The arrogance of Aziz
By Ze'ev Schiff
One of the most extraordinary conversations regarding the manufacturing of biological weapons took place between Richard Butler, former head of the previous weapons inspections team in Iraq (UNSCOM), and Iraqi Vice President Tareq Aziz.
Butler describes the conversations in his book, "The Greatest Threat," which was published in 2000. Aziz told Butler that chemical weapons saved Iraq from the Iranians, but that the real threat to Iraq comes from the illegitimate Zionist state. Because of that danger, Iraq had to develop biological weaponry, which it is ready to use to defend itself against Israel.
In an interview with an Australian paper, Butler added details, quoting Aziz as saying that Iraq manufactured biological weapons to use "against the Iranians and the Jews."
I remembered this in the wake of an interview broadcast a few days ago with Aziz on TV, in which he explained that Iraq couldn't attack Israel now because it does not have long-range missiles.
And what if it did? It was a purely technical reason from a man who routinely lies. Aziz is trying to present himself on his world travels as a nice grandpa. Despite what he told Butler about Saddam Hussein's regime being ready to use biological weapons, the Pope recently received him. No Arab leader has ever stated such things so baldly and by doing so, Aziz has turned himself into a war criminal who deserves death.
The international respectability Aziz has won of late can be largely credited to the French and Russian attitudes toward him. Their sympathies for Iraq have not really been fully expressed in the debates that have taken place over the years about monitoring Iraqi weapons.
The French now argue that, instead of war, the inspections in Iraq should be strengthened. But the truth is that they, and the Russians, weakened the previous inspections team. The previous French ambassador to the United Nations, for example, mocked inspectors' claims that the Iraqis escaped in cars from an inspections site before the inspectors arrived - saying, perhaps the Iraqis were going on a picnic.
In their consistent position to the various proposals raised by the inspectors, the French and Russians buttressed Iraqi stubbornness. Every time there was French and Russian opposition to inspectors' proposals, the Iraqis took another step toward throwing them out. First they demanded the removal of the Americans among the inspectors, and finally demanded a cessation of all inspections by UNSCOM at the end of 1998, expelling the entire team from the country.
In his second report to the Security Council on February 14, inspections team chief Hans Blix said he plans to arrange a meeting for the Iraqis with a representative from South Africa, which successfully dismantled its nuclear weapons program. There are other countries that have backed off from nuclear weapons projects, but South Africa is a country that once had the bomb and no longer does. Foreign intelligence services suspected they had it but were never able to prove the secret. President Frederik Willem de Klerk decided it would be best to disarm before the government was handed over to the black majority. He is the one who invited in inspectors from the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) and provided all the information they requested.
Gideon Frank, director of Israel's Atomic Energy Commission, said in a lecture to the IAEA that, without a country reaching a political decision to disarm, there's no chance of disarming it. That's not what is happening in Iraq. Despite the threat of war, Saddam and his colleagues have no readiness to make such a political decision and their goal is to hide as much as possible. If the Iraqis meet the South Africans, they'll want to know how to hide their nuclear weapons. |
