Here is the key sentence in this article. "If you want to have action on this issue this winter, your only hope is the declaration."
[The New Republic]
WHITE HOUSE WATCH
Itchy
by Ryan Lizza
Post date: 11.22.02
Issue date: 12.02.02
As the United Nations moved toward approval of Resolution 1441 earlier this month, Sergei Lavrov, the Russian ambassador to the United Nations, became obsessed with a passage buried in the document. It was a couple of days before the November 8 vote, and holdouts like Russia, still skeptical of the U.S. draft, were combing the document for "hidden triggers" that the United States could use to justify military action or for loose phraseology that they could use to validate claims of Iraqi noncooperation. Lavrov thought he found something alarming in paragraph eight: "Iraq shall not take or threaten hostile acts directed against any representative or personnel of the United Nations or the IAEA [International Atomic Energy Agency] or of any Member State taking action to uphold any Council resolution." The language was meant to caution Saddam Hussein against harming the U.N.'s chemical and biological weapons inspectors and the IAEA's nuclear sleuths. But why was the phrase "or of any Member State" in there?
The Russian representative, as well as several other Security Council members, worried that the phrase was a backdoor way for the United States to cite aggression against U.S. and British aircrafts patrolling Iraq's no-fly zones as evidence of Saddam's noncompliance with the new U.N. mandate. The no-fly zones have long been controversial among Iraq's friends on the Council because they are not authorized by the United Nations but, rather, justified as a way to enforce resolutions ordering Saddam not to repress Kurds in the north and Shiites in the south. Says a Security Council diplomat, "The Russian ambassador was muttering about the `institutionalization of the no-fly zones.'" To mollify him, the British made a personal assurance that paragraph eight had nothing to do with coalition aircraft. "Otherwise, the Russians would not have voted for the resolution," says a diplomat. After the formal Security Council vote, Lavrov read a statement insisting that paragraph eight referred only to personnel detailed to the inspection teams.
Unlike the British, the Americans never made a similar guarantee to the Russians. And, this week, interpreting paragraph eight caused the first major split both within the Bush administration and between the U.S. and the Security Council over what sort of Iraqi violations amount to a material breach of the new resolution. When asked if Iraq's firing on the aircraft in the no-fly zones constituted such a breach, the State Department's spokesman, Richard Boucher, played down the attacks. "It would probably take some kind of analysis by the lawyers of the resolution," he said. But, a few days later, the White House decided to take a more aggressive posture and announced that "firing upon our aircraft in the no-fly zone, or British aircraft, is a violation. It is a material breach."
Still, the White House knows that no other member state shares its interpretation, not even the United Kingdom, which co-sponsored the resolution and is the only other country whose pilots are at risk. "The British have said that, even if one of their planes is shot down, it wouldn't be material breach," says a State Department official. "For the U.K., fourteen forty-one was about one last chance to achieve disarmament," says a British diplomat. "It was not about no-fly zones. If it was, we would not have had a fifteen to nil vote." That's why the administration, while technically defining attacks on coalition pilots as a material breach, has no plans to refer the incidents to the Security Council now. The best President Bush can do is reserve the right to cite the attacks later on, once a pattern of postresolution Iraqi intransigence has been documented. That may be just as well. The provocations will strengthen the case against Iraq that the Bush administration will eventually bring before the Council, and, for now, they give U.S. forces an excuse to strike valuable targets. "It's in their interest to degrade the Iraqi air defenses," says a Security Council diplomat. "They should be happy!"
This week's international debate over the definition of material breach is a harbinger of things to come. In fact, the debate over paragraph eight will be nothing compared with the coming war over paragraphs three and four. Those paragraphs mandate that, by December 8, Iraq must provide the inspectors with "a currently accurate, full, and complete declaration" of every aspect of its chemical, biological, nuclear, and missile programs. For weeks, administration hard-liners skeptical about new inspections have argued that the smallest lie or omission in the declaration should serve as evidence of Iraqi noncompliance and as a trigger for military action. If the new resolution is to be different from the old ones, they insist, Saddam must understand that anything less than a 100 percent confession of his proscribed weapons programs will produce his overthrow. Some Bush officials hope that U.S. intelligence will easily prove inaccuracies in the declaration and forestall the drawn-out process of actual inspections. "There is a vigorous fight going on with respect to this," says one person close to the more hawkish members of Bush's national security team.
But Colin Powell and the State Department already seem to have won that fight. Despite Bush's tough rhetoric on Wednesday in Prague--"Deception this time will not be tolerated"--State's interpretation is that even the most bogus declaration cannot by itself equal material breach. Paragraph four says that "false statements or omissions in the declarations submitted by Iraq pursuant to this resolution and failure by Iraq at any time to comply with, and cooperate fully in the implementation of, this resolution shall constitute a further material breach [emphasis added]." State's reading of this paragraph--the only one in the resolution in which material breach is defined--is that lies in the disclosure must be accompanied by noncooperation with inspections to reach material breach. "The way the resolution is structured," Powell said recently in an interview with the BBC, "if the declaration is false and if there are efforts to deny the inspectors the access that they need, then that constitutes, in and of itself, as a matter of fact, a material breach." His deputy, Richard Armitage, echoed this view last week in another TV interview: "In theory, a false declaration could be a material breach. But I think, in fact, it would have to be false declarations combined with attempts at obfuscation, or concealment, or blocking inspectors." Other administration officials agree. "A sloppy and vague disclosure won't constitute material breach," says a State Department official. "Their view is to put Hans Blix in charge."
To the hawks' dismay, this is also the consensus view in the Security Council. "There is no material breach until Iraq has not cooperated in the verification of the declaration," says a Western diplomat who was closely involved with the negotiations. "Merely telling lies in the declaration is not in itself a casus belli." In fact, the presence of the word "and" in paragraph four was key to getting a unanimous vote. "The British were extremely specific about this," adds one diplomat. "[U.K. Ambassador Jeremy] Greenstock stressed it and stressed it." The Brits concur. "It's the two things together," says a British official. "To get to the level of material breach, we're talking about a lie in the declaration and noncooperation" with the inspectors. As long as there is cooperation, even if the inspectors discover that the declaration was false, there is no material breach.
This interpretation, of course, gives Saddam zero incentive to be forthcoming in the declaration. Why should he provide Blix with any clues when he is only really going to be judged by his cooperation with inspections on the ground? All of which means that a war may not be nearly as imminent as many believe. "There was a flurry of concern at the end of the resolution process over at DOD," says one State Department official. "They realized this was a serious weapons-inspections process. ... It could drag on for months." In fact, Rolf Ekeus, the former chief arms inspector, has said it could take two years before inspectors find anything. For the hawks, Saddam's December 8 declaration may be their last chance to stop that process. Says one hard-liner, "If you want to have action on this issue this winter, your only hope is the declaration."
Ryan Lizza is an associate editor at TNR. |
