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Monday, Nov 9, 2009
Sandra Mackey, Peter Bergen, Khidir Hamza, Todd Gitlin and other experts on Iraq, al-Qaida and weapons inspections evaluate the secretary of state's U.N. presentation.
Feb 6, 2003 | On Wednesday morning, Secretary of State Colin Powell made the most detailed case yet that Saddam Hussein was flouting the will of the United Nations, hiding his chemical and biological weapons and cooperating with al-Qaida.
"Clearly, Saddam will stop at nothing until something stops him," Powell told a skeptical U.N. Security Council, calling the evidence the U.S. has assembled "irrefutable and undeniable."
But is it? Salon asked a panel of experts on Iraq, disarmament and Middle Eastern policy to evaluate Powell's case to the U.N.
Sandra Mackey, author of "The Reckoning: Iraq and the Legacy of Saddam Hussein"
I wasn't quite sure who his audience was -- whether it was the international community or whether it was aimed at American domestic opinion. I felt like it was more a recitation of facts rather than a fire in the belly kind of speech. Definitely, when he finished up with the part on links to international terrorism, he was targeting the American public.
It's been a real stretch all along to tie Saddam Hussein and Osama bin Laden together and that speech made the most deliberate reach to bring together rumor, innuendo, facts and so forth to really make that argument. It wasn't terribly effective because, as he said, Osama bin Laden and Saddam Hussein do not have similar goals. One's a secularist and one's an Islamist and they're rivals for the same constituencies. Then, when he said that hatred could overcome those things -- that was again trying to make that argument that the link was there. But I didn't think it was terribly effective.
Saddam is a very devious character and I'm certainly not one to say that he wouldn't do anything like [al Qaida-like terrorist activities]. But Saddam is the personality type that he can't get himself involved in anything that he cannot control. He knows as well as anybody else that he cannot control a network of terrorist cells that work on their own. I have a very hard time accepting the argument that Saddam Hussein is going to give weapons to al-Qaida simply because he can't guarantee that he can control it. And the terrorism that Saddam has been involved in has been against his domestic enemies, different from al-Qaida.
I also thought that Powell's attempt to link up the connection between Hussein and Hamas was very detrimental to U.S. interests in the Middle East, because what we have got to do if we're going to go to war with Iraq is deal with the Palestinian issue. That was definitely aimed at American public opinion. You cannot separate the issue of Iraq from the issue of the Palestinian question. It's like that issue doesn't exist. That's what this administration should have done first: say that we're going to deal with the Palestinian issue and then deal with Saddam Hussein. But they're not.
Powell did a credible job in really laying out the fact that Saddam Hussein does have ambitions in that area that would certainly be enormously enhanced by possessing of weapons of mass destruction. It was bolstering the contention of the administration that the longer you wait the harder he will be to deal with. My argument with the administration is not so much about what they're saying about Saddam being a menace to the region. My argument is that the way they have handled this whole approach to Iraq has really turned into an ideological battle in which the U.S. follows unilateralism in what really is a multilateral world. We've been running a multilateral foreign policy since the Second World War. It's even more necessary now to run a multilateral foreign policy but yet the administration is going off course.
It may not happen immediately --[that a war on Iraq will inflame the region] -- but to the region it looks like were launching a war against Iraq in order to control oil and protect Israel. Once we get bogged down in Iraq the more that perception will be strengthened.
I think the inspectors have been effective. As long as they're in there then you can at least be on the ground. The chemical and biological weapons are a concern but a nuclear potential changes the strategic balance. That's really the important thing. That's the one thing they really could pick up regardless of what Hussein's doing because it's much more difficult to hide nuclear weapons.
Richard Murphy, assistant secretary of state for Near East and South Asian Affairs under President Reagan and a former U.S. Ambassador to Syria, Saudi Arabia, Mauritania and the Philippines. He's currently a senior fellow in Middle East Studies at the Council on Foreign Relations.
He made the case to the converted, he may have made it to the wavering, but he didn't budge those who have been critical from the beginning -- France, China and Russia.
Clearly, though, there's still room for agreement. While they all insist they want more time for inspections and are waiting to hear from Blix on the 14th, I think that Powell has given them something to stand on that they didn't have before, to the extent that they care about their own population's [anti-war sentiment] and the position their own respective leaders have talked themselves into. Chirac has put himself into a rather tight corner. For him to regain any maneuverability he needs some time to think about the evidence presented. Perhaps Powell's speech and Blix's next appearance taken altogether will start to move the French position. Powell did use the word "irrelevant" in speaking about the need for the council to shoulder responsibilities. That's a fairly powerful incentive for both France and Russia.
The specifics he gave certainly were new -- the mobile vans for chemical and biological weapons, the communications intercepts and satellite photography. I thought it was a very effective presentation. There was nothing new about al-Qaida, but he was very careful to stay on grounds he could defend against any challenge. He didn't link the Saddam regime with 9/11 and he didn't bring up the story of Mohammed Atta meeting in Prague with a representative of Baghdad. His comment about the understanding reached between Baghdad and al-Qaida not to attack each other was the least convincing, because there was no audio intercept, nothing you could photograph. That evidence is what made it such a strong presentation on chemical and biological weapons paraphernalia. I don't think the specifics he had left much room for spinning, frankly.
Khidir Hamza, Iraq's former director of nuclear weaponization and coauthor with Jeff Stein of "Saddam's Bombmaker: The Terrifying Inside Story of the Iraqi Nuclear and Biological Weapons Agenda"
He made a tremendous case. Powell was at his best today. He is becoming the real warrior of the administration. Today his speech and his presentation is really a powerful argument for not even continuing with inspections. What he's saying today is it is useless to go on with inspections, Saddam will defeat any inspections you can devise. That was the whole gist of his speech.
Many people are very convinced by his speech, but there are some who are unconvincible. I doubt if he'll convince the French no matter what he does. What I think he did today is make the American public much more aware of the problem. He put so much detail and threw in so much classified information. He jeopardized sources and methods, but it was worth it. We are going to war and we want as many people with us as possible. The American government has decided it's worth the risk, even if no one in Iraq will talk on cellphones now. The guy who talked on the phone is dead by now.
Most of the arguments Powell made today have been around in the Iraqi opposition for a long time. The defectors he's talking about came through the Iraqi opposition. I myself came in through the Iraqi National Congress. So the Iraqi opposition has a first-hand view. For them, it's a happy day. It's liberation. This proves what they've been saying all these years, with nobody hearing them.
