Background report on Iraq

 

Iraq has only been an independent, sovereign state since 1932, even though its people can trace their history back over 5000 years to the Sumerians of ancient Mesopotamia and the worlds first civilization. In ancient times, Mesopotamia was ruled by a succession of groups from the  Akkadians, Assyrians, and Chaldeans, all of which presided over impressive civilizations. With the rise of Islam, Mesopotamia was subject to Arab conquest and became the center of the Abbisad caliphate from 750 to 1258. Over the next six centuries, Iraq fell to other foreign conquerors including the Mongols and  the Ottoman Empire. With the collapse of the Ottoman empire after World war I, Iraq was designated a British Mandate by the League of Nations. In 1921, the British installed a Hashemite monarchy led by Faisal. The monarchy was overthrown by a military coup in 1958. After a power struggle with other coup plotters, General Abd Al Quasim emerged as the leader of the new Iraqi Republic. The Quasim government was beset by  attempted coups and assassination attempts (one led by future president Saddam Hussein of the Baath party). Quasim attempted unsuccessfully to hold in check the ambitions of a well organized communist party on the one hand and the strengthening Baath party on the other hand. Eventually Quasim was overthrown in 1963 by the Baath party.

The Baath Party that assumed power in early 1963 had been founded in Syria (where it would also flourish) in the early 1940s, and was built around an ideology of Socialism and Arab nationalism. In Iraq the Baath party would come to be controlled by cadres from the town of Tikrit which is the birthplace of Saddam Hussein.  After taking charge, The Baath Party created the National Council of Revolutionary Command (NCRC) as the main governing body. Even with its dominance of the NCRC, the Baath Party had difficulty maintaining its rule. It was besieged by internal factional battles within the party and a Kurdish uprising in the north of Iraq. The first Baath government was overthrown by a group of Nasserite military officers who sought closer ties with Nasser’s Egypt. This group was led by Colonel Abd as Salaam Arif, who had also participated in the 1958 coup. Arif cultivated close ties with Egypt’s Nasser, and even planned to have Iraq join Nasser’s United Arab Republic (which had consisted of Egypt and Syria until Syria pulled out in 1961), but this plan never came to fruition. In 1965 Nasserite officers tried unsuccessfully to assassinate Arif, at which point he disassociated himself from the Nasserite movement. In 1966 Arif was killed in a plane crash, and was replaced by his brother, General Abd  Ar. Rahman Arif with the support of the military.

The second Arif was a weak leader and his government was further hurt by renewed fighting with the Kurds in the north, and a dispute with Syria over payment for the transit of Iraqi oil through Syria. Syria eventually cut off the flow of Iraqi oil to the Mediterranean which caused great economic dislocation in Iraq.  In 1968 a small group of military officers launched a successful coup against Arif. Shortly thereafter a revitalized  Baath party was able to take over the reins of the Iraqi government. Between 1963 and 1968 the Baath party had built up a formidable organization with significant support throughout Iraqi society. The party leadership was now tightly integrated by tribal and family ties. The top members of the leadership were all Sunni Arab Tikritis and most were members of the family of Ahmad Hasan al Bakr who led the party. After an unsuccessful coup attempt by Nasserite military officers. Bakr and one of his key lieutenants, Saddam Hussein began a series of ruthless and thorough purges of anyone that might challenge the rule of the Baath Party.  They also established a provisional constitution in 1970 that further cemented the Baath Party’s hold on Iraqi Society.         

Throughout the 1970s power in the Baath party became ever more centralized around a very small group of Tikritis led by Bakr and Saddam Hussein. The group pushed through a series of constitutional changes that gave greater power to the President and to the Baath party’s Regional Command which took control of the official policy-making body known as the Revolutionary Command Council (RCC).  The Baath Party created an extensive secret police and intelligence apparatus throughout Iraqi society as well as its own well armed militia. By the late 1970s Saddam Hussein had consolidated control over the party and the Iraqi government. In 1979 he replaced Bakr as president of the republic, commander in Chief of the armed forces, and head of the Baath Party and RCC.

