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The Greatest Threat: Iraq, Weapons of Mass Destruction, and the Crisis of Global Security

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Book Review: Snatching Defeat from the Jaws of Victory by David Isenberg Thursday, May 18, 2000

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There is no way to say this delicately so I may just as well come right out and say it. This is a painful book to read. Why? Is it badly written? No, it is both informative and engaging. Does it deal with an unimportant topic? On the contrary, it deals with a critically important issue: the effort to stop the proliferation of weapons of mass destruction, nuclear, biological and chemical weapons. Why then the pain?

This book is essentially the story of a failure, one that has consequences for the entire world. Specifically, it is the telling of the undermining and destruction of UNSCOM by Saddam Hussein. The West set up UNSCOM, short for the United Nations Special Commission, in the aftermath of the 1991 Persian Gulf War to disarm Iraq of its weapons of mass destruction.

Rolf Ekeus, a Swedish diplomat, headed UNSCOM for its first six years. In 1997, after Ekeus left to become Swedish ambassador to Washington, Richard Butler took over as executive director. Butler was an experienced Australian diplomat who had previously worked on many other disarmament issues. This book is the story of the final two years of struggle with Iraq in accordance with the original U.N. Security Council Resolution 687 of 1991. This struggle more or less ended -- unsatisfactorily -- when the United States and Britain bombed Iraq in Operation Desert Fox in December 1998, an event that marked the end of UNSCOM inspections in Iraq.

Caught cheating

Bear in mind that the various global arms-control regimes are based on the presumption that if those being inspected are found breaking the rules, some sort of enforcement will take place -- usually through the U.N. system and specifically thorough the Security Council. When enforcement fails, as happened in Iraq's case, the consequences are critical. As Butler notes: "Saddam's cheating has been detected, but it has not been stopped. Nations that could take action have chosen not to. The implications of this for the maintenance of the strictures against weapons of mass destruction, built so painstakingly over almost half a century, are dire. If Saddam finally gets away with it, the whole structure could well collapse."

Butler's is a story of many disappointments. He faced lack of political will and crass appeasement on the part of member nations of the U.N. Security Council. Constant obfuscation and deception by Iraq are the main themes, highlighted by vignettes of pettiness on the part of U.N. bureaucrats, such as the advisers to U..N Secretary-General Kofi Anan, and brazen lying by such Iraqi functionaries as Deputy Prime Minister Tariq Aziz. Butler had a reputation as a plain-spoken man. It is a reputation that is deserved. It is refreshing to see a diplomat use words like "outrageous," "appalling," "word witchcraft," "blackest lie," "phony" and "facile."

Back to Iraq?

In the first two chapters, Butler briefly describes his childhood and later working for the Australian Foreign Affairs department and the work he did prior to taking on his position as head of UNSCOM. But the remaining chapters constitute the core of the book.

Much of the book details the two wars that UNSCOM waged. Sadly, it lost both. The first and the better known is the daily war of attrition it fought with Iraq, which used ceaseless tactics of cheat, retreat and cheat in order to thwart UNSCOM. As Butler explains, Saddam Hussein did not believe he lost the Gulf War. Though Saddam was driven from Kuwait, he viewed the Dessert Storm coalition's real aim as to remove him from power or turn Iraq into a vassal state. Thus, for Iraq the battle with UNSCOM was simply the last battle of the Gulf War. And for Iraq to "cement its "victory" in that war they had to defeat both UNSCOM in general and Richard Butler personally. In fact, Iraq paid Butler an ironic compliment when it demanded his removal as item 9 of a list of demands presented to the Security Council in November 1998 in its attempt to forestall the Clinton bombing.

The other war UNSCOM fought with the U.N. to both preserve its independence and to get the Security Council to support its documentation of Iraq's continuing refusal to live up to its pledge to allow UNSCOM inspectors to carry out their work.

One of the more intriguing sections of the book deals with the allegation by Scott Ritter, former UNSCOM weapons inspector who resigned in 1998, that Butler had taken direction from the U.S. government and that UNSCOM had allowed itself to be a conduit for U.S. intelligence collection in Iraq. Ritter's view was detailed in his book Endgame published last year. We may never know the exact truth of the matter, but Butler musters a good case that his charges are false.

As Butler makes clear in his conclusions, we cannot expect UNSCOM's successor organization, UNMOVIC (United Nations Monitoring Verification and Inspection Commission), created in December 1999, to accomplish anything worthwhile. To name just two flaws, unlike UNSCOM it will be under the direction of the U.N. secretary-general; its staff will be U.N. civil servants instead of technical experts.

