[Congressional Record Volume 149, Number 17 (Thursday, January 30, 2003)] [Senate] [Pages S1767-S1770] From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov] THE SITUATION IN IRAQ Mr. BINGAMAN. Mr. President, as I understood the President in his State of the Union speech earlier this week, it is his intention to begin military action against Iraq sometime in the near future. That stated intention of the President causes me some grave concern, and I wanted to come to the Senate floor today and express that concern. Let me begin by stating the propositions with which we all agree. First, I think we all agree Saddam Hussein is a brutal despot who has terrorized his own people and has threatened his neighboring States for many years. Second, whether or not Saddam Hussein has weapons of mass destruction in a readily usable form at this time, we must assume that given the opportunity he will obtain those weapons. Third, it is very much in our interest as a Nation, and in the interest of our allies, that Saddam Hussein be prevented from acquiring or maintaining those weapons. But the question before the country today is narrower than these propositions. The question before the country is whether we should cut short the inspection process that is currently underway. The U.N. inspection process is a process that we rightly insisted upon in our earlier deliberations with the Security Council. So the question is whether we should cut short that inspection process and begin a military action to remove Saddam Hussein and his regime from power. The President has moved aggressively to prepare this Nation for war. The total number of personnel who have been either ordered to deploy, or who have been put on alert to do so, is roughly 148,000. There are roughly 23,000 marines en route to the Persian Gulf aboard three major task forces. There are roughly 25,000 sailors and aviators attached to the various carrier battle groups and amphibious task forces that are either en route to the region, on standby, or are on surge status. These forces include some 175 aircraft of all types and over 1,000 VLS launch tubes carrying nearly 500 cruise missiles. So steps have been taken to prepare us militarily for war. Today, we are, simply put, on the brink of war. But while these military preparations have occurred, there has also been a parallel effort going on through the U.N. to ascertain what weapons of mass destruction Saddam Hussein holds, where those weapons are located, and what threat those weapons pose to his neighbors and to other free nations. We have come to a difficult decision point. The Pentagon is advising the President that military preparations are nearly complete. The President must decide whether this country should proceed militarily in the next few weeks or whether we should continue to support the efforts of U.N. inspectors to carry out the instructions that were given them by the U.N. Security Council, on which we sit. In my view, the President should allow the U.N. inspectors to continue their work. If they are denied access to sites they wish to inspect, then the use of military force will be justified. If they find substantial evidence of a weapons program that threatens Iraq's neighbors, then we should join with those neighbors in eliminating that threat. But up until this date, up until today, neither of these circumstances prevails. The inspectors themselves have so stated, and they have asked for additional time to complete their work. The decision the President makes on going to war with Iraq will be the first test of the new National Security Strategy that was issued by the White House in September of last year. In that document, the President acknowledges that the legitimacy of preemptive military action depends ``on the existence of an imminent threat.'' Right after that statement appears in this document, however, the document speaks of ``adapting the concept of imminent threat.'' How much adaptation of that concept is wise? How much adaptation of that concept makes sense for ourselves and our allies as a precedent for the future? This National Security Strategy document that the administration issued in September of last year goes on to talk about our willingness as a nation to take military action to preempt emerging threats. Here the President is contemplating, in the circumstance before us today, military action not to meet a specific identified military threat but to depose a hostile government, even though no imminent military threat has been identified. In his State of the Union Address, the President framed the issue as being whether ``war is forced upon us.'' He stated that, ``If war is forced upon us, we will fight with the full force and might of the U.S. military--and we will prevail.'' I, and I am sure most Americans, agree with that statement. But