The Death Lobby: How the West Armed Iraq

Epilogue: How Prevent Another Iraq

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It became clear once the guns fell silent from Operation Desert Thunder that the Allies had put a severe check on Saddam's ambitions, but they had not blocked them altogether. Many more tanks, aircraft, and chemical weapons survived the Allied onslaught than had originally been thought. Key Republican Guards units were kept in Baghdad to protect the regime's survival and fight another day. When Saddam wheeled around and ruthlessly suppressed Kurdish and Shiite rebellions in the north and south of Iraq, he had more than enough weapons to do the job, including hundreds of tons of the deadly chemicals the Allies victoriously claimed they had destroyed on the first day of the war. The phosphoric acid and other chemical agents that the Iraqi helicopters dumped on the rebels had been manufactured at a buried factory near Akashat and stored in secret underground depots, thanks to German companies. The massacre was so ruthless that more than one million Kurdish civilians fled for their lives. They preferred to face uncertainty and hardship up in the mountains than face certain death at the hands of Saddam.

One reason the Pentagon and the White House were caught short by Saddam Hussein's success against the rebels was purely technical. Bomb damage assessments and KH-11 satellite photographs showed that the Allied bombing campaign had almost totally destroyed Iraq's three major oil refineries, at Baiji, Daura, and Basra. Iraq couldn't turn its tanks and helicopters on the rebels, Joint Chiefs Chairman Colin Powell told President Bush, for one simple reason: they were out of gas.

But Powell was wrong, and President Bush knew it. Or at least, he should have. For many months, the Pentagon had been tracking the activities of Iraq's western suppliers of dual-use technology, and had compiled an extensive list of the sophisticated weapons plants and other militarily useful facilities those companies had built in Iraq. They knew, for instance, that Marubeni of Japan had supplied Saddam with hundreds of buried fuel storage tanks which had escaped Allied bombardment, while a Franco-Italian petrochemicals consortium had built an entire underground diesel fuel plant just twenty miles away from the heavily damaged Baiji refinery which was still capable of transforming an additional 31,000 barrels of oil each day into fuel for Iraqi tanks and helicopters. Kurdish refugees and Shiite villagers thank the companies that built these plants--and the Germans who supplied Saddam Hussein's poison gas works--every day.

General Brent Scowcroft, the President's National Security Advisor, told Jewish leaders in Washington on March 5 that the Pentagon began to realize during the air campaign against Iraq that it was facing a far more sophisticated enemy than originally thought. "We'd knock out a command and control facility, and the next day we'd find that another one had take its place. We'd hit that one, and he'd have yet another backup," Scowcroft said. "The incredible expense and planning he has put into building up his military capability is awesome."

Iraq was prepared to fight a major war well before it invaded Kuwait, Scowcroft said. It had stockpiled heavy equipment in bomb-proof shelters deep underground. From French, German, and Japanese companies, Iraq had purchased massive quantities of "civilian" telecommunications gear which was used with great success by the Iraqi military. When the Allies moved into southern Iraq, they discovered thousands of miles of fiber optics communications cables buried on both sides of the Euphrates, and dozens of automatic switching units. (This equipment was so sophisticated that it was banned for export from Eastern European countries such as Czechoslovakia, but not to Iraq). Thanks to specialized software provided by a major European defense telecommunications firm, Saddam Hussein could still transmit orders to his commanders in the south despite the heavy Allied bombardment. When the Allies started to move in on the ground, Saddam told his commanders to move out. The mother of all battles would be fought another day.

Scowcroft took great pains to explain why the Allied bombing campaign had lasted so long (40 days and 40 nights). "We'd hit an ammunition bunker, or a fixed military facility, and fly back the next day only to discover that it was still operational," he said. "The Iraqis had fitted these sites with special blow-out walls, so we'd have to go back and hit the same target again and again." The blow-out walls had been shipped in secret to Iraq by an Austrian company, to equip a "university" research center. One member of Saddam's Foreign Legion (the term Senator Jesse Helms used to refer to the hundreds of Western companies which helped Saddam build his military industries) called this: "Linking the special needs of the East to the awesome talents of the West."

The responsibiliy for building Saddam Hussein's military power must be shared among Iraq's many suppliers and supporters; but the weapons alone would not have transformed Saddam Hussein into an international threat. If any nation must be singled out for this particularly grave responsibility it is Germany, the same Germany which pledged after World War II never to become a threat to world peace again. Without the aid of German companies, and the support of the Bonn government, Saddam Hussein would never have been able to build a chemical weapons industry, nor would he have made such strides toward the atomic bomb and toward the development of a new generation of ballistic missiles, capable of delivering nuclear warheads against any capitol in the region.

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Proliferation policy in the U.S. and in other Western countries has yet to change in any significant fashion, despite a series of highly-publicized "initiatives" intended to calm the political storm the deliveries to Iraq had raised. Once again, an American President and his top policy-makers are using trade and aid to transform Third World dictators into American friends. Once again, a German Chancellor has turned his back on the past. Like Merlin with his magic wand, they vainly hope to turn the frog into a prince.

Regimes similar to Iraq's today exist in Syria, Iran and elsewhere, and have proven track records as proliferation threats. All have devoted immense resources to develop the chemical and nuclear weapons, and the long-range missiles needed to deliver them onto distant targets. These regimes do not need encouragement. And yet, Bush Administration officials such as Reginald Bartholomew at the Department of State, and Secretary of Commerce Robert Mosbacher, continue to argue that careful coddling by Washington will bring these dictators around, while American allies abroad are using a similar rationale to justify multi-billion dollar sales of industrial plants and machinery to these countries, as well as arms.