The conclusion that Butler leaves us with is both dismaying, and even worse, true. "When a determined criminal flouts international law under cover of the principle of state sovereignty, the world system, as currently constituted, appears able or unwilling to stop him," he writes.

In short, we should be afraid, very afraid...

There is an advantage to reading a book a few years after it is first published. The advantage in this case is that the Saddam dictatorship is history and many of the assurances that lead us to war have been proven to be a little over hyped, to be generous. That comment leads us to this book. The author was the head of the UN weapons inspectors in the last two years they were in place, ending in 1998. This book is his review of his time on the job and the obligatory musings about what needed to be done with Saddam circa 2000. I had heard in a number of other articles and some books that the author was a bit arrogant and pushy. To be fair, those personality traits, if they even exist, did not come out in the book. The author presented his case in a rather fair sounding and well thought out process. There were no over the top dramatics nor did it seam to me that the author was trying to stretch the truth to prove his point.

I started this book thinking it would be one case after another of how Iraq had hid WMD`s, yet they were hardly ever mentioned. By this I mean that the author only detailed out a few cases of papers being found and old weapons parts being dug up. In all his pages on the inspection process, the author gives the reader no finds of the actual weapons the world was looking for. All the author really detailed was the unlimited number of ways the Iraqi's found to be unhelpful, arrogant, and just plain nasty to his team. If there ever was a case for how not to play well with others the Iraqi's are the hands down favorites. In hind sight, what is rather humorous is that if they would have just swallowed a little crow and let the UN run all over their county unmolested for a few years, they would have left and the Saddam cronies would still be in power. This could be the first dictator to loss power due to unending amounts of arrogance coupled with a good helping of plain ignorance.

The last item I found interesting was the side story that bordered on a male cat fight. This author and Scott Ritter, another of the weapons inspectors, had a few words while working together and both decided to finish the disagreement in the press. About the only value in the comments is that it makes you smile a little to think that this author lowered himself to grade school play ground name calling in a book for the masses. Overall, I found the book interesting in its detail of the way the Iraqi government dealt with the UN and how the French, Russians and Chinese all interacted with the US. I also thought the very apparent lack of evidence of WMD`s being discussed in the book was a precursor of things to come. If you are interested in the conservative thinking that lead up to the Iraqi war, then this book is an interesting bit a the picture.

What an eye opener. The Greatest Threat gave me goose-bumps. I couldn't put the book down. Scary! Everyone needs to read this book. It grabs you right from the start as if you were right there with the UNSCOM inspectors. I agree with the author on American and International politics needing to be over-hauled. Maybe the mess we find ourselves in today could have been avoided if our country and other countries had worked together to promote disarmament. Then, inforced it when the country refused to comply instead of sweeping the issue under the rug.

The book is well written and reads like a the latest thriller. The trouble is it is very real. It's sad that one ruthless leader can cause so much pain to his own people and the world. I don't like war either, but it looks like that is the only choice we have as the author pointed out. This book is a must read if you want to know what is going on with Iraq and how we got where we are today.

This book is exceptional on so many levels I scarcely know where to begin. Richard Butler former Executive Chairman of UNSCOM is very definitely a man of deep integrity driven by an equally deep concern for the issue of arms control not solely in Iraq but throughout the world. This book is his story and how during the course of two years he battled to achieve the complete dismantling of Iraq's stockpile of weapons chemical biological and nuclear.

He describes in detail the stand-offs between himself and the Iraqi authorities and how ultimately the united nations through weakness and division have allowed Saddam Hussein to hold onto much of his deadly arsenal. He charts the use of these weapons by Iraq in its war with Iran as well as the use of gases on ethnic minorities inside the country itself.

The reader gets an incredible look at the UN Security Council attempting to apply a, geo-political rules as usual approach, to the problem of Iraq's non-compliance with UN resolutions. The role of the Russian diplomats along with the French and Chinese come in for close scrutiny. If Butlers understanding of Israel's defence posture during the gulf war is accurate then the reader can take it that if Saddam were to use a chemical weapon or worse against a city like Tel Aviv then almost certainly and without consultation Israel would respond with tactical nuclear weapons against Iraq. During the gulf war Israeli Jets sat fuelled and ready to fly against targets in Iraq following the deployment of some 39 Scud missiles fired at Israel during the conflict. This analysis and so much more is contained in this sober but authentic look at how dangerous the world has become. Worst of all is the ongoing capitulation by the United Nations in terms of forcing Iraqi compliance with its own resolutions.