in my view, as of this date, war has not been forced upon us. It is not credible for us to assert as a nation that war has been forced upon us. The U.N. inspection process proceeds. If there is evidence of an imminent threat that requires us to take preemptive military action, I have not seen [[Page S1768]] that evidence. Many Americans and many of our allies also have been unpersuaded by the evidence they have seen. The more willing we are to assert the right to start a war to change the government of a sovereign state, the more we risk encouraging preemptive action by other nations against governments they wish to depose. And the less we need to identify an imminent threat before beginning a war, the more we undermine efforts to avoid unprovoked conflict in the future. The President was right to go to the United Nations and to insist that U.N. inspectors return to Iraq. His latest decision to send Secretary Powell to the Security Council to present evidence of the threat posed by Iraq is also proper, and I look forward to hearing what that evidence is. But unless that evidence demonstrates a threat that requires military action now, the wise course is for us to hold off on that military action and allow the U.N. inspectors to do their work. Mr. President, I yield the floor. The PRESIDING OFFICER. The Senator from South Dakota. Mr. JOHNSON. Mr. President, I rise to share with my colleagues my very great concern over ties between Iraq's probable possession of biological and chemical weapons and the potentially catastrophic actions taken by the Reagan and Bush, Sr., administrations, including the active assistance of then ``special envoy'' and now Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld. This arming of Saddam Hussein with weapons of mass destruction by the Reagan and Bush, Sr., administrations has now been disclosed from what were previously classified documents, as reported recently by the Washington Post. I ask unanimous consent that the Washington Post article be printed in the Record. There being no objection, the material was ordered to be printed in the Record, as follows: [From the Washington Post, Dec. 30, 2002] U.S. Had Key Role in Iraq Buildup; Trade in Chemical Arms Allowed Despite Their Use on Iranians, Kurds (By Michael Dobbs) High on the Bush administration's list of justifications for war against Iraq are President Saddam Hussein's use of chemical weapons, nuclear and biological programs, and his contacts with international terrorists. What U.S. officials rarely acknowledge is that these offenses date back to a period when Hussein was seen in Washington as a valued ally. Among the people instrumental in tilting U.S. policy toward Baghdad during the 1980-88 Iran-Iraq war was Donald H. Rumsfeld, now defense secretary, whose December 1983 meeting with Hussein as a special presidential envoy paved the way for normalization of U.S.-Iraqi relations. Declassified documents show that Rumsfeld traveled to Baghdad at a time when Iraq was using chemical weapons on an ``almost daily'' basis in defiance of international conventions. The story of U.S. involvement with Saddam Hussein in the years before his 1990 attack on Kuwait--which included large- scale intelligence sharing, supply of cluster bombs through a Chilean front company, and facilitating Iraq's acquisition of chemical and biological precursors--is a topical example of the underside of U.S. foreign policy. It is a world in which deals can be struck with dictators, human rights violations sometimes overlooked, and accommodations made with arms proliferators, all on the principle that the ``enemy of my enemy is my friend.'' Throughout the 1980s, Hussein's Iraq was the sworn enemy of Iran, then still in the throes of an Islamic revolution. U.S. officials saw Baghdad as a bulwark against militant Shiite extremism and the fall of pro- American states such as Kuwait, Saudi Arabia, and even Jordan--a Middle East version of the ``domino theory'' in Southeast Asia. That was enough to turn Hussein into a strategic partner and for U.S. diplomats in Baghdad to routinely refer to Iraqi forces as ``the good guys,'' in contrast to the Iranians, who were depicted as ``the bad guys.'' A review of thousands of declassified government documents and interviews with former policymakers shows that U.S. intelligence and logistical and support a crucial role in shoring up Iraqi defenses against the ``human wave'' attacks by suicidal Iranian troops. The administrations of Ronald Reagan and George H.W. Bush authorized the sale to Iraq of numerous items that had both military and civilian applications, including poisonous chemicals and deadly biological viruses, such as anthrax and bubonic plague. Opinions differ among Middle East experts and former government officials about the pre-Iraqi tilt, and whether Washington could