[Congressional Record Volume 143, Number 51 (Friday, April 25, 1997)]
[Senate]
[Pages S3710-S3712]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]




                    THE CHEMICAL WEAPONS CONVENTION

  Mr. KYL. Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent to have printed in 
the Record various op-ed pieces that relate to yesterday's debate on 
the Chemical Weapons Convention.
  There being no objection, the material was ordered to be printed in 
the Record, as follows:

                [From the New York Times, Apr. 22, 1997]

                    On My Mind--Matter of Character

                          (By A.M. Rosenthal)

       For collectors' of flips, flops, mistakes and outrages in 
     the conduct of American foreign policy, last week was a 
     treasure trove, pure heaven. For the national interest it was 
     a pure mess.
       Three times the Clinton Administration floundered or 
     double-talked itself into loss of credibility--and on three 
     of the more important international issues facing the 
     country: the treaty on banning chemical weapons, the struggle 
     against state-sponsored terrorism and the war on drugs.
       The most immediate issue is the treaty prohibiting 
     production, storage and use of chemical weapons.
       This should have been a breeze. Americans could normally be 
     counted on to support international outlawing of chemical 
     weapons, which the U.S. has already forsworn. But a lack of 
     candor at home and of political courage with our allies has 
     made it a tossup as to whether it will pass when it comes up 
     for a Senate vote on Thursday.

[[Page S3711]]

       Written into the treaty are loopholes that are deal 
     breakers for many senators. Article 10 alone would break it 
     for me.


                     Article 10 and other outrages.

       The article mandates that all signatory countries have the 
     right to the ``fullest possible exchange'' of all materials 
     and information about ``protections'' against chemical 
     weapons. Those materials and techniques could show terrorist 
     nations how to produce chemical weapons that could evade the 
     defense of their chosen victims. Iran just loves Article 10.
       Since the treaty was first proposed in the Reagan 
     Administration, four important facts have become part of 
     international reality.
       One: Some of America's friends like Russia and Germany, 
     have sold techniques and components of weapons of mass 
     destruction to countries bitterly hostile to the U.S. Two: 
     Under Presidents Bush and Clinton, the U.S. has not shown the 
     willpower to stop or punish the ``friendly'' sellers or their 
     customers. Three: China has become a major rogue distributor, 
     to major rogue nations. And four: America has not been able 
     to stop that either.
       Article 10 would permit salesmen of death to peddle 
     chemical-weapon materials and techniques entirely legally, by 
     labeling them ``defensive.''
       The answer that the Secretaries of Defense and State gave 
     was that the treaty will go into effect whether the U.S. 
     likes it or not, so we should sign and keep an eye on it from 
     the inside.
       There's a far better way. The senate should adopt a 
     proposed amendment making actual U.S. participation 
     conditional on the President obtaining deletion of Article 10 
     and some other loopholes.
       The week's outrage on state-sponsored terrorism sacrifices 
     the right of Americans to get important non-classified 
     information. Washington decided to withhold a white paper 
     about Iranian terrorism it had planned to make public. This 
     came after a German court found Iran guilty of terrorism 
     against Iranian dissidents in Germany, and as information 
     pops up that Iran was involved in the slaughter-bombing of an 
     American military installation in Saudi Arabia.
       The white paper was withheld because the State Department 
     does not want to upset European nations that have tried to 
     use ``engagement'' to persuade Iran to behave sweetly, a 
     policy the U.S. says has failed. Hello? State, are you all 
     there?
       Drugs: Mexico now is the major transporter of marijuana and 
     Colombian cocaine into the U.S. The hotshot general who 
     headed Mexico's antidrug effort has been arrested as the 
     secret agent of the drug cartels. The Mexican Government had 
     allowed this traitor to go to Washington for embraces and 
     top-secret briefings with his American counterpart, Gen. 
     Barry McCaffrey, without informing any American that their 
     man was about to be jailed.
       Bonded to Mexico by Nafta and the peso bailout, an 
     embarrassed White House decided not to lift Mexico's 
     certification as a country doing its best to fight drugs.
       Mr. Clinton plans to visit Mexico next month. Instead of 
     preparing Mexico's public to hear some hard truth about their 
     country's contribution to the drug war, last week the 
     Administration began almost apologetically making nicey-nice 
     to Mexico, to put the visit in the ``right light'' for Mr. 
     Clinton.
       Underlying these fumbles, mistakes and outrages are not 
     simply defects of policy but of character: the inability to 
     face and correct mistakes and the addiction to evasion and 
     denial. As at home, so abroad.
                                  ____


