[Congressional Record Volume 149, Number 27 (Thursday, February 13, 2003)]
[Extensions of Remarks]
[Page E214]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]




                             SADDAM HUSSEIN

                                 ______
                                 

                           HON. MARCY KAPTUR

                                of ohio

                    in the house of representatives

                      Wednesday, February 12, 2003

  Ms. KAPTUR. Mr. Speaker, I submit the following article to be 
included in the Record:

              [From The Halifax Daily News, Feb. 11, 2003]

The Wrong Question: It's Not Whether Saddam Has Chemical Weapons, It's 
                         Whether He'll Use Them

                            (By Gwynne Dyer)

       U.S. Secretary of State Colin Powell did a good job at the 
     United Nations last week of laying out the evidence that 
     Saddam Hussein has kept some of the chemical and biological 
     weapons that he had before the Gulf War of 1990-91, and maybe 
     even made more since then. If you doubted it before, you 
     shouldn't doubt it any more. But it was the right answer to 
     the wrong question.
       Saddam should be forced to comply with his obligations and 
     destroy all those weapons, but if you are planning to launch 
     a war next month that will probably snuff out tens of 
     thousands of lives, you have to answer a different question. 
     Is there a big enough risk that Saddam will use those weapons 
     himself in the near future, or give them to terrorists to 
     use, to justify pulling the inspectors out and killing all 
     those people now? No, there is not. Saddam Hussein has had 
     these weapons for at least 20 years, and he hasn't given them 
     to anyone in all that time,. And why would terrorists need to 
     get these weapons from Iraq anyway, when they could just 
     steal their poison gas from the huge, poorly guarded stocks 
     in Russia (secured, in some cases, with bicycle padlocks)--or 
     mix them up in the kitchen sink like the Aum Shinrikyo cult 
     did for its attacks on the Tokyo subway in 1995?
       Besides, Saddam Hussein is no friend of al-Qaida. He is the 
     kind of Arab leader the Islamists hate most: a secular, 
     westernizing socialist who liberates women and makes deals 
     with the West. Osama bin Laden says he is an ``infidel'' and 
     has been calling for his overthrow for years.
       Saddam is a thoroughly nasty dictator, but he is neither 
     mad nor expansionist. In fact, if you were looking for a 
     European parallel to Saddam Hussein's regime, it would be 
     something like Nicolae Ceasescu's long reign in Communist 
     Romania--except that Ceasescu, safely contained within the 
     Soviet bloc, never had a war with his neighbours.
       Saddam Hussein, who is 66 this year, comes from the Arab 
     generation that believed in modernization through 
     revolutionary socialism on the Eastern European model. During 
     the 1970s he behaved like a classic Communist leader, 
     eliminating his rivals but taking the task of raising 
     people's living standards quite seriously. With abundant oil 
     revenues available, he built an Iraq where most people had 
     decent jobs, the children were all in school, and women were 
     freer than anywhere else in the Arab world. Then came the war 
     with Iran, and everything went wrong.
       Saddam always dreamed of becoming the hero-leader of the 
     Arab world on the model of Egypt's Gamal Abdul Nasser, which 
     is why he had a nuclear weapons program. (The first Arab 
     leader to acquire a deterrent against Israel's nuclear 
     monopoly automatically becomes an Arab hero.) He never showed 
     any desire to conquer his neighbors, but Iraq did have 
     territorial disputes with Iran and Kuwait, both dating back 
     to before he was born--and he did not manage them well.
       He signed a treaty with Iran in 1975 settling the dispute 
     over the Iraq-Iran border, but it unravelled after the Shah 
     was overthrown in 1978, and the new Islamic government of 
     Ayatollah Khomeini began inciting the majority of Iraqi Arabs 
     who share Iran's Shia religious heritage to throw off 
     Saddam's godless socialist rule. In the great blunder of his 
     life, Saddam went to war with Iran in 1980. Iranians 
     outnumber Iraqis three-to-one, and without huge amounts of 
     U.S. aid and those chemical weapons we keep hearing about 
     (which the Reagan administration knew all about), he would 
     not have survived.
       Iraq emerged from that war in 1988 with hundreds of 
     thousands dead, the welfare state in ruins--and $60 billion 
     in debt to its Gulf Arab neighbours. Saddam asked them to 
     cancel the debt, since Iraq's sacrifices had ``saved'' them 
     from revolutionary Iran. When they refused, he invaded Kuwait 
     (which all the rulers of independent Iraqi have claimed as 
     part of Iraq) in August 1990. He thought he had cleared this 
     with his American allies, but neither party understood what 
     the other was saying in his famous conversation with the U.S. 
     ambassador in Baghdad.
       When Saddam Hussein contacted U.S. President George W. Bush 
     four days after the invasion and offered the U.S. unlimited 
     Kuwaiti oil at one-third of world market price in return for 
     a deal on Kuwaiti sovereignty, Bush Senior coldly ordered him 
     out of Kuwait. He refused, the Gulf War followed, and he has 
     been under UN sanctions ever since, clinging to power in the 
     ruins of the country he once raised to prosperity. He has 
     been a disaster for Iraq, but he is not the new Hitler. He is 
     not even a visceral anti-American, though U.S.-Iraqi 
     relations have been bitterly hostile since 1990,
       So, the right questions are: is Saddam likely to give 
     chemical or biological weapons to the Islamist terrorists he 
     loathes this month or next, when he has not done so in the 
     past 20 years? If not, why do we need a war with Iraq now 
     that will kill a great many people with old-fashioned high 
     explosives?

                          ____________________