have done more to stop the flow to Baghdad of technology for building weapons of mass destruction. ``It was a horrible mistake then, but we have got it right now,'' says Kenneth M. Pollack, a former CIA military analyst and author of ``The Threatening Storm,'' which makes the case for war with Iraq. ``My fellow [CIA] analysts and I were warning at the time that Hussein was a very nasty character. We were constantly fighting the State Department.'' ``Fundamentally, the policy was justified,'' argues David Newton, a former U.S. ambassador to Baghdad, who runs an anti-Hussein radio station in Prague. ``We were concerned that Iraq should not lose the war with Iran, because that would have threatened Saudi Arabia and the Gulf. Our long- term hope was that Hussein's government would become less repressive and more responsible.'' What makes present-day Hussein different from the Hussein of the 1980s, say Middle East experts, is the mellowing of the Iranian revolution and the August 1990 invasion of Kuwait that transformed the Iraqi dictator, almost overnight, from awkward ally into mortal enemy. In addition, the United States itself has changed. As a result of the Sept. 11, 2001 terrorist attacks on New York and Washington, U.S. policymakers take a much more alarmist view of the threat posed by the proliferation of weapons of mass destruction. When the Iran-Iraq war began in September 1980, with an Iraqi attack across the Shatt al Arab waterway that leads to the Persian Gulf, the United States was a bystander. The United States did not have diplomatic relations with either Baghdad or Teheran. U.S. officials had almost as little sympathy for Hussein's dictatorial brand of Arab nationalism as for the Islamic fundamentalism espoused by Iran's Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini. As long as the two countries fought their way to a stalemate, nobody in Washington was disposed to intervene. By the summer of 1982, however, the strategic picture had changed dramatically. After its initial gains, Iraq was on the defensive, and Iranian troops had advanced to within a few miles of Basra, Iraq's second largest city. U.S. intelligence information suggested the Iranians might achieve a breakthrough on the Basra front, destabilizing Kuwait, the Gulf states, and even Saudi Arabia, thereby threatening U.S. oil supplies. ``You have to understand the geostrategic context, which was very different from where we are now,'' said Howard Teicher, a former National Security Council official, who worked on Iraqi policy during the Reagan administration. ``Realpolitik dictated that we act to prevent the situation from getting worse.'' To prevent an Iraqi collapse, the Reagan administration supplied battlefield intelligence on Iranian troop buildups to the Iraqis, sometimes through third parties such as Saudi Arabia. The U.S. tilt toward Iraq was enshrined in National Security Decision Directive 114 of Nov. 26, 1983, one of the few important Reagan era foreign policy decisions that still remains classified. According to former U.S. officials, the directive stated that the United States would do ``whatever was necessary and legal'' to prevent Iraq from losing the war with Iran. The presidential directive was issued amid a flurry of reports that Iraqi forces were using chemical weapons in their attempts to hold back the Iranians. In principle, Washington was strongly opposed to chemical warfare, a practice outlawed by the 1925 Geneva Protocol. In practice, U.S. condemnation of Iraqi use of chemical weapons ranked relatively low on the scale of administration priorities, particularly compared with the all-important goal of preventing an Iranian victory. Thus, on Nov. 1, 1983, a senior State Department official, Jonathan T. Howe, told Secretary of State George P. Shultz that intelligence reports showed that Iraqi troops were resorting to ``almost daily use of CW'' against the Iranians. But the Reagan administration had already committed itself to a large-scale diplomatic and political overture to Baghdad, culminating in several visits by the president's recently appointed special envoy to the Middle East, Donald H. Rumsfeld. Secret talking points prepared for the first Rumsfeld visit to Baghdad enshrined some of the language from NSDD 114, including the statement that the United States would regard ``any major reversal of Iraq's fortunes as a strategic defeat for the West.'' When Rumsfeld finally met with Hussein on Dec. 20, he told the Iraqi leader that Washington was ready for a resumption of full diplomatic relations, according to a State Department report of the conversation. Iraqi leaders later described themselves as ``extremely pleased'' with the Rumsfeld visit, which had ``elevated U.S.