           During the 1970s Iraq had become embroiled in conflict with several of its neighbors in the Gulf Region. As the British withdrew from the Gulf in the early 1970s, Iraq and Iran came into confrontation over control over the Shatt al Arab waterway. As part of the developing conflict, Iraq began to provide support to forces in Iran that opposed the rule of the Shah, and Iran responded by providing aid to Kurdish separatist in the north of Iraq. Hussein and the Shah signed an agreement in 1975 ostensibly to settle the Shatt al Arab issue, and as soon as the agreement was signed Hussein launched a massive offensive against the forces of the Kurdish Democratic Party which had formerly been supported by the Iranians.

In the early 1970s Iraq was also involved in a confrontation with Kuwait over control of two islands in the Gulf near the Iraqi port of Umm Qasr. In an attempt to pressure Kuwait to yield control of the islands, Iraq occupied a border post in northeastern Kuwait in 1973. Iraq eventually withdrew under pressure from Saudi Arabia and the Arab League. During the mid and late 1970s Saddam Hussein sought to establish Iraq as the leader of the Arab world. He worked to improve Iraq’s relations with the Shah’s regime in Iran, and to improve Iraq’s relations with its gulf neighbors and the Arab world in general.

The Iran-Iraq relationship was dramatically changed by the 1979 Islamic Revolution in Iran. The new revolutionary government was led by Ayatollah Ruholla Khomeini, who had been expelled from exile in Iraq in 1978 on order of Saddam Hussein. Khomeini also began to try to stir up unrest among the large Shiite minority in Southern Iraq. In the Spring of 1980 and Iranian sponsored Shiite separatist group called Ad Dawah al Islamiyah (Ad Dawah) carried out an unsuccessful assassination attempt on Iraqi foreign minister Tariq Azziz. This was followed by another attempt on the Iraqi minister of Culture and Information. In response Saddam Hussein cracked down hard on the Ad Dawah, and forcibly deported thousands of Shias to Iran. By September of 1980 the Iraqi and Iranian militaries were engaged in border skirmishes, and in late September Iraq invaded Iranian territory, thus beginning the bloody and mutually devastating Iran-Iraq war. 

In launching the war Saddam Hussein calculated that his well-equipped military could quickly take advantage of the Iranian military whose effectiveness he calculated would be degraded by the chaos of the recent Iranian revolution. Indeed the Iraqi forces did have some success early on, but eventually the conflict turned into a stalemated war of attrition with huge losses on both sides.

Iraqi Weapons of Destruction

 

After the outbreak of the Iran-Iraq war in 1980, Iraqi relations with the U.S. improved dramatically. The Reagan Administration viewed the Iraqis as an important geopolitical ally and as a bulwark against Iranian power in the Persian Gulf region. In 1982 the Reagan administration removed Iraq from a list of terrorist states, which meant that Iraq qualified for aid from the U.S.. In 1984 the Reagan administration re-established full diplomatic relations with Iraq. Relations had been severed in the 1950s when Iraq had developed close relations with the Soviet Union. During the 1980s the Reagan Administration encouraged U.S. allies to make advanced conventional weapons available to Iraq in large quantities. U.S. firms sold Iraq over a billion dollars worth of aircraft, sophisticated machine tools, computers and other high tech equipment that helped Iraq develop chemical, biological, and nuclear weapons and ballistic missiles. Although the U.S. did not sell the Iraqis weapons systems themselves, several Middle Eastern states sold Iraq defense equipment and materials that they had purchased from the U.S. .  

