Here's an intelligent piece by Robert Wright. (He's the author of a book I've recommended here a couple of times, The Moral Animal.)
COMMENT & ANALYSIS: A costly way to search for bioweapons
By Robert Wright
Financial Times; Aug 20, 2002
The official American grievance against Saddam Hussein, it once seemed, was that he would not permit the weapons inspections mandated by the United Nations after the Persian Gulf war. As George Bush, US president, put it in November, Mr Hussein "needs to let inspectors back in his country, to show us that he is not developing weapons of mass destruction".
But lately, administration officials have been acting as if weapons inspections were nearly as suspect as Saddam himself. This month Donald Rumsfeld, the secretary of defence, attributed the success of the first round of UN inspections in Iraq to a lucky break (prior to which, "they couldn't find much of anything"). Then General Richard Myers, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, said that some weapons of mass destruction "are easily hid, and any kind of inspection regime would probably not reveal them".
Even America's chief diplomat, Colin Powell, reacted to a question about weapons inspections with this cryptic formulation: "Inspections aren't the issue. Disarmament is the issue." Yes, Mr Powell allowed, "the president has previously said that he supported inspections", and, yes, we want Iraq to comply with UN mandates; but "the US continues to believe that regime change will be in the best interests of the Iraqi people, people of the region and the world".
What started out as an ultimatum - "let UN inspectors return or we are going to attack you" - seems to have been streamlined: "we are going to attack you".
One might question whether telling a man thought to possess biological weapons that you are going to kill him no matter what he does is the optimal way to arrange his incentive structure. Yet giving Mr Hussein nothing to lose may not be the biggest problem with the administration's recent failure to embrace inspections as an alternative to war. There are two other rivals for that title, one short-term and one long-term.
The long-run problem is that in the future we will, like it or not, have to rely on international weapons inspections, and the sooner we figure out how to conduct them well, the better. Biological weapons are invisible, and equipment that can be used to make them is scattered across college campuses, medical facilities, and pharmaceutical plants. This "dual-use" nature of bio-weapons technology is rightly cited as a reason that inspections could fail unless they are extremely intrusive, dogged and creative. But it is also the reason we have to take up that challenge.
After all, this very elusiveness of bioweapons means that it is hard to dismiss from afar any suspicion that a nation is making them.
So what do you do - attack the nation and install a regime you trust? That may conceivably work in Iraq (assuming several rosy scenarios, including that America does a better job of postwar nation building than it has done in Afghanistan). But institutionalising the approach - turning war into a routine form of data gathering - has obvious downsides.
The Bush administration believes that at least six nations have been secretly making bioweapons. Is Mr Bush planning to attack Iran, Syria, North Korea, and so on after mopping up in Iraq? Maybe he hopes an Iraq invasion will intimidate leaders of these states into swearing off bioweapons. But if so, how does he plan to verify their good intentions? Will he just, as he did with Russian President Vladimir Putin, look into their eyes and see into their soul? Inspections, whatever their shortcomings, might be more effective.
Besides, biological weapons are easier to build without state support than nuclear weapons. Even if we could trust all governments to eschew them, we would still need to scan the planet for them. When US officials implicitly dismiss weapons inspections as futile, they are virtually giving up on the possibility of a secure future.
An inspections regime that could meet the challenges of tomorrow would have to break new ground on at least two fronts.
First, it would be unprecedently robust. By international treaty we would make routine short-notice inspections in any nation plausibly alleged to have biological weapons. Refusal to permit inspections could be defined as a threat to "international peace and security" - grounds for military intervention under the UN Charter.
Second, new rules could be introduced for dual-use technology. For example, such equipment could be redesigned to include sensors and internal computers to record every use and every user. Possession of machines that lack such monitoring devices could be banned under national and international law.
Of course, the US, like all nations, would have to abide by these regulations, including inspections by an international body. In Bush-era Washington, this may sound like science fiction. But at least it would be an approach to controlling bioweapons that did not involve starting war on an annual basis.
If we ever build a workable system for policing biological weapons globally, it will probably happen gradually, by trial and error. One way to start would be to outline a new inspection regime, tougher than the first round of Iraq inspections, and demand that Iraq accept it or face attack. Mr Bush probably could have sold the UN Security Council on such a thing right after September 11, as his father validated the Gulf war with UN backing.
This points to the short-run problem with the administration's attitude towards weapons inspections, a rhetorical problem. If Mr Bush had stuck with the theme he laid down in November - open up to the UN or we are coming in - he could have cast war in Iraq as a defence of international law. Instead, the war is being cast as nearly the opposite: part of a new doctrine of pre-emptive invasion, in violation of the international law against attacking a nation without clear provocation.
The US could still, by giving Iraq a precise weapons-inspection ultimatum, undo some of this public-relations damage. But that is not a big White House priority. Mr Bush entered office believing that the world's opinion of America does not much matter, and this conviction somehow survived September 11 intact. If biological weapons become widely available to terrorists - as they probably will unless weapons inspections are supported and strengthened - history could unambiguously prove him wrong.
The writer, a visiting scholar at the University of Pennsylvania, is the author of Nonzero: The Logic of Human Destiny |
