[Congressional Record Volume 143, Number 157 (Sunday, November 9, 1997)]
[Senate]
[Pages S12254-S12256]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]




                  WE MUST BE FIRM WITH SADDAM HUSSEIN

  Mr. KERRY. Mr. President, I will speak tomorrow on the subject of 
fast track. I wish to talk this evening about another subject that has 
not received as much conversation on the floor of the Senate as it 
merits--because, while we have been focused on fast track and on a lot 
of loose ends which must be tied up before this first session of the 
105th Congress can be brought to a close, a very troubling situation 
has developed in the Middle East that has ominous implications, not 
just for our national security but literally for the security of all 
civilized and law-abiding areas of the world.
  Even after the overwhelming defeat that the coalition forces visited 
upon Iraq in and near Kuwait in the Desert Storm conflict, Iraqi 
dictator Saddam Hussein's truculence has continued unabated. In the 
final days of that conflict, a fateful decision was made not to utterly 
vanquish the Iraqi Government and armed forces, on the grounds that to 
do so would leave a risky vacuum, as some then referred to it, in the 
Middle East which Iran or Syria or other destabilizing elements might 
move to fill.
  But instead of reforming his behavior after he was handed an historic 
defeat, Saddam Hussein has continued to push international patience to 
the very edge. The United Nations, even with many member nations which 
strongly favor commerce over conflict, has established and maintained 
sanctions designed to isolate Iraq, keep it too weak to threaten other 
nations, and push Saddam Hussein to abide by accepted norms of national 
behavior. These sanctions have cost Iraq over $100 billion and have 
significantly restrained his economy. They unavoidably also have 
exacted a very high price from the Iraqi people, but this has not 
appeared to bother Saddam Hussein in the least. Nor have the sanctions 
succeeded in obtaining acceptable behavior from Saddam.
  Now, during the past 2 weeks, Saddam again has raised his obstinately 
uncooperative profile. We all know of his announcement that he will no 
longer permit United States citizens to participate in the U.N. 
inspection team searching Iraq for violations of the U.N. requirement 
that Iraq not build or store weapons of mass destruction. And he has 
made good on his announcement. The UNSCOM inspection team, that is, the 
United Nations Special Commission team, has been refused access to its 
inspection targets throughout the week and once again today because it 
has Americans as team members. While it is not certain, it is not 
unreasonable to assume that Saddam's action may have been precipitated 
by the fear that the U.N. inspectors were getting uncomfortably close 
to discovering some caches of reprehensible weapons of mass 
destruction, or facilities to manufacture them, that many have long 
feared he is doing everything in his power to build, hide, and hoard.
  Another reason may be that Saddam Hussein, who unquestionably has 
demonstrated a kind of perverse personal resiliency, may be looking at 
the international landscape and concluding that, just perhaps, support 
may be waning for the United States's determination to keep him on a 
short leash via multilateral sanctions and weapons inspections. This 
latest action may, indeed, be his warped idea of an acid test of that 
conclusion.
  We should all be encouraged by the reactions of many of our allies, 
who are evincing the same objections to Iraq's course that are 
prevalent here in the United States. There is an inescapable reality 
that, after all of the effort of recent years, Saddam Hussein remains 
the international outlaw he was when he invaded Kuwait. For most of a 
decade he has set himself outside international law, and he has sought 
to avoid the efforts of the international community to insist that his 
nation comport itself with reasonable standards of behavior and, 
specifically, not equip itself with implements of mass destruction 
which it has shown the willingness to use in previous conflicts.