Other great powers such as France and the Soviet Union played a large role in arming Iraq. France sold advanced weapons systems to the Iraqi military (accounting for 28 % of Iraqi arms purchases), and helped Iraq build the Osiraq nuclear reactor which was used in the Iraqi nuclear weapons development program until it was bombed by the Israelis in 1981.  The Israeli government claimed to have solid evidence that the Osiraq facility was being used to develop weapons grade fissile materials. By the time the Iran-Iraq War was over Iraq owed France FF 24 billion. This debt was still outstanding in the 1990s after the Persian gulf war. Before the Persian Gulf war, France also benefitted from its friendly relationship with Iraq in the form of special supplier agreements regarding oil from Iraq that went to French oil companies at very favorable terms. The outstanding Iraqi-French debt and the French desire to reestablish the previous favorable oil relationship continues to influence French policy towards Iraq in the post-Persian war gulf era.     

Before its collapse, the Soviet Union had been a significant supporter of Iraq. Prior to 1989, the Soviet Union accounted for 47 % foreign weapons flows to the Iraqis.  After the Persian Gulf War, Iraq owed Russia a very large sum from Soviet era arms sales to them. Concern with collecting on this debt is a driving force behind Russian policy towards Iraq in the post-Gulf War era also. Iraq’s gulf Arab neighbors like Kuwait and Saudi Arabia also provided  it with financial support during the Iran-Iraq war. Iraq’s large debt to these states would be part of the political wrangling that led up to the Iraqi invasion of Kuwait in August of 1990. 

            In the midst of the Iran-Iraq war, the Iraqis engaged in repeated use of chemical warfare agents. In attacks on Iraqi forces in 1981 and 1984, the Iraqis made use of deadly blistering agents like Sulfur mustard , and deadly nerve agents such as Sarin. Experts sent to Iran by the UN Conference on Disarmament concluded that these Iraqi chemical warfare attacks had been responsible for around 10,000 Iranian casualties. Later in 1988, the Iraqi military used chemical weapons during an offensive against the Kurdish town of Halabjah in northeastern Iraq near the Iranian border.  Between 3000 and 5000 Kurds were killed in this one attack. Between 1988 and 1989 100,000 Kurds fled Iraqi violence directed towards them, with many of them moving into Turkey and Iran.   This is only one episode in a longer and larger pattern of systematic repression of and violence against the Kurds by the government of Saddam Hussein in Iraq. In both 1989 and 1990 attempts were made to pass resolutions critical of the Iraqi human rights record in the UN Commission for Human Rights, but in both sessions these resolutions were voted down, mainly by opposition from non-aligned states.

 

 

 

Persian Gulf War

 

The Iraqi invasion of Kuwait in August of 1990 came as a surprise to many in the world diplomatic community. In his decision to invade Kuwait, Saddam Hussein seems to have been motivated by a combination of economic and political considerations. First of all he was angry at the refusal of Gulf States such as Kuwait and Saudi Arabia to forgive the large debts that Iraq owed them from loans  given during the Iran-Iraq War. Another economic factor had been Iraqi unhappiness with a number of Gulf States who had been producing and selling oil at a rate that surpassed their OPEC production quotas, thus keeping global oil prices down and hurting other oil producers like Iraq. Thrown in with these issues was a longstanding territorial dispute over the Rumailia border region between Iraq and Kuwait and Iraqi charges that the Kuwaitis were stealing oil from wells in Rumailia that were actually located in Iraqi Territory.

The world community and particularly the United States did have access to information that should have indicated to officials that the Iraqi military was about to engage in some kind of action against Kuwait. For several weeks in July of 1990 the Hussein government put out a great deal of bellicose rhetoric and Iraqi forces began to mass on the Iraq-Kuwait border. Some U.S. intelligence officials warned of the probability of an impending attack during the last days before the invasion, but with little effect.  The U.S. Bush administration made the mistake of sending mixed signals to the Iraqis, both publicly and privately, as to how the U.S. would react to Iraqi aggression against Kuwait. Saddam Hussein read the lack of a stern warning from the U.S. as a sign that the U.S. would not react strongly to an attack on Kuwait.