-Iraqi relations to a new level.'' In a September interview with CNN, Rumsfeld said he ``cautioned'' Hussein about the use of chemical weapons, a claim at odds with declassified State Department notes of his 90-minute meeting with the Iraqi leader. A Pentagon spokesman, Brian Whitman, now says that Rumsfeld raised the issue not with Hussein, but with Iraqi foreign minister Tariq Aziz. The State Department notes show that he mentioned it largely in passing as one of several matters that ``inhibited'' U.S. efforts to assist Iraq. Rumsfeld has also said he had ``nothing to do'' with helping Iraq in its war against Iran. Although former U.S. officials agree that Rumsfeld was not one of the architects of the Reagan administration's tilt toward Iraq--he was a private citizen when he was appointed Middle East envoy--the documents show that his visits to Baghdad led to [[Page S1769]] closer U.S.-Iraqi cooperation on a wide variety of fronts. Washington was willing to resume diplomatic relations immediately, but Hussein insisted on delaying such a step until the following year. As part of its opening to Baghdad, the Reagan administration removed Iraq from the State Department terrorism list in February 1982, despite heated objections from Congress. Without such a move, Teicher says, it would have been ``impossible to take even the modest steps we were contemplating'' to channel assistance to Baghdad. Iraq--along with Syria, Libya and South Yemen--was one of four original countries on the list, which was first drawn up in 1979. Some former U.S. officials say that removing Iraq from the terrorism list provided an incentive to Hussein to expel the Palestinian guerrilla leader Abu Nidal from Baghdad in 1983. On the other hand, Iraq continued to play host to alleged terrorists throughout the '80s. The most notable was Abu Abbas, leader of the Palestine Liberation Front, who found refuge in Baghdad after being expelled from Tunis for masterminding the 1985 hijacking of the cruise ship Achille Lauro, which resulted in the killing of an elderly American tourist. While Rumsfeld was talking to Hussein and Aziz in Baghdad, Iraqi diplomats and weapons merchants were fanning out across Western capitals for a diplomatic charm offensive-cum-arms buying spree. In Washington, the key figure was the Iraqi charg d'affaires, Nizar Hamdoon, a fluent English speaker who impressed Reagan administration officials as one of the most skillful lobbyists in town. ``He arrived with a blue shirt and a white tie, straight out of the mafia,'' recalled Geoffrey Kemp, a Middle East specialist in the Reagan White House. ``Within six months, he was hosting suave dinner parties at his residence, which he parlayed into a formidable lobbying effort. He was particularly effective with the American Jewish community.'' One of Hamdoon's favorite props, says Kemp, was a green Islamic scarf allegedly found on the body of an Iranian soldier. The scarf was decorated with a map of the Middle East showing a series of arrows pointing toward Jerusalem. Hamdoon used to ``parade the scarf'' to conferences and congressional hearings as proof that an Iranian victory over Iraq would result in ``Israel becoming a victim along with the Arabs.'' According to a sworn court affidavit prepared by Teicher in 1995, the United States ``actively supported the Iraqi war effort by supplying the Iraqis with billions of dollars of credits, by providing military intelligence and advice to the Iraqis, and by closely monitoring third country arms sales to Iraq to make sure Iraq had the military weaponry required.'' Teicher said in the affidavit that former CIA director William Casey used a Chilean company, Cardoen, to supply Iraq with cluster bombs that could be used to disrupt the Iranian human wave attacks. Teicher refuses to discuss the affidavit. At the same time the Reagan administration was facilitating the supply of weapons and military components to Baghdad, it was attempting to cut off supplies to Iran under ``Operation Staunch.'' Those efforts were largely successful, despite the glaring anomaly of the 1986 Iran-contra scandal when the White House publicly admitted trading arms for hostages, in violation of the policy that the United States was trying to impose on the rest of the world. Although U.S. arms manufacturers were not as deeply involved as German or British companies in selling weaponry to Iraq, the Reagan administration effectively turned a blind eye to the export of ``dual use'' items such as chemical precursors and steel tubes that can have military and civilian applications. According to several former officials, the State and Commerce departments promoted trade in such items as a way to boost U.S. exports and acquire political leverage over Hussein. When United Nations weapons inspectors were allowed into Iraq after the 1991 Gulf War, they compiled long lists of chemicals, missile components, and computers from American