1/23/01 11:10 a.m.
Saddam Must Go
Desert Storm plus 10.

By Frank J. Gaffney Jr., NRO contributing editor & president of the Center for Security Policy

ew in the West are cheering the 10th anniversary of Operation Desert Storm. Why are we so gloomy? Simply put, a decade of living with the decision to allow Saddam Hussein to survive the war has proved to be a mistake of epic proportions: Saddam continues to ruthlessly suppress his own people — exploiting what remains of the U.N.'s economic sanctions so as to inflict maximum hardship on Iraq's poor, young and unhealthy for the cynical purpose of shaking his fist at the United States and maximizing domestic and pan-Arabian support for his regime. He has also resumed his efforts to amass weapons of mass destruction (WMD) and other dangerous offensive military capabilities that pose an increasingly grave threat to the region, and beyond.

For example, Saddam has not abandoned his ambitions for Kuwait. As General Amir Saadi, head of Iraq's missile program, told the first chairman of the U.N. Special Committee on Iraq (UNSCOM), Rolf Ekeus, "Iraq needs its military equipment. The war is not over. It was only a cease-fire." Ekeus subsequently told the U.S. Senate: "The Iraqi Government does not consider the Gulf War was a war with an ending…. It was a battle of Kuwait, not a war of Kuwait."

Saddam's continuing work on WMD and their delivery systems reveal his true ambitions. He has been collaborating with the terrorist, genocidal, and authoritarian regime in the Sudan to construct a Scud-missile manufacturing facility; suspicions abound about his resumption of the production of chemical and biological arms; and he has renewed his pursuit of crude atomic weapons capabilities. All these are ominous signs.

In 1995, Saddam launched a new program — the "drone of death" — using a converted training aircraft known as L29. The first flights were launched in 1997 and testing continues to this day. The aircraft have each been fitted with two under-wing weapon stores capable of carrying 300 liters of anthrax. If one aircraft's anthrax were sprayed over a densely-populated area such as Kuwait City, it could kill millions of people. Saddam intends to deploy these drones of death in southern Iraq to threaten his neighbors.

Given its 500-mile radius, a "drone of death," once unleashed into the atmosphere, would enable Saddam to reach targets not only in Kuwait, but also in Israel and Saudi Arabia.

That Iraq never turned over any of its biological weapons to UNSCOM has come back to haunt us. As a result, the full dimensions of this "drone" program remain what UNSCOM's second chairman, Ambassador Richard Butler, has called a "black hole." This is all the more disturbing insofar as the Iraqi L29 program would be the easiest of all Iraq's proscribed programs for Saddam to reconstitute if it were ever located by UNSCOM.

Dr. Seth Carus of National Defense University believes that the explanation for Saddam's adamantine refusal to reveal anything about his WMD activities comes down to the fact that the biological agents contain DNA. Thus, if UNSCOMB authorities found samples of the stockpile from which biological agents used in the attack had originated, DNA testing might enable U.N. investigators to assign responsibility. And so, by maintaining the covert status of his entire biological stockpile, Saddam retains the option of carrying out biological terrorism with legal impunity.

Accordingly, one of the most worrisome legacies Bill Clinton has bequeathed to President George W. Bush is the policy of winking at Saddam's machinations over WMD. It is heartening, therefore, that senior ranks of the incoming Bush-Cheney administration are staffed by individuals who have, in the past, condemned Clinton's feckless effort to "contain" the "Butcher of Baghdad." The new administration champions a dramatically different approach aimed at ending Saddam's misrule and the threat that it poses to his long-suffering people and to those who live beyond his borders.

On Feb. 19, 1998, Secretary of Defense-designate Donald Rumsfeld, reputed Deputy Secretary of Defense-designate Paul Wolfowitz and a number of others said to be under consideration for top posts (including John Bolton, Richard Armitage, Dov Zakheim, Zalmay Khalilzad, Jeffrey Gedmin, and Douglas Feith) offered a blueprint for liberating Iraq in an open letter to the new President.

The following were the elements of the "comprehensive political and military strategy for bringing down Saddam and his regime" recommended by the men listed above and 30 other former senior officials and experts:

• "Recognize a provisional government of Iraq based on the principles and leaders of the Iraqi National Congress (INC) that is representative of all the peoples of Iraq;

• "Restore and enhance the safe haven in northern Iraq to allow the provisional government to extend its authority there and establish a zone in southern Iraq from which Saddam's ground forces would also be excluded;

• "Lift sanctions in liberated areas. Sanctions are instruments of war against Saddam's regime, but they should be quickly lifted on those who have freed themselves from [them]. Also, the oil resources and products of the liberated areas should help fund the provisional government's insurrection and humanitarian relief for the people of liberated Iraq;

• "Release frozen Iraqi assets — which amount to $1.6 billion in the United States and Britain alone — to the control of the provisional government to fund its insurrection. This could be done gradually and so long as the provisional government continues to promote a democratic Iraq;

• "Facilitate broadcasts from U.S. transmitters immediately and establish a Radio Free [Iraq];

• "Help expand liberated areas of Iraq by assisting the provisional government's offensive against Saddam Hussein's regime logistically and through other means;

• "Remove any vestiges of Saddam's claim to 'legitimacy' by, among other things, bringing a war crimes indictment against the dictator and his lieutenants and challenging Saddam's credentials to fill the Iraqi seat at the United Nation[s];

• "Launch a systematic air campaign against the pillars of [Saddam's] power — the Republican Guard divisions [that] prop him up and the military infrastructure that sustains him;

• "Position U.S. ground force[s] equipment in the region so that, as a last resort, we have the capacity to protect and assist the anti-Saddam forces in the northern and southern parts of Iraq;"

The incoming members of the Bush-Cheney administration and other signatories have made it clear that "it will not be easy — and the course of action we favor is not…without its problems and perils. But we believe the vital national interests of our country require the United States to [adopt such a strategy]."

It is both a tragedy for the people of Iraq and a potential nightmare for the rest of the world that Clinton failed to act on this sound advice. If the world does not want to mark any further anniversaries of the international failure to end Saddam's brutality, it should adopt the strategy for liberating Iraq detailed above. It was advanced three years ago by the Committee for Peace and Security in the Gulf. It would have been better had it been adopted then; it would be a tragedy if it were ignored now.