  Plainly and simply, Saddam Hussein cannot be permitted to get away 
with his antics, or with this latest excuse for avoidance of 
international responsibility.
  This is especially true when only days earlier, after months of 
negotiations, the administration extracted some very serious 
commitments from China, during President Jiang Zemin's state visit to 
Washington, to halt several types of proliferation activities. It

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is unthinkable that we and our allies would stand by and permit a 
renegade such as Saddam Hussein, who has demonstrated a willingness to 
engage in warfare and ignore the sovereignty of neighboring nations, to 
engage in activities that we insist be halted by China, Russia, and 
other nations.
  Let me say that I agree with the determination by the administration, 
at the outset of this development, to take a measured and multilateral 
approach to this latest provocation. It is of vital importance to let 
the United Nations first respond to Saddam's actions. After all, those 
actions are first and foremost an affront to the United Nations and all 
its membership which has, in a too-rare example of unity in the face of 
belligerent threats from a rogue State, managed to maintain its 
determination to keep Iraq isolated via a regime of sanctions and 
inspections.
  I think we should commend the resolve of the Chief U.N. Inspector, 
UNSCOM head Richard Butler, who has refused to bend or budge in the 
face of Saddam's intransigence. Again and again he has assembled the 
inspection team, including the U.S. citizens who are part of it, and 
presented it to do its work, despite being refused access by Iraq.
  He rejected taking the easy way out by asking the U.S. participants 
simply to step aside until the problem is resolved so that the 
inspections could go forward. He has painstakingly documented what is 
occurring, and has filed regular reports to the Security Council. He 
clearly recognizes this situation to be the matter of vital principle 
that we believe it to be.
  The Security Council correctly wants to resolve this matter if it is 
possible to do so without plunging into armed conflict, be it great or 
small. So it sent a negotiating team to Baghdad to try to resolve the 
dispute and secure appropriate access for UNSCOM's inspection team. To 
remove a point of possible contention as the negotiators sought to 
accomplish their mission, the United Nations asked that the U.S. 
temporarily suspend reconnaissance flights over Iraq that are conducted 
with our U-2 aircraft under U.N. auspices, and we complied. At that 
time, in my judgment this was the appropriate and responsible course.
  But now we know that Saddam Hussein has chosen to blow off the 
negotiating team entirely. It has returned emptyhanded to report to the 
Security Council tomorrow. That is why I have come to the floor this 
evening to speak about this matter, to express what I think is the 
feeling of many Senators and other Americans as the Security Council 
convenes tomorrow.
  We must recognize that there is no indication that Saddam Hussein has 
any intention of relenting. So we have an obligation of enormous 
consequence, an obligation to guarantee that Saddam Hussein cannot 
ignore the United Nations. He cannot be permitted to go unobserved and 
unimpeded toward his horrific objective of amassing a stockpile of 
weapons of mass destruction. This is not a matter about which there 
should be any debate whatsoever in the Security Council, or, certainly, 
in this Nation. If he remains obdurate, I believe that the United 
Nations must take, and should authorize immediately, whatever steps are 
necessary to force him to relent--and that the United States should 
support and participate in those steps.
  The suspended reconnaissance flights should be resumed beginning 
tomorrow, and it is my understanding they will be. Should Saddam be so 
foolish as to take any action intended to endanger those aircraft or 
interrupt their mission, then we should, and I am confident we will, be 
prepared to take the necessary actions to either eliminate that threat 
before it can be realized, or take actions of retribution.