The story of UNSCOM's final two years in the effort to dismantle Iraq's weapons of mass destruction is rivetingly told in this book, full of rich, sometimes delicious detail. There are subplots involving the Secretary General and a former weapons inspector with their own agendas, a back story of Presidential misdeeds, and for added flavor, the French and Russians each with their own, financially motivated policies to pursue in Iraq. It all adds up to a fine, refreshingly candid read about how something so right-the need to find and eliminate long range missiles, chemical and biological weapons-could go so wrong.

Richard Butler deserves credit for having the courage and ability to step outside the world he has inhabited for so long professionally--diplomacy with all its deliberate, oppressive opacity-and tell a story plainly. He admits that the bombing of Iraq under Desert Fox has hurt rather than helped the cause of weapons inspections and that sanctions have outlived whatever usefulness they had at one time. The characterizations of various senior officials, in all their self-absorbed pomposity are not to be missed (e.g. de Mistura briefing the Security Council on his mission to "map" the presidential palaces, or Russian Foreign Minister Primakov "whose heaviness and pedantry were so redolent of the Soviet" era).

Equally compelling is Butler's prescription. He rightly observes that there are few issues facing the international community that are grave enough to command an exceptional level of action and agreement. Chief among these, he argues, should be the need to control and ultimately eliminate weapons of mass destruction. He calls on the five permanent members of the Security Council to act in concert to enforce the various nonproliferation treaties by, among other things, not threatening use of the veto in a way that precludes any useful collective action to remedy serious cases of noncompliance. Sadly, Butler's invitation to the U.S. to exercise its considerable leadership in achieving such a worthy objective is likely to be ignored.

Butler's very sobering firsthand account of the effort to disarm Iraq after the Gulf War provides the essential reasoning of why it is necessary for President Bush and Secretary of Defense Rumsfeld to continue to push for the replacement of Saddam Hussein.

Butler was a career Australian diplomat who had been the Australian Ambassador for Disarmament. He was named head of the United Nations Special Commission on Disarming Iraq. Butler depicts the unwavering determination of the Iraqi government to acquire weapons of mass destruction. He details the politics of Kofi Annan and the United Nations leadership as they tried to paper over Iraqi deceptions so as to achieve a diplomatic "victory" in the face of a startlingly different reality. The ultimate triumph was handed to a very dangerous Saddam and a defeat to both the UN and the Clinton Administration.

Hitler's Mein Kampf explained Nazi Germany's future for those who would read it (as Churchill did). Similarly, Butler brings his readers face to face with Hussein's twisted world. He explains clearly what it is and why Saddam is working so hard to develop weapons of terrifying capability.

Butler illustrates a frightening Iraqi worldview captured best by Deputy Prime Minister Aziz who "had stated quite plainly that Iraq had used chemical weapons on Iran, that it maintained biological weapons, and that these were intended specifically for use against Israel." Aziz declares his government's vision of an Iraqi future "leading and defending" a united Arab world. One that is "vigilant against the Persians in the Northwest and the Israelis in the Southwest". In order to achieve this dominant role for Iraq "it had sought, obtained, used, and would use again in the future weapons of mass destruction."

Butler asserts: "Iraq's main triumph was the removal of all disarmament inspections and the shutdown of all monitoring systems." Butler writes that many weapons were removed but "Saddam still satisfies the three criteria usually advanced in judging whether or not a crime was committed: motive, means, and opportunity. He clearly continues to have the motive and means to threaten great danger, and now the opportunity for renewed weapons development, given the extended absence of international arms control in Iraq."

Butler introduces Iraq in a chapter entitled "A Glimpse of Terror". He recounts again and again the true character of Saddam's regime. "Its brutal and tyrannical nature has been documented in detail for almost two decades. The political currency of his regime is homicide, frequently threatened and often delivered, the callousness of the regime toward its own people--a quality we witnessed daily in our dealings with Iraq, something which gives the lie to Saddam's public protestations that his primary goal is to lift the awful burden of international sanctions from the backs of the Iraqi people." The truth is that he could get relief from sanctions, as Butler puts it, "at any time by giving up his weapons". Saddam "has resolutely refused to do that, thus trading off the welfare of the Iraqi people." Butler is unequivocal in his indictment of his regime: "cruel, lying, intimidating, and determined to retain weapons of mass destruction--weapons capable of killing thousands, even millions at a single blow."