             [From the Wall Street Journal, Apr. 24, 1997]

                            Review & Outlook


                           chemical reactions

       Before today's vote on the Chemical Weapons Convention, we 
     hope that some Senator will twist his tongue around the 20 
     chemicals listed nearby and read their names into the record. 
     This list makes two important points about what's wrong with 
     the treaty.
       First is that many ordinary chemicals can be put to deadly 
     use. The chemicals on this list can be used in such mundane 
     products as laundry soaps, ink and fumigation agents--or they 
     can be used in lethal weapons. Bear this in mind when you 
     hear the President assert that the CWC will ``banish poison 
     gas from the Earth.''
       The second point is that the CWC not only will permit trade 
     in these 20 potentially deadly chemicals, it will require it. 
     American companies currently are restricted from exporting 
     these dual-use chemicals under the terms of an organization 
     called the Australia Group, which is made up of 29 Western 
     countries committed to ensuring that their exports don't 
     contribute to the spread of chemical weapons.
       But Articles X and XI of the CWC require member countries 
     to transfer chemicals and technology to any other member 
     country that asks. This goes a long way toward explaining why 
     the Chemical Manufacturers Association is so loud in its 
     support of the treaty.
       Senators who are still considering how to vote might 
     consider whether selling such chemicals to China or Iran or 
     Cuba will help make the world safe from chemical weapons--or 
     make the world a more dangerous place?
       Trade in these 20 precursors for chemical weapons agents, 
     now regulated, would be permitted under the Chemical Weapons 
     Convention:
       3-Hydroxy-1-methylpiperidine, Potassium fluoride, 2-
     Chloroethanol, Dimethylamine (DMA), Dimethylamine 
     hydrochloride, Hydrogen fluoride, Methyl benzilate, 3-
     Quinuclidone, Pinacolone, Potassium cyanide, Potassium 
     bifluoride, Ammonium bifluoride, Sodium fluoride, Sodium 
     bifluoride, Sodium cyanide, Phosphorus pentasulfide, 
     Diisopropylamine (DIPA), Diethylaminoethanol (DEAE), Sodium 
     sulfide, Triethanolamine hydrochloride.
                                  ____


             [From The Wall Street Journal, Apr. 22, 1997]