When the Iraqi military launched its invasion of Kuwait the night of August 2^nd 1990, the international community was quick to react. The UN Security Council met the next morning and quickly passed Resolution 660 which expressed strong condemnation of the Iraqi aggression and demanded an immediate Iraqi withdrawal of all forces from the territory of Kuwait. Several days later the Security Council invoked chapter VII of the UN charter and passed Resolution 661 which put into place a comprehensive set of strict economic sanctions. Because the Security Council had invoked chapter VII and declared the Iraqi invasion a threat to international peace and security, All UN members were required to participate in and help enforce these economic sanctions, which were the most comprehensive sanctions ever imposed by the Security Council. Several weeks later the Security Council passed Resolution 665 which authorized member states to use their naval forces to enforce the sanctions enacted in Resolution 661.

Within the Security Council, members were responding to various types of concerns regarding the Iraqi aggression. For smaller members of the Security Council the issue was defined by the need to provide assistance to a small state that was being victimized by a larger, more powerful neighbor. For the great power members in the permanent 5, especially the U.S. there was a different concern that began to emerge. There was increasingly the worry that Iraq might continue its push southward and conquer Saudi Arabia, the worlds largest oil producer. By itself the Saudi military would be no match for the Iraqi military, and if Iraq took possession of the combined oil reserves of both Kuwait and Saudi Arabia it would control over two fifths of the worlds known oil reserves.  Within days of the Iraqi invasion of Kuwait, the Bush Administration, in close consultation with the British and the Saudi government, had decided to launch Operation Desert Shield. Within a month this would mean 265, 000 American and 8,000 British troops being deployed to the Saudi desert to block an possible Iraqi offensive in that direction.

While the military build-up in Saudi Arabia proceeded, the Bush administration sent Secretary of State James Baker and other high level officials around the Middle East and indeed around the world, to put together a coalition for the purpose of reversing the Iraqi aggression against Kuwait. The Bush diplomatic strategy sought to get the UN to provide legitimation for U.S.-led military action against Iraq. It also sought bring a wide range of states into the conduct of the operation jeopardizing overall U.S. command and control.Early on some inside the Bush Administration argued for giving the economic sanctions more time to work, before committing to offensive action in Kuwait, Bush and other key advisors like Defense Secretary Cheney were fairly quick to gravitate towards the idea that it was better to prepare for offensive action sooner rather than later. In early November Bush made the key decision to nearly double the number of U.S. troops deployed in the Saudi Desert in order to give U.S. commanders the forces they would need to execute an offensive option against the Iraqi forces in Kuwait. 

Later in November at the urging of the U.S., the UN Security Council  passed Resolution 678  which gave the Iraqis until January 15^th to withdraw from and Kuwait and otherwise comply fully with previous Resolutions such as 660. The Resolution then authorized member states to

“use all necessary means to uphold and implement [prior resolutions], and to restore international peace and security”.This resolution gave the United States and its coalition partners the blessing of the United Nations to use military force against Iraq  if the Iraqis did not withdraw from Kuwait by January 15^th 1991. In the debate during the weeks leading up to the passage of Resolution 678, the major powers had been anything but united on what to do. The British tended to go along with the hard line taken by the U.S., but the French were not nearly as sold on the need for early use of military force against Iraq. The Soviets meanwhile had moved back and forth between the hard line U.S. position and more of a commitment to let the sanctions and diplomacy do their work. 

In the month and a half between the Security Council adoption of Resolution 678 and its deadline of January 15 for the Iraqis to withdraw from Kuwait, there were some ongoing attempts to bring about a diplomatic solution to the standoff, including some by UN Secretary General Javier Perez De Quellar. Some of these efforts went down to the last minute. As the Deadline of January 15, 1991 arrived, the U.S. and its coalition partners had 680,000 troops in the Gulf region, some 410,000 of them U.S. troops. The Security Council resolution 678 authorizing the use of military action to evict Iraq from Kuwait did invoke chapter VII of the UN charter which would give the Security Council the authority to mobilize a mandatary collective security operation. However this operation to evict Iraq from Kuwait would not be directed by the Security Council as the framers of the UN charter had foreseen for this type of operation, but rather it would be run entirely by the United States military establishment. So Operation Desert Storm was a UN collective Security operation in name only. 