suppliers, including such household names as Union Carbide and Honeywell, which were being used for military purposes. A 1994 investigation by the Senate Banking Committee turned up dozens of biological agents shipped to Iraq during the mid-'80s under license from the Commerce Department, including various strains of anthrax, subsequently identified by the Pentagon as a key component of the Iraqi biological warfare program. The Commerce Department also approved the export of insecticides to Iraq, despite widespread suspicions that they were being used for chemical warfare. The fact that Iraq was using chemical weapons was hardly a secret. In February 1984, an Iraqi military spokesman effectively acknowledged their use by issuing a chilling warning to Iran. ``The invaders should know that for ever harmful insect, there is an insecticide capable of annihilating it . . . and Iraq possesses this annihilation insecticide.'' In late 1987, the Iraqi air force began using chemical agents against Kurdish resistance forces in northern Iraq that had formed a loose alliance with Iran, according to State Department reports. The attacks, which were part of a ``scorched earth'' strategy to eliminate rebel-controlled villages, provoked outrage on Capitol Hill and renewed demands for sanctions against Iraq. The State Department and White House were also outraged--but not to the point of doing anything that might seriously damage relations with Baghdad. ``The U.S.-Iraqi relationship is . . . important to our long-term political and economic objectives,'' Assistant Secretary of State Richard W. Murphy wrote in a September 1988 memorandum that addressed the chemical weapons question. ``We believe that economic sanctions will be useless or counterproductive to influence the Iraqis.'' Bush administration spokesmen have cited Hussein's use of chemical weapons ``against his own people''--and particularly the March 1988 attack on the Kurdish village of Halabjah--to bolster their argument that his regime presents a ``grave and gathering danger'' to the United States. The Iraqis continued to use chemical weapons against the Iranians until the end of the Iran-Iraq war. A U.S. air force intelligence officer, Rick Francona, reported finding widespread use of Iraqi nerve gas when he toured the Al Faw peninsula in southern Iraq in the summer of 1988, after its recapture by the Iraqi army. The battlefield was littered with atropine injectors used by panicky Iranian troops as an antidote against Iraqi nerve gas attacks. Far from declining, the supply of U.S. military intelligence to Iraq actually expanded in 1988, according to a 1999 book by Francna, ``Ally to Adversary: an Eyewitness Account of Iraq's Fall from Grace,'' Informed sources said much of the battlefield intelligence was channeled to the Iraqis by the CIA office in Baghdad. Altough U.S. export controls to Iraq were tightened up in the late 1980s, thee were still many loopholes. In December 1988, Dow Chemical sold $1.5 million of pesticides to Iraq, despite U.S. government concerns that they could be used as chemical warfare agents. An Export-Import Bank official reported in a memorandum that he could find ``no reason'' to stop the sale, despite evidence that the pesticides were ``highly toxic'' to humans and would cause death ``from asphyxiation.'' The U.S. policy of cultivating Hussein as a moderate and reasonable Arab leader continued right up until he invaded Kuwait in August 1990, documents show. When the then-U.S. ambassador to Baghdad, April Glaspie, met with Hussein on July 25, 1990, a week before the Iraqi attack on Kuwait, she assured him that Bush ``wanted better and deeper relations,'' according to an Iraqi transcript of the conversation. ``President Bush is an intelligent man,'' the ambassador told Hussein, referring to the father of the current president. ``He is not going to declare an economic war against Iraq.'' ``Everybody was wrong in their assessment of Saddam,'' said Joe Wilson, Glaspie's former deputy at the U.S. embassy in Baghdad, and the last U.S. official to meet with Hussein. ``Everybody in the Arab world told us that the best way to deal with Saddam was to develop a set of economic and commercial relationships that would have the effect of moderating his behavior. History will demonstrate that this was a miscalculation.'' Mr. JOHNSON. Mr. President, my concern today is not to lay blame for past decisions which now place every American family, every American community in very real jeopardy from these weapons of mass destruction and which now give rise to the clear possibility, if not great likelihood, of war in Iraq with its attendant costs in lives of combatants and innocent civilians alike. Rather, it is my concern that this Senate and this Nation clearly understand how we arrived at this point so that we might learn