Insight Looks at The Iraq War; In the welter of confused criticism, a true accounting of events leading to Baghdad shows the resolve of President Bush's policy

0 Comments | Insight on the News, Jan 19, 2004

Byline: J. Michael Waller, INSIGHT

By the time Saddam Hussein was pulled from his hole in the ground last month, the historical revisionists already were consigning the facts of the conflict to the trash can and substituting a new mythology portraying one of the most successful campaigns in military history as a mistake and a failure. The political opponents of President George W. Bush claim to "support our troops" while at the same time they appear to thirst for some sort of U.S. defeat in Iraq. After having taunted the president for months for not finding Saddam, they were shattered by his capture.

Rep. James McDermott (D-Wash.) suggested that the timing of Saddam's capture while the Democrats were on the campaign trail was "too much by happenstance to be a coincidence." Democrat presidential front-runner Howard Dean suggested darkly that Bush had advance knowledge of the 9/11 attacks no doubt from one of Nancy Reagan's astrologers and former secretary of state Madeleine Albright opined that the administration probably had Osama bin Laden locked up somewhere, ready to be wheeled out when another spike was needed in the polls. She later claimed she spoke in jest, but nobody remembers anybody laughing at the time. The critics are even keeping their fingers crossed in the hope that the U.S.-led coalition of more than 50 countries never finds any Iraqi weapons of mass destruction (WMDs) that have worried three presidential administrations.

Yet the true history of the war shows that Operation Iraqi Freedom put an end to more than a decade of indecision amid the international hand-wringing about Saddam's murderous regime, its threats against its Arab, Israeli, Persian and Turkish neighbors, its sponsorship of terrorism, its plot to assassinate a former president of the United States and its nonstop quest to build an arsenal of chemical, biological and nuclear weapons.

The evidence shows that Bush's reasons for going to war against Iraq were fully rooted, as he has said all along, in successive U.N. resolutions issued since his father forged an earlier U.S.-led coalition to force Saddam from Kuwait in 1990 and 1991. The evidence had strong, unquestioned, bipartisan and international support at least until Bush took a stand to do something about it. Then the critics emerged to criticize secret intelligence reports and to accuse political leaders of manipulating intelligence analysis, even to the point that those same critics contradicted themselves.

Within weeks after the fall of Baghdad, the United Nations ended up endorsing the U.S.-led occupation and lifted sanctions against Iraq. By year's end, the world's most bitter opponents of the liberation France, Germany and Russia agreed to help free Iraq by taking billions of dollars in losses on loans they had made to Saddam.

But the president's domestic critics didn't take defeat as easily. By then the 2004 presidential campaign was under way. How did the Iraq War really begin? The task is to reconstruct the historical record of who knew what, when they knew it and what they did about it.

The road to Iraq began in 1990 when Iraq invaded and annexed Kuwait. The United Nations demanded an immediate withdrawal, imposed economic sanctions on Baghdad and, when Saddam would not comply, approved a resolution to use "all necessary means" to expel the Iraqi conquerors. Diplomacy failed, and a U.S.-led coalition liberated Kuwait, decimating the Iraqi military but not attempting to destroy the regime. In a U.N. cease-fire, Saddam agreed to unconditional terms spelled out in several U.N. Security Council resolutions.

These resolutions demanded an end to internal repression, the return of all prisoners from Kuwait and other countries, the renunciation of all involvement with terrorism and the termination of the permission granted to terrorists to operate within Iraq. U.N. Security Council Resolution 687, passed unanimously on April 3, 1991, recognized that Iraq had a years-long WMD program that included chemical, nuclear and perhaps biological weapons. The resolution recognized reports that Iraq "has attempted to acquire materials for a nuclear-weapons programme." The United Nations further observed the "threat that all weapons of mass destruction pose to peace and security in the area" and resolved that, as part of the cease-fire, "Iraq shall unconditionally accept the destruction, removal or rendering harmless, under international supervision, of all chemical and biological weapons and all stocks of agents and all related subsystems and components and all research, development, support and manufacturing facilities." Iraq also would "place all of its nuclear-weapons-usable materials under the exclusive control, for custody and removal, of the International Atomic Energy Agency [IAEA]."

The process was to commence immediately with Baghdad's total cooperation. The Security Council used the word "unconditionally" five times in the resolution. But during the next two years, the U.N. Special Commission (UNSCOM), created expressly to search for Iraqi WMDs, faced stonewall after stonewall by Saddam. Twice the Security Council demanded that Iraq cooperate fully on inspections. Meanwhile, the United Nations established the Northern No-Fly Zone to provide safe haven for the Kurds north of the 36th parallel and, later, a Southern No-Fly Zone to protect the Shi'as below the 33rd parallel. Iraq was practically partitioned in three. Any unauthorized Iraqi aircraft in the zones would be shot down. Any attempts to harass or threaten the U.S. and British warplanes mandated to enforce the zones would be met with lethal force. Another component of Resolution 687 was the United Nations' unanimous recognition that Iraq was a state sponsor of terrorism. The cease-fire, according to the resolution, "requires Iraq to inform the Security Council that it will not commit or support any act of international terrorism or allow any organization directed toward commission of such acts to operate within its territory and to condemn unequivocally and renounce all acts, methods and practices of terrorism."