On January 17^th , 1991 Coalition forces launched a massive air offensive against Iraqi forces in Kuwait and against military and strategic targets throughout Iraq itself. Targets inside Iraq included air defense systems, command and control facilities, the power grid, communications infrastructure, suspected WMD production facilities, and supply lines to the Kuwaiti theater of operations( KTO). Over a month of coalition air strikes against Iraqi fielded forces in Kuwait had a dramatic withering effect on the combat readiness of those forces. On February 24, 1991, Coalition forces launched offensive ground operations into Kuwait and Iraq, meeting with very little Iraqi resistance. The Iraqi military very quickly went into full retreat back toward Baghdad.. Three days later the U.S. announced that the coalition would halt its offensive, having achieved its UN specified goal of liberating Kuwait from Iraqi forces. Later that day Iraq declared that it had withdrawn all of its forces and had complied with Resolution 660 and all other Security Council Resolutions.On March 2^nd the UN Security Council passed Resolution 686 which stated that hostilities were over on a provisional basis but that all prior resolutions regarding the Iraqi-Kuwaiti conflict were still in force. Resolution 686 also set out a number of new obligations for Iraq to fulfill, and stated that as long as Iraq has not complied with all of these obligations, the provisions of Resolution 678 (authorizing member states to use “all necessary means”) would remain in effect.

On April 3^rd 1991 the Security Council passed Resolution 687 which formally lays out the conditions of the cease-fire. This resolution sets forth the conditions under which the comprehensive economic sanctions placed on Iraq by Resolution 661 (e.g.. the ban on Iraqi oil exports, ban on civilian imports into Iraq, and ban on all military sales to Iraq) could be lifted. Resolution 687 stipulates that before the comprehensive economic sanctions could be lifted, Iraq would have to accept “unconditionally and under international supervision”the destruction or removal of all nuclear, chemical, and biological weapons and ballistic missile systems with ranges greater than 150 km. Iraq would also have to submit to a comprehensive UN-run inspection and monitoring regime to verify both the extent of Iraqi WMD capability and the destruction of that capability. Under the terms of Resolution 687 Iraq is also banned from any future development of nuclear weapons programs, and from the possession of weapons grade fissionable material such as separated plutonium or highly enriched uranium. The resolution stipulates that once all of the above conditions were met, the ban on Iraqi oil sales and imports of civilian goods would automatically be lifted, and provided that the Security Council could use discretion as to whether or not to lift the ban on foreign military sales to Iraq. Resolution 687 created the UN Special Commission (UNSCOM) to verify and supervise the destruction of Iraqi chemical, biological and missile capabilities,and assigned the task of dealing with Iraqi nuclear capability to the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA). The IAEA set up a special unit known as the Action Team to carry out the nuclear inspection and destruction verification duties. 

In the immediate aftermath of the war, rebellions broke out in both the north and the south of Iraq partly in response to the call from U.S. President Bush for the Iraqi people to rid themselves of the government of Saddam Hussein. In the north the uprising occurred among the Kurds who had suffered greatly under Hussein’s rule. In the South the uprising occurred among the Shiite minority which had also chafed under the rule of the Baath party. When the Iraqi Army moved to put down the Kurdish rebellion in the North, the operation quickly turned into a wholesale slaughter of Kurds, which sent huge numbers of  Kurdish refugees streaming into neighboring countries such as Turkey. In response to this slaughter of the Kurds and the escalating refugee crisis stemming from it, the UN Security Council passed Resolution 688 on April 5, 1991. Resolution 688 demanded that the Iraqi government halt its repression of the Kurdish and Shiite minorities, and demanded that Iraq allow humanitarian organizations to have complete access to those in need of assistance. It is interesting to note that in this resolution, the Security Council was declaring this new Iraqi situation and the refugee flows it set off a threat to international peace and security under chapter VII of the UN Charter.