This policy failed miserably in Iraq. And it will fail again.

The export control system throughout the Western world is in a shambles Big business lobbies systematically overwhelm their opponents. Their policy is a purely economic policy: sell-anything-to-any-dictator-who-pays-cash. Curb the sales, they say, and Americans (or Germans, or Frenchmen) will lose jobs. It's amazing how quickly the big guns get dragged out.

Professor Gary Milhollin heads the Wisconsin Project for Nuclear Control, and has been crusading for years to convince the American government to adopt more effective proliferation controls to curb the spread of nuclear weapons technology and other weapons of mass destruction. For Milhollin and other experts, the Allied war against Iraq was brought on mainly by the lack of such controls. Preventing another Iraq, Milhollin believes, will not condemn entire sectors of the U.S. export economy to death, but it will require selective restrictions targetting critical technologies, which the business lobbies will continue to fight.

Milhollin discovered this last year, when he wrote a series of articles in the Washington Post and the New York Times, arguing that planned super-computer sales to Brazil and India were unwise because they would give those nations a ballistic missile capability. No sooner had Milhollin's articles appeared, than "platoons of representatives from IBM and Cray have been visiting all of the people involved in this decision and all of the departments on a continuing basis in their offices." Just so the record was clear, Milhollin added: "I don't get a chance to visit any of these people in their offices. The process is totally closed from the public. The people who decide only hear one side of the case, the exporter side. Then after the export is approved, the very record of approving it is confidential. " Former Deputy Undersecretary of Defense Steve Bryen agrees. "Corporate lobbying is a very one-sided process. There is not any public interest lobbying that I ever encountered or can recall. Basically, most of the dialogue occurs with companies that want to export their goods."

As it stands now, half a dozen executive agencies around Washington are responsible for examining U.S. exports perceived to pose a proliferation threat. More often than not, they do not coordinate their activities, or share their information. The Department of Commerce promotes U.S. exports, and regulates U.S. trade--a clear conflict of interest if there ever was one. When the wrong technology gets through to the wrong dictator, such as the Consarc furnaces which were nearly shipped to Iraq, Commerce spends its time sniping at other agencies, trying to shift the blame.

A nine-month investigation into the flawed export control system by the Commerce, Consumer, and Monetary Affairs Subcommittee of the House Committee on Government Operations, released on July 14, 1991, called for a total overhaul of the licensing system. [Footnote: "Strengthening the Export Licensing System," a report by the [as above], Washington, DC, July 1991. House Report 102-137]. Subcommittee chairman Doug Barnard, Jr (D-Ga), stated that the investigation "found that indeed Saddam Hussein's Iraq did receive materials and technologies from the United States which aided that outlaw country in building dangerous weapons which it was ready to use against our troops. This was done in spite of a system of export controls in place which was designed to protect the United States against precisely such a risk. In short, we found that the system was sorely in need of rehabilitation to avoid a repeat of the Iraq situation."

The report criticized the licensing system as "inherently inefficient and ineffective... convoluted and confusing." It found that "too many government agencies are involved in the licensing process," that the "agencies' lines of authority are not clear," and that the agencies "do not effectively share information." The secrecy of the system was castigated, including the justification used by many exporters that the divulgation of their contracts could be detrimental to them. "This clearly is not sufficient reason to hide export licensing information from the public eye. On the other hand, there is a clear public interest in knowing how much of a particular dual-use commodity was sent to a particular country," the report stated.

The committee recommended creating a single independent agency within the executive branch to handle all export licensing, including nuclear-related items, dual-use equipment, and munitions, with the intent of avoiding inter-agency sniping and better ensuring accountability -- both to exporters, and to the public -- by requiring greater congressional oversight than today exists. In additional views appended to the report, Representative Jon L. Kyl, a republican from Arizona, deplored the virtual exclusive of Defense Department experts in export license review cases in recent years, and strongly urged that the proposed Agency for Export Administration include Pentagon representatives. "It is absolutely critical that national security be the primary consideration in determining final approval or disapproval of an export license," he said.

Instead of becoming a political football tossed from agency to agency, proliferation controls in the U.S. should be centralized in a single oversight and licensing office. One proposal currently under discussion is to establish a new Proliferation Agency in the White House, as part of the National Security Council, and detail a Defense Department technology transfer expert to head it. Not only will this ensure that the President retains authority over U.S. foreign policy questions, which export licensing inevitably involves; it means that the President himself must account for future breaches in the law. The lack of accountability has been one of the biggest problems in the current system.

But reinforcing strategic export controls in the United States is not enough. Germany and France--just to name these two--have shown that American allies abroad have even less concern for preventing the sale of strategic military technology to Third World dictators than the U.S. Department of Commerce. The only way to bring foreign violators of proliferation controls to book is by imposing strict trade sanctions. And yet, sanctions legislation passed by Congress has been vetoed again and again by President Bush.

Saddam Hussein's death machine was almost exclusively built by Western companies. The vast majority of the machine-tools, computers, and sophisticated test equipment he needed to build ballistic missiles, bombs, bullets, and guns was provided totally legally by companies who applied for export licenses. A compilation of public sources alone shows that 445 companies cashed in on this macabre manna, one-third of them in West Germany alone.

Until concrete steps are taken to curb this type of trade, the "new world order" President Bush is so keen on heralding in will turn out to be more death as usual.