                            Review & Outlook


                             Lott's Mirrors

       Trent Lott's problem with the impending Senate vote on the 
     chemical weapons treaty vote is not merely that it binds the 
     U.S. to deal with the likes of Cuba and China. The larger 
     question for Republicans is whether they can cope with the 
     Clinton Presidency, a political hall of mirrors invariably 
     reflecting any given reality back into the body politic as 
     something slightly off-center.
       So with the chemical weapons treaty. The issue is being 
     represented to the public as a huge vote on foreign policy, 
     which typically means an austere, almost hyper-
     intellectualized debate free of the usual, grimy domestic 
     constituencies. We should be so lucky.
       If that were true, this treaty would already be dead. The 
     Senate today is full of men and women who've never had the 
     opportunity before to vote on one of these arms-control 
     projects. Some of them must be wondering how the subject ever 
     got so mystical. We ourselves have watched arms-control 
     tiltings since the days of Camelot, and we'd like to reassure 
     the younger class of Republican Senators that if they feel 
     there is a certain ``lightheadedness'' about this effort, 
     their instincts are correct.
       President Clinton was panting over the weekend. ``There is 
     no such thing as perfect verifiability,'' he said of the kind 
     of weapons a Japanese cult cooked up in a bathtub. His 
     ``bottom line''--will we go from leading the fight against 
     poison gas to joining the company of pariah nations this 
     treaty seeks to isolate?''--sounded like something from an 
     AFL-CIO commercial on Social Security. And of course, even a 
     flawed treaty would be ``an advance over no treaty at all.''
       This is liberal sentimentalism at its worst. It says, Our 
     hearts are in the right place, so let's not let a bunch of 
     operational details get in the way of doing the right thing. 
     Presumably this policy woolly-mindedness, in both domestic 
     and foreign politics, is precisely what the current crop of 
     Republicans came to Washington to stop. And that they did 
     with the welfare reform act.
       So why all the drama over this vote?
       Mainly because the real drama is in watching Trent Lott 
     figure out which path he should take in leading the 
     Republicans safely through the Clinton hall of mirrors 
     between now and the off-year elections in 1998. Just ahead, 
     there is the budget mirror, the capital-gains mirror, the MFN 
     mirror, the Helsinki mirror and any other issue that might 
     require the Republicans to balance on a tree limb with Bill 
     Clinton.
       The case for waving through a terribly flawed chemical 
     weapons treaty is that a grateful Bill Clinton will be 
     inclined to do deals with the GOP on the budget, capital 
     gains and the like. This strategy inevitably casts Trent Lott 
     as the President's errand boy, the Charlie Brown of politics, 
     willing to believe that this time Bill Clinton won't pull the 
     ball like Lucy of the promises--that he won't double-cross 
     Mr. Lott as he did on the CPI adjustment, that he won't sic 
     Bob Rubin on a capital-gains cut the way he did on the 
     balanced budget amendment.
       The only reason that Beltway Republicans would consider 
     playing this game again with so unreliable a partner as Bill 
     Clinton is their belief that absent deals of some sort, the 
     Democrats in 1998 will accuse them of obstruction and 
     failure, all the while running TV ads about Republicans and 
     ``poison gas.''
       Until a few weeks ago, the treaty almost certainly would 
     have passed for these reasons. But then the broader interests 
     of the Republican Party stepped forward to be heard. Jack 
     Kemp and Steve Forbes came out against the treaty. Four 
     former GOP Secretaries of Defense--Weinberger, Cheney, 
     Rumsfeld and Schlesinger--testified against it. Grass-roots 
     conservatives such as Grover Norquist and Gary Bauer joined 
     the active opposition.
       These people want, as do we, the party's legislative 
     accomplishments to reflect identifiable Republican beliefs. 
     Notwithstanding the participation of Republican 
     Presidents, arms control today is an idea flowing entirely 
     from a Democratic liberal's view of the world. This 
     chemical weapons treaty perfectly reflects that view. It 
     is a state of mind that would regard Senator Lott's 
     objection to sharing chemical-weapons defense technology 
     with Iran as a ``killer amendment,'' and that would solve 
     the Lott objection by promising only to give Iran 
     ``emergency medical supplies.''
       We're about to go through a few days of high Washington 
     drama before the vote as all eyes focus on the 
     ``undecideds.'' This group now includes GOP Senators Hatch, 
     Bennett, Nickels, Hutchison, Abraham, Santorum and of course 
     Majority Leader Lott. We suspect most of this group knows the 
     treaty should fail on its merits. The larger question is what 
     they believe should define the Republican Party--what they 
     see in the mirror, or reflections from the mirrors Bill 
     Clinton puts before them.

[[Page S3712]]

     
                                  ____
              [From the Los Angeles Times, Apr. 21, 1997]

                  Kirkpatrick: The Threat Will Remain

       Ratifying the Chemical Weapons Convention will not prevent 
     the manufacture or use of chemical weapons because the 
     convention is neither verifiable nor enforceable. Proponents 
     attempt to dismiss the many loopholes in the treaty with the 
     assertion that nothing is perfect. But perfection is not the 
     question.
       Proponents also seek to minimize the fact that the rogue 
     states and countries with the most highly developed programs 
     either have not signed or have not ratified the treaty--
     Syria, Iraq, North Korea, Libya have not signed at all. 
     Russia, which has the most chemical weapons, has not 
     ratified, and China has not completed the ratification 
     process. Of course, signing will not prevent signatories from 
     breaking their promises not to produce noxious gases, as 
     Russia has recently broken a promise to the United States.
       Will U.S. ratification make the world safer? Did the 
     Maginot line make France safer? To the contrary. It created a 
     comforting illusion that lulled France into a false sense of 
     security and facilitated Hitler's conquest.
       The world is less dangerous today than during most of my 
     lifetime. I cherish this sense of lessened threat. But we are 
     not so safe that we can afford to create a false sense of 
     security by pretending that we have eliminated the threat of 
     chemical weapons. President Clinton said, ``We will have 
     banished poison gas from the Earth.'' It will not be so. We 
     had better do some hard thinking about how to defend 
     ourselves and the world against the poison gases that have 
     been and will be produced.

                          ____________________