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THE DETERRENCE DELUSION by Praful Bidwai, The News International (Pakistan) April 17, 2003 The surrender of Gen Amer Hammoudi al-Saadi, the Iraqi president's top scientific adviser, to United States forces last Saturday is one of the most important and dramatic recent developments in Iraq, besides the nasty war, the increasing human misery, growing chaos and anarchy, and the pillage of the National Museum, said to be the most precious in the entire Middle East with its 170,000 treasures. Al-Saadi holds the secret to the truth about (i.e. existence or non-existence, and location of) Iraq's suspected weapons of mass destruction (WMD) programme. He was a key player in its design and operation in the past, and the principal negotiator with UNMOVIC in the critical last few weeks of the inspections. Those who recall his appearance on television will surely remember the quiet confidence and articulate manner in which he dealt with tricky technical questions about Iraq's WMD. Last February, Al-Saadi took Colin Powell to task for his allegations, presented solemnly to the Security Council, concerning persuasive "evidence" of Iraq's WMD. Al-Saadi audaciously, but confidently, claimed that some of the evidence cited was fabricated. And sure enough, it turned out a month later -- and the International Atomic Energy Agency confirmed this -- that the "evidence", for example, of Iraq's attempts to buy uranium from Niger, indeed involved despicable, crude forgery. Al-Saadi has told German television ZDF that Iraq has no WMD: "I know...and have always told the truth about these old programmes, and only the truth. You will see, the future will show it, and nothing else will come out...I am saying this for posterity and...not to defend a regime..." This fits in with the fact that nearly four weeks into the war, all that the US and UK have come up with is a few hundred gas masks, and empty yellow drums. Meanwhile, US troops in Iraq have stopped using gas-masks. What Al-Saadi has said so far reinforces the assessment that Iraq has no significant nuclear weapons programme (a conclusion repeatedly confirmed by the IAEA), nor sizable holdings of biological and chemical weapons which can kill on a mass scale-in the normal sense in which these terms are understood: namely, deliverable weapons with high lethality and stability, as opposed to primitive anthrax-type of armaments that degrade rapidly, or chemicals that can kill 20, 30, 100 soldiers, but hardly fit the description WMD. This assessment should knock the bottom out of the Anglo-American case for war and prove that this unjust and illegal war was launched against the will of the international community and in the teeth of opposition from the Security Council for extraneous, devious and deeply deplorable reasons. This also puts a big question mark over the view, now gaining currency even amongst the war's liberal critics, that had Iraq actually had efficient and powerful WMD, the US would not have attacked it. Washington would have been deterred. By extension, this view holds, the sole assurance that countries like Pakistan or India have against being targeted by the US -- as many people fear might happen next -- is their own WMD. They must never give up their nuclear weapons because these can serve as instruments of national defence against Empire and hegemonism. Doesn't North Korea, with its "successful" defiance of the US through its "nuclear deterrence" gambit, confirm this? This argument is factually unsound, logically flawed and politically disastrous. To start with, North Korea is not attempting "nuclear blackmail" or exactly "playing nuclear hardball" with America. In all probability, it has no nuclear weapons, even crude ones. It does have nuclear spent fuel and is threatening to restart a reactor shut down under a 1994 agreement with the US-- probably in a reckless attempt to drive a political bargain. It has walked out of the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT), but it is probably still many months from acquiring a first-generation nuclear weapon. It's Pyongyang's conventional weapons, including crude missiles, that worry the US: they can strike 30,000-plus American troops in the vicinity. They can also target hundreds of thousands of troops, weapons systems and civilians of two key US allies, Japan and South Korea. Washington is currently far too preoccupied with Iraq to devise means of dealing with Pyongyang (although it is not hard to construct a scenario in which, if negotiations for nuclear restraint fail, the US could coercively "take out" Pyongyang's WMD programme and medium-range missiles). To return to Iraq, the US was bent on this war and, as Hans Blix now says, had planned it months earlier, irrespective of what the inspections might reveal. The mere possession of WMD by Iraq would not have caused, nor prevented, this war. No single weapon influences the decision to go to war so decisively. Thus, the US' nuclear weapons possession in the 1950s did not prevent China from entering the Korean War. Non-nuclear Vietnam gave nuclear China a bloody nose in 1979. And Argentina wasn't deterred from fighting the UK, a nuclear power, in the Falklands in the 1980s. What would make a big difference of course is if an adversary has WMD and also an assured means of delivering them, especially after absorbing a first strike. That would certainly make Washington think twice. Plainly, Iraq has no such capability. It cannot fly its planes over its own territory demarcated in arbitrary, US-imposed "No-Fly Zones". And its missiles are too primitive to matter. The absence of a workable, effective deterrent to the US is not unique to Iraq. It's true of Pakistan and India too, neither of which has, or is about to develop, intercontinental missiles. Their own mutual deterrent equation is crude, ramshackle, unreliable! Even China has at best a handful of missiles that can reach continental America, never mind their accuracy. These countries, leave alone Iraq, are just not in America's league. To imagine that mere possession of WMD by Iraq could have averted war is to indulge in dangerous self-delusion. It is also to profoundly misunderstand WMD. They are not, cannot be, instruments of defence, only instruments of mass annihilation. They are not "anti-imperialist" weapons, but weapons of hegemony and indiscriminate destruction. It is utterly unforgivable to sanctify or legitimise them under any circumstances, without undermining the strong argument for universal disarmament of all WMD, no matter who possesses them. In 1996, the International Court of Justice, the highest global authority on international law, held nuclear weapons possession to be incompatible with law and declared that the nuclear weapons-states have an obligation to complete talks for nuclear abolition with the utmost urgency. The most hypocritical aspect of the present war is that it's being waged in the name of WMD disarmament by states which haven't the least intention of disarming their own WMD, and which indeed are about to inaugurate the world's Second Nuclear Age, via ballistic missile defences. The only way to fight these double standards is to demand a single, uniform yardstick, that of universal, global WMD abolition. India and Pakistan would be desperately ill-advised to imitate the US/UK or to "play nuclear hardball" with anyone. That way lies trouble -- and a terrible, unequal, unjust world. Deterrence cannot give real security. The two post-1998 India-Pakistan confrontations underscore the historic folly of relying on deterrence for security. |
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