In the U.S. and elsewhere, public opinion was greatly influenced by images of the plight of  Kurdish refugees fleeing the Iraqi military and freezing to death in the mountains of the border area between Iraq and Turkey. The Bush administration decided to take action. The U.S. joined forces with British, French, and  Dutch troops to create safe havens in the north of Iraq for the Kurds. This operation became known as Operation Provide Comfort. In addition to creating safe havens on the ground, The allies decided to set up no-fly- zones in both the North and the South to prevent the Iraqi military from using military aircraft against the Kurds or the Shiites respectively. These no-fly zones also prevented Iraq from using military aviation to project power in the direction of any of its neighbors especially Kuwait and Saudi Arabia. These no-fly-zones remain in force to this very day and are still patrolled by U.S. and British warplanes. Iraqis have challenged these overflights on a regular basis by “painting” the U.S. and British aircraft with targeting radar, and the allies have usually responded by attacking Iraqi air defense targets with missiles and occasionally with wider attacks on Iraqi defense infrastructure. 

            UNSCOM and the IAEA Action Team were on the ground from shortly after the passage of UN Resolution 687 until the end of 1998 when they left Iraq just prior to Operation Desert Fox which will be described below. The UNSCOM and Action Team inspections that went on during this seven year period were very successful in discovering and destroying much of Iraq’s WMD and long range missile capability. The inspection regime was especially effective in setting back Iraq’s nuclear weapons program which had been dangerously advanced prior to the outbreak of the Persian Gulf War. During the period of inspections IAEA and UNSCOM inspectors made thousands of random surprise inspections at several hundred suspect sites throughout Iraq. Perhaps most importantly, the presence of UNSCOM and the IAEA Action Team on the ground, made it very difficult for the Iraqi government to restart its WMD development programs. The economic sanctions which kept Iraq from receiving income from sale of its oil also prevented the Iraqi government from having the financial ability to reconstitute its military and WMD capability.

UNSCOM inspections uncovered advanced development programs for Biological and Toxin Warfare (BTW) agents such as Anthrax and Botulinum Toxin as well as for chemical warfare agents such as the vesicant Sulfur Mustard, and several classes of nerve agents including Tabun (GA), Sarin (GB) and VX.  

By the mid-1990s it was becoming obvious to the international community that the comprehensive economic sanctions on Iraq were having a devastating impact on the Iraqi civilian population. A 1996 World Health Organization report had showed a dramatic increase in the incidence of vaccine preventable diseases, widespread malnutrition especially in children, and a 600 percent increase in child mortality rates.  In April of 1995 after seeing convincing evidence that the existing comprehensive economic sanctions against Iraq were doing severe damage to the Iraqi civilian population, the UN Security Council created the oil for food program by passing UN resolution 986. Resolution 986 and the oil for food program lifted partially the previous total ban on Iraqi oil exports. The program allowed for Iraq to sell limited quantities of its oil abroad with the revenues from those sales going into a UN-supervised escrow account and then used to purchase food, medicine and other supplies for the civilian population. The Iraqi government refused to participate in the oil for food program for more than a year after it was enacted.

By 1996 the Iraqi government became less forthcoming with documentary information regarding its WMD programs and increasingly resistant to the day to day operations of the UNSCOM and IAEA Action Team on the ground. Around this time it was also beginning to be apparent that international support for the continuation of the sanctions regime in Iraq was beginning to erode. This phenomenon came to be known as “sanctions fatigue”, and the Iraqi government was increasingly trying to capitalize on it to speed up the demise of the UN sanctions.  In the fall of 1997, Iraqi resistance to UNSCOM inspections had reached the point where they were eroding significantly the effectiveness of the inspections. In October of  1997 the UN Security Council passed Resolution 1134 which demanded that the Iraqis stop interfering with the UNSCOM inspections. The Iraqi government responded by demanding that all U.S. members of UNSCOM leave Iraq. In November of 1997 all UNSCOM inspectors were withdrawn from Iraq, and the U.S. prepared a military buildup for possible strikes against Iraq. Subsequently the Iraqi government announced that the UNSCOM inspectors could return, but would not be allowed to inspect certain “sovereignty” sites.  This repeated dynamic of Iraqi restriction of UNSCOM activities followed by threats of U.S. and British military strikes, followed by Iraq backing down for several weeks continued through 1998. Finally in December of 1998 after another period of Iraqi defiance U.S. and British forces launched Operation Desert Fox, which consisted of four days of intense heavy bombing of Iraqi command and control facilities, air defense facilities, and suspected WMD production facilities.

