The Foreign Service Journal, March 2010

26 F O R E I G N S E R V I C E J O U R N A L / M A R C H 2 0 1 0 — conducted four days of bombing in December 1998. The UNSCOM inspectors left and never returned, and the Security Council was mightily divided. As Tariq Aziz later told me, Iraq had a choice of sanc- tions with inspectors or sanctions without them. No one should have been surprised when it chose the latter. A Fateful Year By the time President George W. Bush took office in 2001, a decade after his father’s smashing military victory over Iraq, it was clear that the sanctions regime was crum- bling. One of the first tasks of Secretary of State Colin Powell was to address this situation, which he did by pro- posing to the U.N. Security Council a radically reconfig- ured sanctions program dubbed “smart sanctions.” (Tariq Aziz smugly dismissed them as “stupid sanctions.”) Up to this point, there had been a presumption that most exports to Iraq should be denied. Now there would be a list of prohibited items, while all other requests would normally be approved. This shift was intended, in part, to lessen the effect of sanctions on the Iraqi people — but its main goal was to retain support for any constraints on Sad- dam fromRussia, France and other Security Council mem- bers. In the pre-9/11 world, this was considered to be the best way to accomplish that goal. Even so, by that summer SaddamHussein appeared to be on the verge of shedding U.N. sanctions — his highest priority — at a low cost in prestige and power. Interna- tional commerce was returning to life, and its oil produc- tion was rising. At meetings of the Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries, the Iraqi delegation was the center of attention, with traders eagerly anticipating the full and unfettered return of Iraqi oil to the market. Sad- dam shrewdly doled out favors and oil contracts to build an international constituency. “If you wanted to be a friend of Iraq when sanctions were formally dropped, then you bet- ter be a friend of Iraq now” was an effective tactic, espe- cially when combined with a moral argument that the sanctions were killing thousands of innocent Iraqis. American control of substantial Iraqi airspace through the “no-fly” zones (patrolled at great expense and risk) was a matter of extreme annoyance, but it posed no immediate threat. Saddam had a very long time horizon uncon- strained by the business, election or news cycles that com- press Washington’s thinking, and his perspective extended far beyond that of American politicians. That calculation was not far off the mark — until 9/11. But Saddamwas too slow to understand that the world had changed. After all, he had no connection with the perpe- trators or with al-Qaida generally, so he did not foresee that the U.S. would treat him as an equivalent emerging threat that had to be dealt with once and for all. Only after President George W. Bush gave his 2002 State of the Union address denouncing Iraq as a member of the “Axis of Evil” did Saddam begin to appreciate the gravity of his position. But he was still unwilling to accept a resumption of inspections (without an explicit commit- ment by the Security Council to lift sanctions), and his ob- stinacy provided evidence to those concerned about the possibility that Iraq had begun rebuilding WMD as soon as U.N. inspectors had left Iraq three years earlier. Ultimately, this was his fatal mistake. Had Saddam freely accepted the return of inspectors in 2002 rather than continuing to defy the Security Council, it is highly likely that the momentum for invasion would have dissipated. Saddam followed this course against the advice of both Tariq Aziz and Foreign Minister Naji Sabri, who under- stood the post-9/11 diplomatic climate. However, Saddam knew the status of his WMD pro- grams and felt that the U.S. must know it, as well. And having received assurances from Russia and France that they would block any U.S. proposal that the United Na- tions take military action, he may have anticipated that the Security Council would finally make a concrete promise to lift sanctions if inspectors found nothing within some defined period of time. The Coefficient of WMD To understand why it turned out that there were no weapons of mass destruction in Iraq in 2003 is to under- stand something that may be useful in other circum- stances. It may also convey knowledge about where Saddam and his regime were headed. Why did Saddam use weapons of mass destruction in certain situations and not in others? What were the un- derlying dynamics? The goal I set for the investigation of Iraqi WMD programs in 2004 was to understand all the factors involved, not just to discover the status of WMD inventories in 2003. It is the difference between algebra and calculus. What equation was Saddam Hussein attempting to solve for which the coefficient of WMD was zero at certain points and greater than zero at other times? What were the fac- tors and constants that comprised this equation? And F O C U S