Week after week, Bush and his people have been getting pounded
by newly emboldened Democrats and liberal pundits for having exaggerated the
threat posed by Saddam Hussein and his still-elusive weapons of mass
destruction. One day, CIA Director George Tenet is hung out to dry; the
next, it's the turn of Paul Wolfowitz's team of mad Straussians. On the
other side of the Atlantic, the same sort of thing has been happening to
Tony Blair.
They deserve the pounding, but if we're to be fair, there's an
even more deserving target, a man of impeccable liberal credentials,
well-respected in the sort of confabs attended by New Labor and espousers of
the Third Way. I give you Rolf Ekeus, former Swedish ambassador to the
United States and, before that, the executive chairman of the United Nations
Special Commission (UNSCOM) on Iraq from 1991 to 1997. These days, he's
chairman of the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute, a noted
dovecote of the olive branch set.
In the wake of the first Iraq war, it was UNSCOM Chief Ekeus,
exuding disinterested integrity as only a Swede can, who insisted that
Saddam Hussein was surely pressing forward with the manufacture of weapons
of mass destruction. It was Ekeus who played a pivotal role in justifying
the continued imposition of sanctions, on the grounds that these sanctions
were essential as a means of applying pressure to the tyrant in Baghdad.
In 1996, Ramsey Clark, former U.S. Attorney General, and a
leading critic of the indiscriminate cruelty of these sanctions, wrote an
open letter to Ekeus beginning thus: "Dear Mr. Ekeus, How many children are
you willing to let die while you search for 'items' you 'are convinced still
exist in' Iraq? Every two months for the past half year, and on earlier
occasions, you or your office have made some statement several weeks before
the Security Council considers sanctions against Iraq which you know will be
used to cause their continuation . This cruel and endless hoax of new
disclosures every two months must stop. The direct consequence of your
statements which are used to justify continuation of the sanctions against
Iraq is the deaths of hundreds of thousands of innocent and helpless
infants, children and elderly, and chronically ill human beings."
Despite many such furious denunciations, till the day he handed
over his job as UNSCOM chief to the more obviously suspect and disheveled
Australian, Richard Butler, Ekeus continued in the manner stigmatized by
Clark and others. It was U.S. ambassador to the United Nations, Madeline
Albright, who notoriously said to Lesley Stahl of CBS, of the lethal
sanctions that killed over half a million Iraqi children, "we think the
price is worth it," but it was Ekeus who furnished the U.N. diplomatic cover
for that terrible calculus.
It's fortunate for Ekeus's reputation among the genteel liberal
crowd that public awareness of what he really knew about Saddam's chemical,
biological and nuclear weapons is still slight. In fact, Ekeus was perfectly
well aware from the mid-1990s on that Saddam Hussein had no such weapons of
mass destruction. They had all been destroyed years earlier, after the first
Gulf War.
Ekeus learned this on the night of August 22, 1995, in Amman,
from the lips of General Hussein Kamal, who had just defected from Iraq,
along with some of his senior military aides. Kamal was Saddam's son-in-law
and had been in overall charge of all programs for chemical, biological and
nuclear weapons and delivery systems.
That night, in three hours of detailed questioning from Ekeus
and two technical experts, Kamal was detailed and categorical. The U.N.
inspection teams had done a good job. When Saddam was finally persuaded that
failure to dispose of the relevant weapons systems would have very serious
consequences, he issued the order, and Kamal carried it out. As he told
Ekeus that night, "All weapons, biological, chemical, missile, nuclear, were
destroyed." (The UNSCOM record of the session can be viewed at
http://www.fair.org/press-releases/Kamal.pdf). In similar debriefings that
August he said the same thing to teams from the CIA and MI6. His military
aides provided a wealth of corroborative details. Then, the following year,
Kamal was lured back to Iraq and at once executed.
Did Ekeus immediately proclaim victory and suggest that
sanctions could be abated? As we have seen, he did not. In fact, he urged
that they be intensified. The years rolled by, and Iraqi children by the
thousands wasted and died. The war party thumped the drum over Saddam's
WMDs, and Kamal's debriefings stayed under lock and key. Finally, John Barry
of Newsweek unearthed details of those sessions in Amman, and in February on
this year, Newsweek ran his story, though not with the play it deserved. I
gather that when Barry confronted Ekeus with details of the suppressed
briefing, Ekeus was stricken. Barry's sensational disclosure was mostly
ignored.
And Ekeus's rationale for suppressing the disclosures of Kamal
and his aides? He claims that the plan was to bluff Saddam and his
scientists into further disclosures. Try to figure that out.
For playing the game, the way the United States desired it to be
played, Ekeus got his rewards: a pleasing welcome in Washington when he
arrived there as Swedish ambassador, respectful audiences along the world's
diplomatic circuits. To this day he zealously burnishes his "credibility"
with long, tendentious articles arguing that Bush and Blair had it right. He
betrays no sign of being troubled by his horrible role. He will never be
forced to squirm in hearings by Democratic senators suddenly as brave as
lions. He won't have to sit in a hospital in Baghdad watching children die
or ride in a Humvee and wait for someone to drop a hand grenade off a bridge
on top of him.
Today, he grazes peacefully in the tranquil pastures of the
Stockholm Peace Research Institute. But if we're going to heap
recriminations on Bush and Blair and the propagandists who fashioned their
lies, don't forget Ekeus. He played a worse role than most of them, under
the blue flag of the United Nations.
Alexander Cockburn is coeditor with Jeffrey St. Clair of the
muckraking
newsletter CounterPunch. To find out more about Alexander Cockburn and read
features by other columnists and cartoonists, visit the Creators Syndicate
Web page at
www.creators.com.
COPYRIGHT 2003 CREATORS SYNDICATE, INC.
