The Iran Deal’s Fatal Flaw

We don’t yet know all the details of the nuclear agreement that Iran, the United States and five other world powers announced Thursday they are aiming to complete by June 30. What we do know is that any acceptable final deal will depend on a strong weapons inspection element. In his remarks in the Rose Garden, President Obama declared Tehran had agreed to precisely that. “If Iran cheats, the world will know,” he said.

Yet weapons inspectors can be no tougher than the body that empowers them—in this instance the UN Security Council. And herein lies the agreement’s fundamental weakness—and perhaps its fatal flaw. Do we really want to depend on Vladimir Putin? Because Russia will be able to decide what to enforce in any deal—and what not to.

Like so many things in in life, one can learn a lot from Saddam Hussein. Certainly Tehran will have learned from Saddam’ s experience in trying to evade the scrutiny of the UN Security Council, weapons inspectors, sanctions, and individual governments.

Sanctions were imposed on Iraq when Saddam invaded Kuwait in 1990. Washington led a response in the UN Security Council that produced a broad coalition unified around the objective of getting Saddam out of Kuwait. Ultimately this required military action—the Gulf War—despite the back-channel efforts of Russia’s special Iraq liaison, Yevgeny Primakov, to broker a deal.

Following the war, the Security Council passed a ceasefire resolution that retained the sanctions on Iraq, but linked them to additional requirements; Iraq must verifiably disclose and account for all its WMD, and Iraq must accept a monitoring system to assure they would not reconstitute their WMD programs in the future.

The Security Council created a new body of weapons inspectors (dubbed UNSCOM) who reported directly to the council. The IAEA also had a role in accounting for the extensive nuclear aspects of Saddam’s programs. This was a case of coercive disarmament as distinct from an arms control agreement like the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT). It was akin to the disarmament provisions of the Versailles Treaty and ultimately suffered a similar fate.

The authorities that the Security Council mandated for UNSCOM and IAEA inspectors to verify Iraq’s disarmament were extraordinary and probably well beyond anything Iran will accept. In essence, inspectors could go anywhere in Iraq, interview anyone, fly their own aircraft and helicopters, install sensors or cameras anywhere, take possession of documents, etc. Moreover, the chairman or his deputy had authority to designate any location in Iraq as a site for inspection. And that included “no-notice’ inspections.

UNSCOM and the IAEA operated helicopters from a base inside Iraq. We had dedicated missions of the US U-2 aircraft (todays drones would be a cheaper more effective tool to provide aerial surveillance). UNSCOM operated a full-time monitoring center in a dedicated building in Baghdad.

Backing up the inspectors was the threat of force—at least on paper. The resolutions empowering the inspections were passed under Chapter 7 of the UN Charter. The key resolution, UNSCR 687, was a ceasefire resolution. If the Security Council found Iraq in material breech of its provisions, i.e. if Saddam did not comply with the inspectors, military actions could resume. On a few occasions over the ensuing years, some bombing strikes occurred.

And yet, with all of these authorities and tools, we were unable to complete the tasks given by the Security Council. UNSCOM and the IAEA after more than seven years of operations inside Iraq could not verify that Saddam had completely disarmed. Ironically, we later learned, Saddam had, eventually, pretty much given up his WMD program by 1997-98. But we could not verify his claims, and by that time no one was giving him the benefit of the doubt Moreover, as he told us in debriefings, he retained the intent to restart the programs once conditions permitted. It would be interesting to ask Saddam if he thought the IAEA inspectors given the intrusive access we had in Iraq, would be sufficient to detect and deter Iranian cheating.

Does anyone believe such access will be agreed, voluntarily, by Tehran?

In practice, Saddam regularly obstructed and delayed inspectors. He tested, from the start, the will of the Security Council. He cooperated only when he had no other option. And the only reason he cooperated at all, was to get out of sanctions. Saddam pursued two tracks—one of grudging incremental revelations about WMD and the second track was the divide the Security Council and cause sanctions to erode.

Critically, it is important to recall that as the inspection process went on, the unity of in the Security Council decayed. This is natural. As time goes on the objectives and priorities of fifteen nations will evolve and diverge. Saddam recognized and accelerated this trend. Indeed, almost from the start, some members of the Security Council were in close consultation with Iraq. Some had longstanding business relations with Saddam—especially France and Russia.

Charles Duelfer served as special advisor to the Director of Central Intelligence for Iraq’s weapons of mass destruction and led the Iraq Survey Group, which conducted the investigation of the scope of Iraq’s WMD. Later, at the UN, Duelfer served as the deputy executive chairman and acting chairman of the UN Special Commission on Iraq (UNSCOM) from 1993 until its termination in 2000.

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