At the conclusion of Operation Desert Fox, the Iraqi government announced that it will never allow any international inspections inside of Iraq again. This represented the effective end of UNSCOM and the IAEA Action Team. By this point support for any continuation of the existing sanctions regime against Iraq had been greatly weakened especially among P-5 council members such as France, Russia, and China. France and Russia in particular were eager for the sanctions to be removed so that they could re-establish commercial ties with Iraq and collect on the huge pre-Gulf war debts still owed them by Iraq. This erosion of support for the sanctions was much wider than just among the Security Council however, and it was becoming especially pronounced throughout the Arab world.

In December of 1999 the Security Council passed resolution 1284. This resolution created a new inspection organization called the UN Monitoring Verification and Inspection Commission (UNMOVIC) to replace UNSCOM. This resolution also alters the Iraqi oil for food program by getting rid of the cap on the amount of oil the Iraqis can sell to pay for UN supervised humanitarian imports. It also stipulates that the import sanctions could be suspended entirely for 120 day periods if the Iraqis would allow UNMOVIC inspectors to come back in and set up an inspection regime, and would fulfill their disarmament obligations as agreed to under Resolution 687. During the negotiations over this resolution there was considerable disagreement as to what extent the economic sanctions should be loosened. The French wanted much less strict UN control over what Iraq could do with the revenues from its oil sales. The U.S. wanted to insure that strict control would be maintained over Iraqi oil revenues until Iraq complied fully with the requirements Resolution 687. Russia and China tended to come down closer to the French position, while the United Kingdom tended to stick with the U.S. hard-line position.

Iraq rejected the terms of Resolution 1284 and continued to refuse to allow any type of UNSCOM style inspections.

In 2001 the new Bush Administration in the U.S. realized that international support for the existing Iraqi sanctions regime was eroding fast. They began to put forward a package they called “smart sanctions”. These would get rid of all restrictions on Iraqi imports of civilian goods, and would focus much more narrowly on preventing the Iraqis from importing any WMD military, dual-use items that might be used to reconstitute the Iraqi WMD capability. The U.S. spent the better part of 2001 lobbying its fellow Security Council members for support for some version of the “smart sanctions” idea. without much success. Then on September 11, 2001 the United States sustained a massive terrorist attack on targets in New York and Washington, DC. Since then the Bush Administration has hinted  that part of its overall war on terrorism may have to involve removing Saddam Hussein from power in Iraq and destroying any WMD capability the Iraqis may have been able to reconstitute since 1998 when UNSCOM left. The concern in the Bush Administration is that the Iraqis may become a good source of WMD capabilities for terrorist groups like Al Qaeda who would not hesitate to use them against U.S. targets.

 

