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Disclosing the UN spin
game
By David Isenberg
The
job of framing the spin surrounding Iraq’s
just-delivered "weapons of mass destruction" declaration
pursuant to UN Security Council Resolution 1441 is,
well, spinning out of control.
Even before the
declaration was delivered to UN headquarters in New
York, government officials both in the United States and
Iraq, as well as pundits spanning the globe, were
frantically scrambling to put their views out.
In a sense, all the posturing almost makes one
sympathetic to Iraq and Saddam Hussein. From the
viewpoint of deterring war it is caught between the
proverbial rock and a hard place. Prior to the delivery
of the declaration, the US had made it clear that if
Iraq declared it had none of the prohibited missile
systems or nuclear, biological or chemical weapons, the
US would regard that as a lie and consider it sufficient
cause for invasion. On the other hand, if Iraq did
declare that it had such weapons, then it would be in
contravention of past UN Security Council resolutions,
not to mention acknowledging something Iraq has gone to
great pains to deny, and that would also be considered
sufficient cause for war, at least to the Bush
administration.
As Judith Kipper, a senior
Middle East specialist at the Center for Strategic and
International Studies in Washington, noted in a report
in the Christian Science Monitor, "Clearly the [Bush]
administration doesn't want any good news from Baghdad
... the president and vice president have already set up
very low expectations - in fact, expectations of
noncompliance."
Consider just a few remarks made in
recent days:
Speaking on Fox News, US Senator Joe
Lieberman said, "I think you'd have to say that what
they gave the UN yesterday was probably a 12,000-page,
hundred-pound lie."
Similarly, Senator Bob
Graham, a Florida Democrat and outgoing chairman of the
Select Committee on Intelligence, told CBS, "We are in
possession of what I think to be compelling evidence
that Saddam Hussein has, and has had for a number of
years, a developing capacity for the production and
storage of weapons of mass destruction."
David
Kay, former chief UN weapons inspector, speaking on Meet
The Press, said, "I think that's the important bottom
line out of 12,000 pages - no weapons of mass
destruction, no programs to develop them in the last
four years, nothing left over from their previous
program. I think that just doesn't meet the laugh test."
Last Thursday, White House spokesman Ari
Fleischer said, "President Bush has said Iraq has
weapons of mass destruction. [British Prime Minister]
Tony Blair has said Iraq has weapons of mass
destruction. [US Secretary of Defense] Donald Rumsfeld
has said Iraq has weapons of mass destruction ... Iraq
says they don't. You can choose who you want to
believe."
That same day he also rejected Iraq's
claims that it had no nuclear weapons, citing testimony
of past weapons inspectors and intelligence experts. But
he offered no new evidence to support the
administration's declarations that the Iraqi government
had just moved its weapons of mass destruction out of
sight.
Predictably, on the anti-war side, former
president Jimmy Carter, arriving in Norway to receive
the Nobel Peace Prize, said that there was no reason for
a US war on Iraq if Baghdad complied with United Nations
weapons demands.
Meanwhile, UN officials in New
York have been assembling reports filled with secret
Iraqi weapons data information withheld from previous UN
reports - for comparison with the new declaration,
according to a report in the Sunday Boston Globe. The
information will be unveiled in coming weeks to question
or disprove Saddam's report.
That is a
critical issue, as Security Council Resolution 1441
states that "false statements or omissions" in Iraq's
declaration would constitute a "material breach" -
diplomatic jargon for a justification for war - if the
problems were accompanied by a lack of Iraqi cooperation
to address them.
Reversing an earlier decision, on Sunday the
president of the UN Security Council, Alfonso Valdivieso
of Colombia, agreed to give the US and the four other
permanent council members - Britain, France, Russia and
China - full copies of the declaration. While the US
actually received it and is making copies for other
members, it may make it more difficult for the US to
frame the declaration as false, as the other states can
be depended on to examine it as closely as the US.
The Los Angeles Times reported last Friday that
the Bush administration had compiled a team of analysts
who would carefully examine the declaration. While it
might take several weeks to fully translate and examine
the information, US officials hope to find any important
omissions and falsehoods more quickly than the UN might.
Much of the media reporting would be comical if
it didn't deal with such a deadly issue. For example, in
a twist on the old saw that size matters, much of the
media are harping on the size of the Iraqi declaration,
inferring that its approximately seven-volume,
12,000-page submission is nothing more than an attempt
to burden the United Nations Monitoring, Verification
and Inspection Mission (UNMOVIC) with reams of
irrelevant misleading data. Such inferences overlook the
fact that virtually all UN arms control-related
paperwork is voluminous in size. For example, the annual
confidence building measure declaration made to the UN
by states that are party to the Biological Weapons
Convention on permitted biodefense activities can run to
a thousand pages or more.
The actual declaration
contained, according to CNN, 11,807 pages of
information; 1,334 on biological weapons, 1,823 on
chemical weapons, 6,887 on missiles, and 12 CD-ROMs
containing 529 megabytes of information (believed to
contain information Iraq has supplied to the United
Nations before).
According to Iraqi General Amir
Saadim, who serves as a senior science adviser to Saddam
Hussein, the nuclear section starts with an 80-page
introduction that outlines the development of Iraq's
nuclear program, organizations and finances. Then a
363-page chapter details technologies used by Iraqi
scientists, including "electromagnetic isotope
separation" and "uranium enrichment by gaseous
diffusion". Finally, there is a 333-page chapter on
actual nuclear weapon development.
Considering
the millions of pages known to exist in UNMOVIC’s
databases, a 12,000-page declaration is pretty ho-hum.
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