proliferation. Hence a central principle of our strategy is the need for a layered defense, and we believe inspections are an invaluable component of such a layered system. Intelligence from a distance—no matter how good—can never do what a physical presence on the ground, armed with an international writ and unfettered access, can do.
A permanent, international, non-proliferation inspection capability would play a role nothing else now can, providing vital enforcement—hence seriousness—to the broader regime, and filling the gaps between the various weapons treaties. Iraq, Libya, Iran, Pakistan, and North Korea all point to the need for such an established—not ad hoc—capability.
Because long term monitoring is just as important as inspections, only a standing, permanent body can do the job. Training, and developing the expertise of a broadly international corps of experts will have the added benefit of helping build a sense in these individuals’ home governments of engagement in, and shared responsibility for, what must be the global responsibility of preventing proliferation. Success will never be achieved if non-proliferation is seen as a United States responsibility, a nuclear weapons state responsibility, or even that of a handful of major powers.
Creating a permanent inspectorate is one element of a broader priority, a set of policies central to our new strategy, which is to build up the role and the responsibilities of the Security Council, following on its 1992 declaration declaring proliferation a threat to international peace and security.
We are very aware of the political weaknesses of the Council, amply demonstrated over the years in dealing with Iraq. However, we also know that—with effort—political will can be built. The effort is worth taking because no other entity, existing or imagined, commands the Security Council’s universal legitimacy or its umbrella mandate for peace and security.
Anyone who doubts this has only to look at how hard countries work to avoid being taken to the Security Council—North Korea and Iran notably among them.
How could the Security Council’s role be built up, beyond the creation of the permanent inspectorate?
In 1995, an international panel chaired by former United States National Security Advisor McGeorge Bundy studied this issue and made a recommendation that I thought then, and still believe, deserves serious consideration.
The panel urged that the Security Council create a Special Rapporteur on Non-Proliferation reporting directly to it on trends and developments. The Special Rapporteur would, in effect staff and prod the Security Council on a constant basis, would draw together all the threats, the treaties and initiatives, filling loopholes, providing the staff basis for taking action. A standing position like this would lower the bar to action—the potential energy barrier, if you will—by making consideration of non-proliferation by the Council routine rather than extraordinary. His or her brief would, of course, encompass the activities of countries that are not members of the NPT, the CWC or the BWC.
This broad non-proliferation endeavor needs a unifying strategic concept which we call “universal compliance.” “Compliance” means more than signatures on treaties, or declarations of fine intent—it means actual performance. The United Nations and member countries have focused too long on universal membership in treaties without sufficient drive for compliance, and without sufficient attention to enforcement. “Universal” means that all states must comply with the norms and terms that apply to them. This includes states suspected of violating safeguard agreements, or abetting proliferation through technology transfers. Equally, it includes nuclear weapons states that are not living up to commitments they have made.
I am very encouraged by the U.S. administration’s recent initiatives in this field. They are important and very welcome steps forward. I would add however, that the effort to build a strengthened international non-proliferation effort will be in vain if the United States does not continue with the testing moratorium, ratify the CTBT and if it chooses to develop new types of nuclear weapons. The violation of the spirit of Article VI inherent in such steps is simply too egregious to be swallowed in the same spoon by the non-nuclear states which are being asked to take major steps to move the world in the opposite direction.
“Universal” has other important aspects. It shifts the focus away from the bipolarity of “haves” and “have-nots”. In truth, we are all in this together. We face a global threat. We will only—we can only—meet it on a global basis.
Finally, the strategic framework of “universal compliance” gives us a means for dealing with the ‘three state problem’ – India, Pakistan and Israel. We do not have to tear apart the NPT to find a place for these states within this new framework. They, like all others, will have their responsibilities to meet.
There are literally dozens of individual policies that would need to be taken to turn this overarching framework into an effective reality. Let me suggest just one, as an example. We propose that the IAEA adopt a rule that prohibits a state that the Agency cannot certify to be in full compliance with its transparency and safeguard obligations under the NPT from receiving foreign assistance for nuclear activities. This would include assistance related to reactors, uranium enrichment and reprocessing facilities (exceptions would be made for assistance for reactor safety and security purposes). This rule also would specify that members of the IAEA should adopt national legislation making it illegal for any entity on their territory to facilitate forbidden assistance to such a state.
Such a rule would impede the acquisition of nuclear-weapon capabilities by states that the IAEA has detected undertaking suspect activities. It would raise the costs and risks of cheating on transparency and safeguard obligations, and it would extend the burden of compliance not just to recipients of technology and know-how, but to providers as well. Finally, the rule would apply to states such as India, Israel and Pakistan that do not comply with all IAEA transparency and safeguard obligations.
In the event that a state ignores these prohibitions and continues a supply relationship with a non-compliant state, including indirectly by allowing entities on its territory to do so, the IAEA would be required to refer the matter to the Security Council for enforcement.
I will not test your patience further. Let me end where I began. This is a moment of tremendous importance to the United Nations, and equally for the global future. Crises such as those we have lived through the past few years and weeks have a silver lining. They jolt the system and create a moment when political will is fluid and can be moved and built.
I recognize the great barriers we face to change on every front. But it is far too soon—far too soon—to apply the familiar calculus and conclude that nothing can be done to radically strengthen the non-proliferation system. This is a moment when change is possible. With sufficient leadership—from the United States, but not just from the United States—exactly that can be done.
Download the Carnegie report, WMD in Iraq: Evidence and Implications
Review extensive web resources on WMD in Iraq at www.ceip.org/intel
