Clinton's Personal Misconduct Behind Bungled Iraq Business
The United Nations-brokered deal with Iraq is the worst catastrophe for U.S. foreign policy since the Iran hostage crisis of 1979.
Over the past few months, Saddam Hussein has violated his sworn commitments and obstructed UN arms inspectors, all to tenaciously defend a germ warfare industry that -- as the New York Times reported in a terrifying article on Thursday -- retains the ability to produce enough poison to kill the entire population of the Middle East. U.S. President Bill Clinton warned Saddam that if he did not comply with the UN inspectors, his country would be bombed. The Clinton administration and Saddam stared each other down. This week, the Clinton administration surrendered.
The Americans have repeatedly called for full and unfettered access to all weapons sites in Iraq, including the 60 so-called presidential sites. The text of the agreement between Saddam and UN Secretary General Kofi Annan is not yet available, but authoritative reports inform us it opens only eight of the sites. The rest will be inspected by small UN teams (no more than four persons) that must be accompanied by a senior Iraqi official. If the Iraqi official is late for his appointment, the team must wait until he arrives. In the past, delays like that have lasted days and even weeks.
The agreement creates fantastic possibilities for delay, even in non-presidential sites. From now on, the UN inspectors (who are mostly British and American) will have to be accompanied wherever they go by a UN diplomat (almost never British or American). If the Iraqis want to stop or delay an inspection, they can appeal to the diplomats, who must by the terms of the text consider 'Iraqi sensitivities.' The man in charge of deciding these appeals will be a former foreign minister of Algeria, not exactly a pro-western country.
Because Annan has gone on record condemning the inspectors' 'cowboy' methods, the agreement lends plausibility and credence to Saddam's claims he is a victim of western unfairness and Zionist plots. (He seems to share a press agent with Hillary Clinton, doesn't he?)
Madeleine Albright used to call Saddam a liar and mass-murderer. Today the man she chose as secretary general is telling the world that Saddam Hussein's promises can be trusted.
Finally, the agreement expands the amount of oil Iraq can legally sell. We have heard a great deal about the starving Iraqi women and children. But the truth of the matter is Iraq is already permitted to sell enough oil to buy the food and medicines it needs -- the money has simply been diverted to Saddam's germ warfare program. Allowing him to sell more will not spare a single child the pangs of hunger. It will simply enable Saddam to build more weapons, and to build them faster.
There's a wise old saying: 'Wherever you go, there you are.' Clinton is Clinton -- the man implicated in the Monica Lewinsky coverup is the same man who is in charge of U.S. foreign policy. The bad character that appears to have led him into perjury and obstruction of justice is the same bad character that has bungled the Iraq business.
Why did Clinton accept the Annan-Saddam deal? Because his foreign policy has always been driven by polls -- and the polls showed the public did not support the policy he had stumbled into. Only 16% of Americans supported his 'bomb for no particular reason' strategy. Forty per cent wanted no use of force, and 35% wanted a real war to remove Saddam.
Another president in this situation would have rallied the country to his cause: he might have given the country, as George Bush did during the Gulf War, a formal speech from the Oval Office. But Clinton can't do that -- too many people would be staring at his chair and snickering. He might, as Ronald Reagan used to do, have defended his policies with wit and force at a press conference. But Clinton cannot do that either -- he has not faced the press for weeks, because he cannot truthfully answer the questions they will ask him.
In the end, his own personal misconduct backed him into a situation where he feared war more than Saddam. He went eyeball to eyeball with a Middle Eastern dictator -- and blinked. He has humiliated his country. Let us fervently pray that he has not opened the door to the rebuilding of Iraq's germ weapons.
Originally published in The Financial Post