America's conflict with Iraq now approaches the endgame. On Feb. 5 -- two days from today -- Secretary of State Colin Powell will go before the United Nations Security Council to make, for the final time, the case for war with Iraq. Powell will reveal classified U.S. intelligence to prove that Iraq still owns weapons of mass destruction and is evading U.N. weapons inspections, and thus is in breach of U.N. resolutions demanding disarmament. Three months later, the U.N. Conference on Disarmament will hold its 25th anniversary session in Geneva. The disarmament conference is the branch of the United Nations that negotiated the nuclear non-proliferation treaty and the conventions restricting chemical and biological weapons. The nation that will serve as chair of the U.N. disarmament conference is Iraq.
Evidently Saddam's flouting of every weapons regulation on the books is less important than bureaucratic procedure: Iraq rotates into the disarmament chairmanship through an alphabetical ordering system. A side effect of this is that Iraq's co-chair at the conference will be its closest alphabetical neighbor, Iran. Iran, coincidentally, is another "Axis of Evil" member that is actively seeking nuclear weapons and is the country that traded chemical attacks with Iraq during the 1980s. The situation is farcical.
Unfortunately, farce is a word that can be applied to the United Nations' handling of the entire Iraq crisis. While humorous, this latest embarrassment is symptomatic of the United Nations' growing impotence, as demonstrated by its inability to bring Iraq to task. When Colin Powell speaks before the Security Council on Wednesday about the fate of Iraq, the fate of the United Nations hangs in the balance as well. For if the United Nations does not take action against Iraq and if the United States must act unilaterally to stop the mad pursuits of a dangerous dictator, the United Nations will be exposed as a debating society incapable of enforcing the rules it orders member states to follow.
Saddam Hussein, after all, has been thumbing his nose at the United Nations since 1990. He is in violation of 16 separate Security Council resolutions. A few recent favorites include UNSCR 687 (1991), which ordered Saddam to destroy all of his chemical and biological weapons and "related subsystems and components and all research, development, support and manufacturing facilities;" UNSCR 707 (1991), which required Iraq to produce a declaration of all its weapons programs and give inspectors unrestricted access to weapons sites; and UNSCR 1205 (1998), which lambasted Iraq's expulsion of weapons inspectors, called Iraq noncompliant and threatened the "severest consequences" unless the inspectors were allowed to return.
Yet those "severest consequences" never materialized. Iraq spent an entire decade repeatedly and publicly defying the international community while the United Nations did nothing in response. The United Nations' threats were hollow and Saddam knew this and exploited it. Every few years the United States would fire a cruise missile at an Iraqi bunker and the United Nations imposed some economic sanctions to contain Iraq. But Saddam cheated on the sanctions and sold black-market oil to fund his quest for weapons of mass destruction while the Iraqi people starved. He hid his weapons stockpiles and created mobile weapons labs to stay one step ahead of inspectors. He also bugged the inspectors' rooms and tailed them. He killed defectors and their families to keep his own scientists from leaking information. And all this time the United Nations did nothing but grumble and pass more resolutions. Security Council members France and Russia even lobbied to lift the sanctions and take an easier stance on Iraq.
After Sept. 11, faced with evidence that Iraq was supporting terrorists, the Security Council passed UNSCR 1441 last November. This latest resolution called on Iraq to produce a new weapons declaration, destroy all remaining weapons of mass destruction and re-admit weapons inspectors. In other words, the United Nations gave Saddam Hussein second, third and fourth chances to comply and disarm. Since then Saddam has produced a 10,000 page report declaring that he has no weapons (a claim contradicted outright by U.S. and U.N. intelligence) and led the U.N. inspection teams in a game of hide-and-seek. And still the inspectors have turned up 16 chemical munitions that Iraq swore didn't exist, and chief inspector Hans Blix has called the Iraqis uncooperative -- thus making the country in violation of yet another U.N. resolution.
Now time is running out -- for Saddam and for the United Nations. If Colin Powell exposes Iraq's deceit before the Security Council this Wednesday, the Council should respond with military action before the month is out. Anything less than a unanimous resolution calling for Saddam Hussein's ouster will be a death knell for the United Nations, demonstrating once and for all that it is toothless, irrelevant and unwilling to enforce its own rules. It is in America's interest to have an effective United Nations and to eliminate Iraq's capacity for mass murder, but the former cannot be achieved without the latter. So the United Nations must now back its words with action and disarm Iraq or it will become a modern-day League of Nations: pointless, powerless and forgotten.