Beginning in the summer of 2002, the Bush administration began sending out signals that it may be moving in the direction of using military force to disarm Iraq and remove Saddam Hussein from power. During the late summer the Bush administration was split by an internal conflict between hardliner unilateralists and more moderate multilateralists. The unilateralist hardliners like Vice President Dick Cheney and Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld  argued that the U.S. should move on Iraq unilaterally or at least without formally consulting the United Nations. The more moderate multilateralists led by Secretary of State Colin Powell argued that the U.S. should take the Iraqi problem to the UN Security Council to establish that Iraq was in violation of past resolutions requiring it to disarm. From Powell’s perspective at least this way if the U.S. did end up going to war with Iraq it would be doing so with the support of allies and with the legitimacy that comes with a Security Council resolution. Over the objections of the hardliners, Powell was able to persuade President Bush to submit the Iraqi question to the U.N. Security Council one more time. On September 12, 2002 President Bush gave a speech to the U.N. General Assembly wherein he challenged the U.N. to deal effectively with repeated Iraqi defiance of past U.N. resolutions requiring disarmament in the area of long range missiles and WMD capability. Bush told the General Assembly that the UN would become irrelevant and would go the way of the League of Nations if it did not respond effectively to continued Iraqi defiance. He then warned that if the UN did not act to force Iraq to disarm, then the U.S. along with a coalition of the willing would use military force to disarm Iraq without UN approval. The Bush administration maintained  that the U.S. would have the right to use military force without any new UN action based on past Security Council resolutions on Iraq going back to 1991 (see Resolutions 660, 678, 687 etc).

 

Bush’s speech set in motion a nearly two month-long debate in the Security Council on the Iraq question. The U.S. and Great Britain wanted a new resolution declaring Iraq in “material breach” of past resolutions demanding its disarmament. Other Council members such as France and Russia wanted to send in UN weapons inspectors to see whether or not Iraq still had WMD or missiles banned by prior UN resolutions..During the debate, the U.S. eventually came around to accept the idea of weapons inspectors going back in for a limited time, but continued to insist on language in the new resolution that would cite Iraq as being in continued material breach until they could show inspectors that they had destroyed all of their banned weapons. The Bush administration also wanted language that would authorize U.S-led military force if inspectors found Iraq to be in material breach The French, Russians and others continued to resist such language, preferring instead to postpone authorization of military force to a subsequent resolution which could be debated after UN weapons inspectors finished their work in Iraq . After nearly two months of sometimes acrimonious debate, the council passed Security Council Resolution 1441 on November 8^th 2002 by a 15 to 0 margin. Resolution 1441 represented a delicate diplomatic compromise which effectively papered over many of the key differences between the U.S. and Britain on one side and the French and others on the other side. The resolution declared Iraq to be in continued material breach (as the U.S. wanted), but instead of authorizing military force, Resolution 1441 created an enhanced inspection regime using the existing UNMOVIC infrastructure, and stated that sending this new team into Iraq would constitute a final opportunity for Iraq to comply with its pre-existing disarmament obligations. The resolution also set up a roughly 3 month timetable for the weapons inspectors to come up with a final report, with several interim reports due earlier along with a complete Iraqi self report due within 30 days of the start of inspections.. 

 

The inspectors started entering Iraq in late November and slowly began to scour the Iraqi countryside to begin their work. The Iraqis did not hinder the inspectors as had often been the case under the UNSCOM system, but the Iraqis did not take steps to provide proof that they had disarmed either. The Bush administration quickly seized on the latter as proof that the Iraqis did not intend to disarm. When the Iraqis presented their comprehensive self report, the reaction of the inspectors and the council, and especially the U.S. was marked displeasure. The Iraqis failed to account for WMD and missile equipment that were known to still be in Iraq in 1998 when the UNSCOM and IAEA action team left the country before operation Desert Fox. In late January 2003, Chief UNMOVIC and IAEA Inspectors issued an interim report. The IAEA report was not too critical of the Iraqis, but the UNMOVIC report concluded that the Iraqi’s were not providing true cooperation in actively disclosing their capabilities (which Resolution 1441 called for). In his State of the Union Address the next day, President Bush made it clear that his patience was running out, and that Iraq’s last chance to peacefully disarm was about to run out. On Wednesday, February 5^th U.S. Secretary of State Colin Powell made an hour long presentation of declassified intelligence that was claimed to show that Iraq was actively hiding banned materials from weapons inspectors and that Iraq had ties to Al Qaeda and other terrorist groups. The administration then sought to convince the Security Council that war was justified. Reaction to Secretary Powell’ presentation was mixed, thus insuring significant debate on the Iraqi question. The Bush Administration continues to make it clear that they are prepared to go to war with or without any further U.N.. authorization.