Butler, who led his inspections team in Iraq, reveals in his findings on chemical weapons that "essentially Iraq made virtually all of the prohibited agents and used some of them both in and outside Iraq. But VX was and is the most devastating of them. It can be sprayed as a liquid or scattered into the atmosphere as an aerosol. A missile warhead of the type Iraq has made and used can hold some 140 liters of VX,...enough of the chemical to kill up to 1 million people. A single droplet on the skin constitutes a lethal dose." The UN has imposed a missile range limit on Iraq, "a limit Iraq is now breaching". Iraq successfully protected its secret chemical weapons program and "the overall size of Iraq's VX production remains unknown to this day."

Butler draws an equally disturbing conclusion on biological weapons where he notes the "intelligence materials I had seen indicating that Iraq may have transferred some of its biological weapons equipment in shipping containers for safe storage in another country."

Butler, who is pro-United Nations and pro-multilateralism, recount Iraq's propaganda efforts, the rise of a French-Chinese-Russian effort to lift the sanctions, the dishonesty of some of Kofi Annan's staff in trying to manipulate information, suppress reports of Iraqi behavior to help lift the sanctions. Those who would reform the United Nations would do well to study Butler's account of internal maneuvering and manipulation. It is an institution that should be taken seriously and should be made more transparent and more accountable.

Butler's logic is irrefutable, "weapons of mass destruction are fundamentally different from other threats to peace. They cannot be the subject of politics as usual because of their capacity to destroy everything."

We don't know exactly what is happening inside Iraq because "no one is watching Saddam Hussein. You can be certain that he is not waiting idly for the UN to suddenly realize its fault. He is building--building weapons, as are other rogue states...If a single missile loaded with nerve gas was to hit Tel Aviv, the world will never be the same. If a single canister of VX was released into the New York City subway system, the world will never be the same. If a single nuclear explosion hollowed out central London, the world will never be the same."

The book opens and is concluded with this quote from Edmund Burke; "The only thing necessary for the triumph of evil is for good men to do nothing". This testimony to Saddam's evil by an Australian should be a must read for every American uncertain of the need to replace a madman.

Notwithstanding its ominous title, this book is a reasonably conventional professional autobiography of a career diplomat. Author Richard Butler served as executive chairman of the United Nations Special Commission ("UNSCOM") charged with disarming Iraq from 1997 until 1999. Prior to that, he was Australia's ambassador to the United Nations and Thailand. Most of the book is devoted to disarmament issues, especially efforts to enforce U.N. Security Council resolutions requiring Iraq to destroy its weapons of mass destruction and to forbear rebuilding them and the subsequent decision to abandon those efforts. These issues must concern anyone interested in global security because, in Butler's view, the post-Cold War "new world order" may be every bit as dangerous as the frostiest years of the United States-Soviet Union confrontation.

Butler repeatedly demonstrates that he took a narrow, fundamental legalistic approach to his duties. He insists that the Security Council's decisions are binding on all of its members and that the Security Council has the ability "to enforce its decisions by military force, if needed." According to Butler, Security Council Resolution 687, which codified the terms of the cease-fire of the Persian Gulf War required Iraq to destroy all of its weapons of mass destruction - nuclear, chemical, biological, and missiles. Resolution 687 also set up the UN Special Commission - UNSCOM - as an organ of the Security Council to conduct the actual disarmament work, and the Security Council made completion of the disarmament work a prerequisite to the lifting of the economic sanctions imposed on Iraq in 1990. Butler clearly believes that Iraq never intended to cooperate with UNSCOM. As a pretext for reusing to cooperate, Iraq systematically blocked UNSCOM inspections, and this sparked a crisis that continued for 18 months. While Butler and UNSCOM were involved in an increasingly-bitter dispute with Iraq, Secretary-General Kofi Annan visited Iraq in February 1998 and proclaimed that Saddam Hussein was a man "I can do business with." In early August 1998, Iraq notified the Security Council that it had "decided to suspend UNSCOM's disarmament work." This led to a serious division in the Security Council, with the United States and the United Kingdom pitted against Russia, China, and France, which sought to end the disarmament work and discontinue the economic sanctions. UNSCOM was eventually disbanded and replaced by a body more sensitive to Iraq. Butler's outlook on the future is pessimistic. Butler asks: "Is Iraq as dangerous as it was a decade ago? And he answers: Elementally yes."

Although it is a cliché, I believe that this book is an extended exercise in preaching to the choir. Readers concerned with international-security issues already know and probably will agree with Butler that the UNSCOM period revealed "the real shape of the post-Cold War world," and they will share his criticisms of Russia, France, and China for having "clearly defined, separate interests in addition to their obviously shared concerns about a unipolar world." Much of this book is a detailed, sometimes tedious, narrative of Butler's two-year tenure at UNSCOM. After a while, it is mind-numbing, but, to the extent that Butler sought to make a historical record, he succeeds. This is an important book which ultimately asks: Can anyone have confidence in the United Nations if it allows cynical self-interest and endless palaver to prevail over principle and action?