  When it meets tomorrow to receive the negotiators' report and to 
determine its future course of action, it is vital that the Security 
Council treat this situation as seriously as it warrants.
  In my judgment, the Security Council should authorize a strong U.N. 
military response that will materially damage, if not totally destroy, 
as much as possible of the suspected infrastructure for developing and 
manufacturing weapons of mass destruction, as well as key military 
command and control nodes. Saddam Hussein should pay a grave price, in 
a currency that he understands and values, for his unacceptable 
behavior.
  This should not be a strike consisting only of a handful of cruise 
missiles hitting isolated targets primarily of presumed symbolic value. 
But how long this military action might continue and how it may 
escalate should Saddam remain intransigent and how extensive would be 
its reach are for the Security Council and our allies to know and for 
Saddam Hussein ultimately to find out.
  Of course, Mr. President, the greatest care must be taken to reduce 
collateral damage to the maximum extent possible, despite the fact that 
Saddam Hussein cynically and cold-heartedly has made that a difficult 
challenge by ringing most high-value military targets with civilians.
  As the Security Council confronts this, I believe it is important for 
it to keep prominently in mind the main objective we all should have, 
which is maintaining an effective, thorough, competent inspection 
process that will locate and unveil any covert prohibited weapons 
activity underway in Iraq. If an inspection process acceptable to the 
United States and the rest of the Security Council can be rapidly 
reinstituted, it might be possible to vitiate military action.
  Should the resolve of our allies wane to pursue this matter until an 
acceptable inspection process has been reinstituted--which I hope will 
not occur and which I am pleased to say at this moment does not seem to 
have even begun--the United States must not lose its resolve to take 
action. But I think there is strong reason to believe that the 
multilateral resolve will persist.
  To date, there have been nine material breaches by Iraq of U.N. 
requirements. The United Nations has directed some form of responsive 
action in five of those nine cases, and I believe it will do so in this 
case.
  The job of the administration in the next 24 hours and in the days to 
follow is to effectively present the case that this is not just an 
insidious challenge to U.N. authority. It is a threat to peace and to 
long-term stability in the tinder-dry atmosphere of the Middle East, 
and it is an unaffordable affront to international norms of decent and 
acceptable national behavior.
  We must not presume that these conclusions automatically will be 
accepted by every one of our allies, some of which have different 
interests both in the region and elsewhere, or will be of the same 
degree of concern to them that they are to the U.S. But it is my belief 
that we have the ability to persuade them of how serious this is and 
that the U.N. must not be diverted or bullied.
  The reality, Mr. President, is that Saddam Hussein has intentionally 
or inadvertently set up a test which the entire world will be watching, 
and if he gets away with this arrogant ploy, he will have terminated a 
most important multilateral effort to defuse a legitimate threat to 
global security--to defuse it by tying the hands of a rogue who thinks 
nothing of ordering widespread, indiscriminate death and destruction in 
pursuit of power.
  If he succeeds, he also will have overwhelmed the willingness of the 
world's leading nations to enforce a principle on which all agree: that 
a nation should not be permitted to grossly violate even rudimentary 
standards of national behavior in ways that threaten the sovereignty 
and well-being of other nations and their people.
  I believe that we should aspire to higher standards of international 
behavior than Saddam Hussein has offered us, and the enforcement action 
of the United Nations pursues such a higher standard.
  We know from our largely unsuccessful attempts to enlist the 
cooperation of other nations, especially industrialized trading 
nations, in efforts to impose and enforce somewhat more 
ambitious standards on nations such as Iran, China, Burma, and Syria 
that the willingness of most other nations--including a number who are 
joined in the sanctions to isolate Iraq--is neither wide nor deep to 
join in imposing sanctions on a sovereign nation to spur it to ``clean 
up its act'' and comport its actions with accepted international norms. 
It would be a monumental tragedy to see such willingness evaporate in 
one place where so far it has survived and arguably succeeded to date,

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especially at a time when it is being subjected to such a critical test 
as that which Iraq presents.

