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Sunday, Nov 22, 2009
Judith Kipper, Middle East specialist affiliated with the Council on Foreign Relations and the Center for Strategic and International Studies.
I think the presentation of Powell was to be admired. He was eloquent and elegant and he was very, very respectful of the Security Council and the inspections process. As far as the evidence that he presented, I think it's of course interesting, but I don't believe it's compelling. Everyone knows that the Iraqi regime does have weapons of mass destruction. The intercepts and the photographs are somewhat tantalizing, but they're not really new. I don't think anyone -- including the Security Council members -- assumed that Iraq would do provide anything more than minimal cooperation, or that they would simply hand these things over in the way that the presentation seemed to imply.
On the terrorist part of it, I think that he raises more questions than are answered. If there is a camp in northeast Iraq that's training al-Qaida, that's a Kurdish area. The U.S. has good relations with the Kurds. The U.S. is bombing almost every day in the no-fly zone, so why hasn't that camp been eliminated? I don't know the answer to that. If there is a camp of Islamic radicals, how come for even 24 hours after we knew it existed it was allowed to remain there? There's no reason they couldn't go to that area for a special operation or why wouldn't we get cooperation with the Kurds to eliminate that installation. I think the White House has been determined from the beginning to link what has been circumstantial evidence of contacts between Iraqis and al-Qaida and other groups -- the administration is determined to make it more than what it really is.
Have people come to Iraq for medical or education reasons, to get medical care or to learn to do certain things? Well, yes. But have they come to learn to do chemical warfare? Or biological weapons? I have seen no evidence of that ... though I have no access to secret information. Is there operational cooperation, or did Iraq have knowledge of al-Qaida operations, especially Sept. 11? I don't think that case has been made.
Powell's presentation was effective in that it raised very specific questions that have to be addressed by the international community. But that doesn't mean that it's effective in achieving the intentions the administration had for this speech. For example, France or someone else might come and say that we need to provide more intelligence data to the weapons inspectors and not provide it to the public so that they can catch the Iraqis red-handed -- and that to do that, the inspectors need more time.
Mansour Farhang was revolutionary Iran's first ambassador to the United Nations and worked as a mediator during the early months of the Iran-Iraq war. He is a professor of international relations and Middle Eastern politics at Bennington College.
He made a very compelling case, but it was a political speech. As a political speech I think it was as effective as it could be, but I really never had any doubt about the truth of what he had to say. I don't think anybody in the Security Council including the Iraqi delegate could question the truth of what he was saying. The Iraqi delegate had to deny it, but rest of the people didn't really question the substance of what he said.
But at the end he said we want disarmament or we want regime change, and there's no doubt that the word disarmament as it applies to U.S. policy towards Iraq is a euphemism for regime change. That's the issue. People are fearful of the consequences. Many of the people who oppose the war believe Saddam could be kept in a box and continually squeezed if the inspectors will remain stationed in Iraq. It's much more than containment. They will continue to diminish his capacity and at some point he will die or be overthrown.
If there was one thing I was thinking of, it's that there's a lot of skepticism about American motives, particularly in the Middle East, and maybe this is just idealistic thinking, but I think Powell could have made his presentation dramatically more credible if he made at least a veiled reference to past U.S. support for Saddam Hussein, and expressed regret. After all, when he tried to explain the nature of the regime and spoke about Saddam using chemical weapons, he went back to a period in Saddam's rule when he was a de facto American ally. People in the region know this, and when they know this and Powell makes absolutely no reference to it, it makes them question his integrity.
The al-Qaida connection was largely circumstantial. In my own opinion, they definitely have a community of interest and definitely the Muslims fighting the Kurds in Northern Iraq are connected to Saddam and in some way connected to al-Qaida. I believe what he said. I don't think there is any question about all of these connections.
But the real issue is whether war is the only way to get rid of Saddam. In the case of war, people in the region are concerned that once again hundreds of thousands of Iraqis are going to be decimated. The concern is whether it is necessary to punish the desperate people of Iraq one more time.
It's virtually certain that an overwhelming majority of the Iraqi people support regime change. They want him gone, they want him destroyed, they want him dead. But they don't want to be refugees and they don't want to be bombed. I read in an Iranian newspaper that the Iraqi regime, over the last three or four weeks, has removed a lot of people close to the border with Iran and perhaps has planted a lot of mines. If this is the case, it means the many Iraqis who are going to cross the border to go to Iran will have to go over mines.
The Iranian government has already established 20 refugee camps less than 20 yards over the border. Last time, altogether a million Iraqis crossed the border and 200,000 remained in Iran. Iran wants to avoid all that.
Nothing Powell said could have changed my view and the view of the Middle East. The only country he could sway is France, because France is using a legalistic argument, at least in public. Every time they make a statement they refer to evidence. If the United States has the right kind of evidence, that could at least put an end to the public position of France. It's the only country where a legalistic argument and evidence could make a difference. With respect to China and Russia, evidence has nothing to do with it.