from our Nation's past tragic mistakes. As Mr. Michael Dobbs of the Washington Post writes: The story of U.S. involvement with Saddam Hussein in the years before his 1990 attack on Kuwait--which included large- scale intelligence sharing, supply of cluster bombs through a Chilean front company, and facilitating Iraq's acquisition of chemical and biological precursors--is a topical example of the underside of U.S. foreign policy. It is a world in which deals can be struck with dictators, human rights violations sometimes overlooked, and accommodations made with arms proliferators. . . . The United States also provided billions of dollars in credits to help arm Iraq, ostensibly to assist with its war at that time against Iran. The review of declassified documents and interviews with former policymakers: reveals that the administrations of Ronald Reagan and George H. W. Bush authorized the sale to Iraq of numerous items that had both military and civilian applications, including poisonous chemicals and deadly biological viruses, such as anthrax and bubonic plague. Anthrax and bubonic plague from the United States to Iraq. The Reagan administration removed Iraq from the State Department terrorism list in 1982 over the strong objections of Congress. Despite this delisting, Iraq continued throughout the 1980s to harbor terrorists, including even Abu Abbas, leader of the Palestinian Liberation Front. The Reagan administration effectively turned a blind eye to the export of dual use items such as chemical precursors and steel [[Page S1770]] tubes that can have military and civilian applications. . . . When United Nations weapons inspectors were allowed into Iraq after the 1991 Gulf war, they compiled long lists of chemicals, missile components, and computers from American suppliers. Mr. President, sadly, there is no new precedent in our Government using our citizens' tax dollars to finance the purchase of weaponry for antidemocratic, antihuman rights, and unstable foreign nations only to see their short-term friendship disappear and to have them become enemies to the United States and the Western World. What is truly shocking here, however, is that the very possession of chemical and biological weapons of mass destruction, which is the justification for a new war in Iraq and which places in jeopardy the safety of American families, American communities, and American military personnel, is, in large measure, the consequence of decisions made by the Reagan and Bush administrations. As we speak, tens of thousands of U.S. gulf war veterans continue to suffer from exposure to chemical agents over a decade ago. We in Congress debate whether and how to inoculate hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of Americans to protect them from biological weapons that their own Government helped create in Iraq. It is one thing that our Nation would have provided cluster bombs and conventional weaponry to Saddam Hussein--it no doubt seemed important and strategically helpful to the purpose of stabilizing the Middle East during the 1980's. But how can members of this Senate look members of our military in the eye--and I include my own son, a sergeant in the 101st Airborne and a veteran of Bosnia, Kosovo and Afghanistan--and acknowledge that these past administrations, albeit without congressional knowledge or consent, allowed Iraq to acquire the anthrax, and bubonic plague viruses? The circumstance our Nation now faces, from the threats of Iraqi weapons of mass destruction as well as the possibility that these weapons have or will fall into the hands of Al-Qaida or other non-state terrorist organizations, are to a great degree, circumstances of our own making. Obviously, no American administration has ever supported terrorism against our own people, though interfering with Iraq's use of these weapons against many of its own people was apparently not a matter of first concern to the U.S. The lesson should be clear--to the extent that the U.S. arms the world, it undertakes a risk that those weapons could be used against our own citizens. While helping proven democratic allies to defend themselves will always be a legitimate role for the U.S., it is hard to imagine a lesson driven home more profoundly than we find today that arming non-democracies is a much greater risk, and arming non- democracies with weapons of chemical and biological warfare capability is an outrageous and utterly unacceptable risk to the U.S. and the world. It may be impossible for our Nation to avoid reaping what is has sown in the past, but this administration, this Congress and the American people must be united now in committing never again to be even a unwitting instrument of chemical, biological or nuclear terror in the world. I yield the floor. The PRESIDING OFFICER. The Senator from Alaska. ____________________