  In a more practical vein, Mr. President, I submit that the old adage 
``pay now or pay later'' applies perfectly in this situation. If Saddam 
Hussein is permitted to go about his effort to build weapons of mass 
destruction and to avoid the accountability of the United Nations, we 
will surely reap a confrontation of greater consequence in the future. 
The Security Council and the United States obviously have to think 
seriously and soberly about the plausible scenarios that could play out 
if he were permitted to continue his weapons development work after 
shutting out U.N. inspectors.
  There can be little or no question that Saddam has no compunctions 
about using the most reprehensible weapons--on civilians as readily as 
on military forces. He has used poison gas against Iranian troops and 
civilians in the Iran-Iraq border conflict. He has launched Scud 
missiles against Israel and against coalition troops based in Saudi 
Arabia during the gulf war.
  It is not possible to overstate the ominous implications for the 
Middle East if Saddam were to develop and successfully militarize and 
deploy potent biological weapons. We can all imagine the consequences. 
Extremely small quantities of several known biological weapons have the 
capability to exterminate the entire population of cities the size of 
Tel Aviv or Jerusalem. These could be delivered by ballistic missile, 
but they also could be delivered by much more pedestrian means; aerosol 
applicators on commercial trucks easily could suffice. If Saddam were 
to develop and then deploy usable atomic weapons, the same holds true.
  Were he to do either, much less both, the entire balance of power in 
the Middle East changes fundamentally, raising geometrically the 
already sky-high risk of conflagration in the region. His ability to 
bluff and bully would soar. The willingness of those nations which 
participated in the gulf war coalition to confront him again if he 
takes a course of expansionism or adventurism may be greatly diminished 
if they believe that their own citizens would be threatened directly by 
such weapons of mass destruction.
  The posture of Saudi Arabia, in particular, could be dramatically 
altered in such a situation. Saudi Arabia, of course, was absolutely 
indispensable as a staging and basing area for Desert Storm which 
dislodged Saddam's troops from Kuwait, and it remains one of the two or 
three most important locations of U.S. bases in the Middle East.
  Were its willingness to serve in these respects to diminish or vanish 
because of the ability of Saddam to brandish these weapons, then the 
ability of the United Nations or remnants of the gulf war coalition, or 
even the United States acting alone, to confront and halt Iraqi 
aggression would be gravely damaged.
  Were Israel to find itself under constant threat of potent biological 
or nuclear attack, the current low threshold for armed conflict in the 
Middle East that easily could escalate into a world-threatening inferno 
would become even more of a hair trigger.
  Indeed, one can easily anticipate that Israel would find even the 
prospect of such a situation entirely untenable and unacceptable and 
would take preemptive military action. Such action would, at the very 
least, totally derail the Middle East peace process which is already at 
risk. It could draw new geopolitical lines in the sand, with the 
possibility of Arab nations which have been willing to oppose Saddam's 
extreme actions either moving into a pan-Arab column supporting him 
against Israel and its allies or, at least, becoming neutral.
  Either course would significantly alter the region's balance of power 
and make the preservation and advancement of U.S. national security 
objectives in the region unattainable--and would tremendously increase 
the risk that our Nation, our young people, ultimately would be sucked 
into yet another military conflict, this time without the warning time 
and the staging area that enabled Desert Storm to have such little cost 
in U.S. and other allied troop casualties.
  Finally, we must consider the ultimate nightmare. Surely, if Saddam's 
efforts are permitted to continue unabated, we will eventually face 
more aggression by Saddam, quite conceivably including an attack on 
Israel, or on other nations in the region as he seeks predominance 
within the Arab community. If he has such weapons, his attack is likely 
to employ weapons of unspeakable and indiscriminate destructiveness and 
torturous effects on civilians and military alike. What that would 
unleash is simply too horrendous to contemplate, but the United States 
inevitably would be drawn into that conflict.
  Mr. President, I could explore other possible ominous consequences of 
letting Saddam Hussein proceed unchecked. The possible scenarios I have 
referenced really are only the most obvious possibilities. What is 
vital is that Americans understand, and that the Security Council 
understand, that there is no good outcome possible if he is permitted 
to do anything other than acquiesce to continuation of U.N. 
inspections.
  As the world's only current superpower, we have the enormous 
responsibility not to exhibit arrogance, not to take any unwitting or 
unnecessary risks, and not to employ armed force casually. But at the 
same time it is our responsibility not to shy away from those 
confrontations that really matter in the long run. And this matters in 
the long run.
  While our actions should be thoughtfully and carefully determined and 
structured, while we should always seek to use peaceful and diplomatic 
means to resolve serious problems before resorting to force, and while 
we should always seek to take significant international actions on a 
multilateral rather than a unilateral basis whenever that is possible, 
if in the final analysis we face what we truly believe to be a grave 
threat to the well-being of our Nation or the entire world and it 
cannot be removed peacefully, we must have the courage to do what we 
believe is right and wise.
  I believe this is such a situation, Mr. President. It is a time for 
resolve. Tomorrow we must make that clear to the Security Council and 
to the world.
  I yield back the balance of my time.
  Mr. TORRICELLI addressed the Chair.
  The PRESIDING OFFICER. The Senator from New Jersey.
  Mr. TORRICELLI. Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent to return to 
morning business and address the Senate for 15 minutes.
  The PRESIDING OFFICER. Without objection, it is so ordered.

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