This is a very good book by Richard Butler. Who is Richard Butler? He is an Australian diplomat who has been in the nuclear disarmament field for decades and was the Australian ambassador to the United Nations. Richard Butler was appointed the head of UNSCOM, which was the United Nations' body set up to oversee the Iraqi dissarmament of weapons of mass detruction after the Gulf War. If anyone should know what the world faces from Iraq, Richard Butler is the man and his story needs to be heard.

His views on Iraq are frightening and his information on the United Nations as a body and some of the countries that belong to it are disheartening. Throughout the book Butler explains why Iraqi leadership actually thinks they won the Gulf War. He explains how the United Nations waffled on enforcing the rules that they had instituted. His take on Kofi Annan and the politicians that made it easier for Iraq to evade the international laws passed by the U.N.

Is Iraq still harboring weapons of mass destruction? I think that is a foregone conclusion. Iraq has lied, cheated, broken treaties and evaded international law. Saddam has succeeded in stonewalling international monitoring.

Would Iraq use such weapons once they gather enough? I think the judgement on that is also already concluded. Saddam and Hitler where the only two people in history to use chemicals for genocidal purposes. Saddam already proved he would when he used them on the Iranian soldiers in the Iran-Iraq war, on the Iranian POWs (testified to by Iraqi defectors) and on the Kurds - citizens of his own country. Saddam showed once again his sinister side in 1991, shortly before the Gulf War, when he dispatched hit squads around the world to take out "coalition" diplomats.

Richard Butler's words should be read, his thoughts and insights should be considered. The book needs to be recognized by those in power before it is too late.

Now is the time to read this book. All other reviews may be nullified at this point, because they were written before our war with Iraq.

I read this book with a gaping mouth that only got bigger and bigger with amazement as I went along.

The book has come to us through a time warp from the past to present time. Richard Butler accurately hits the nail on the head in his book. He relates events and issues to our present day situation with Iraq prior to them happening. The book helped me to see that situations and concerns that are being debated today have been known and existed many years. There is a lot of knowledge about Iraq that has existed for years and hasn't been dealt with, just swept under the rug.

Accusations about Saddam are true. I can see why when reading this book that France, Russia and China are against helping. I couldn't understand that before. It is scary and chilling to read each and every word - because each and every word validates the move against Saddam.

Richard speculates about a terrorist attack against New York and how it would be difficult to track the Saddam connection, but it most likely would be there. This book gives the evidence many are asking for, and confirms what it is being discovered everyday in Iraq.

Richard speculates that if the terrorist connection could be made or will not disarm who would be bold enough to start a war against Saddam. It would most likely be America and Britain, and that France, Russia and China would oppose.

Richard talks about evidence of chemical, biological and weapons of mass destruction that was found, but how Iraq squirms, lies and avoids answers, etc. They are aided by forces to help deceive.

You will feel like you are reading a newspaper of today - a newspaper that gives the un-muddled cold hard truth of the situation in Iraq.

Scarier than a Stephen King book.

No doubt about it. Saddam Hussein is one of the major problem in the middle east.

This book is written by Unscom's Head Richard Butler. It shows how the Iraqi Govermnet lies or refuses to coperate with the UN resolutions. If they had, then the sanctions would have been lifted many years ago. Hence as sad as it is. Saddam bears heavy responsibility for the suffering of his own people.
The book tragicaly tells us how Saddam was able to divide the UN on the sanction issues, with Russia France and China on one side wanting to end the sanctions (and to have economic relationship and to have there own interests) and the US and UK on the other who wants the sanctions to be in place until UNSCOM does it job (However US and UK action's would seem "genocidle" which the State run Iraqi Media plays over and over).

The book also tell's us of the author's fustrations in dealing with the Iraqi Goverment. He was also villified to the Extreme by the Iraqi media that even the Russian Ambassador believed in the hype. As a result of this and many other things. UNSCOM was forced to leave in December 1998 and to this day never returned.

As the situaton unfolds in the Middle East (Israel and Palestinian territory). Saddam is indeed fueling the conflict by giving money to Families of suicide bombers (Hence encouraging more violence on both sides). He is doing it so that the US cannot take him out (the US is tied up in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict).

Enjoy reading this book. It will give you a lot of insight.