On April 12, 2003, in the presence of international journalists, Amir al-Saadi turned himself in to coalition forces in Iraq. He was on the list of “high-value” Iraqi targets (people) to be captured. There was a list of 52 individuals, each matched on a deck of cards according to their perceived importance in the run up to the war. Saddam was the ace of spades. Dr. al-Saadi was the 7 of diamonds.[1]

al-Saadi was one of the top managers of the former weapons of mass destruction (WMD) program and a key interlocutor with UN weapons inspectors—both UNSCOM and its successor, the United Nations Monitoring, Verification and Inspection Commission (UNMOVIC). When he turned himself in, he said publicly to the press that Iraq did not have WMD and the truth would bear him out. At that moment, I realized that the likelihood Saddam had retained significant WMD was extremely low. Al-Saadi was in a good position to know the truth. Why would he lie in light of the American occupation of all of Iraq?

The access that Washington always demanded was now unhindered by Saddam. Ministries, documents, people, facilities, were all available (subject to the destruction of war and looting). If al-Saadi had any doubts about Iraqi retention of sizeable WMD stocks, why would he make such a categorical statement? In a later discussion with al-Saadi, reflecting on the dilemmas between his side and the UNSCOM inspectors, he said there was a point at which Iraq decided to tell the truth. The problem for UNSCOM was to know when that point began. He said there was an Arabic saying meaning, “You overlook many truths from a liar.” Therein lies the problem.

Later, in an introductory meeting with President George W. Bush, having just been named the new head of the Iraq Survey Group, I asked him for one bit of assistance. I was confident that I could get a basic answer on whether Iraq possessed WMD before the United States invaded if I could get candor from a few individuals—especially Saddam’s presidential secretary Abed Hamid Mahmud. I had gotten to know Abed during my time at UNSCOM. Unlike many of the UNSCOM counterparts, he was not a technocrat. He was Saddam’s gatekeeper and, as much as anyone, saw everything that went to and from Saddam. A former presidential guard (“murafaqin”), he was loyal and more of an enforcer than an intellectual for Saddam.

While debriefing Saddam would tell us many things, and many turned out to be both true and prescient, statements about WMD would not be credible from him alone. Saddam’s one clear incentive was to shape his legacy. He knew his future was limited. On the other hand, Abed knew about Saddam’s orders, and we could affect his future. (Saddam’s future would inevitably be in the hands of Iraq.) It is also important to recall the obvious point that in a regime like Saddam’s, people don’t freelance. They must obtain orders—not investors.

In the event, discussions with Abed were enlightening and contributed heavily to my confidence in the conclusions of the Iraq Survey Group final report concerning WMD.[2]

These two anecdotes are intended to make the broader point that people are vital not only to deriving facts, but also to understanding what the facts mean. This was certainly a lesson and legacy of the years of interaction between long-term UNSCOM inspectors and their Iraqi counterparts. UNSCOM demonstrated the value of access to individuals in achieving monitoring goals. A vital aspect of UNSCOM’s inspection authorities (arguably the most important) was the access to interview identified individuals. “Experts talking to experts” produced data and intangible, but critical, confidence in the declarations of Iraq.

Iraq controlled the environment for these discussions and government “minders” were always present. Such discussions could be unpleasant, since they usually involved technical people who felt the threat of the regime in the room with them. Missteps could have consequences.

Of course, access to people is not a substitute for access to sites. UNSCOM’s unique authority to designate any site for inspection on short notice was an important tool. It was essential to constraining Iraq’s cheating scenarios. Even with Iraq’s elaborate ability to track UNSCOM inspectors, they could only confidently plan on warning times in hours for any site in Iraq. This limited the capacity to cleanse the location or to blatantly block the inspectors.

Ironically, access to sites for Iraq Survey Group inspectors did not help as much as one might imagine. First, many sites were destroyed either by bombs or looters. Second, just getting to sites was dangerous—the regime was not there to provide security. Simply going to a site involved planning a military movement that was time-consuming. Helicopters were tough to arrange. Improvised explosive devices, insurgents, and unexploded ordnance were all present. Moreover, reports by various Iraqis of hidden weapons were rampant and mostly motivated by the prospect of a reward. To simply check through a list of 100 sites would have taken months or longer.

However, the authority to visit any site, combined with the access to captured government documents, tended to encourage truth-telling in debriefing sessions of former Iraqi officials. In this light, when asked about retained WMD, Saddam quipped: “If you can find someone who will reveal where to find me, if there were WMD, wouldn’t someone tell you?”[3]

Understanding the opposing perspectives can also be illustrated by some comments from Saddam. For example, in a speech he gave in June 2000, Saddam declared that Iraq should not give up a rifle and retain only a sword, if its neighbors did not do the same. This was interpreted in Washington as Saddam-speak for boasting about WMD. Saddam explained that his intended audience was Iran. Iran had fired missiles into Iraq in 2000, and Saddam wanted to bolster his image vis-à-vis Iran. It was not, as he explained, about the United States. He assumed that the United States, with all its technical tools, must know what the real status of Iraq weaponry was.

This aspect of the Iraqi perception of the United States was not obvious at the time. For Saddam and other senior Iraqi leaders, their default assumption about the United States was that we were smart and informed by a massive intelligence system. They did not assume Washington had no clue. This shaped their interpretation of Washington statements that Iraq was retaining WMD and sanctions must remain.[4]

Absence makes the heart grow fonder. Or, you don’t know what you’ve got ‘til it’s gone…

The basic fault of UNSCOM and the relevant UN resolutions (that gave it both purpose and opportunity) was that UNSCOM did not know how good it was. We did not make a definitive judgment about the extent of Iraqi compliance with the disarmament element of the UN resolutions. We could not say with enough confidence how much of the total we had verified. This was especially true in the biological area, where we could not verify what that total was.

What UNSCOM could and did say at the end of 1998 was that our ability to investigate and inspect under the conditions Iraq permitted was insufficient to make such a categorical judgment.

Iraqi officials, of course, had a different perspective. They concluded (and in retrospect with good reason) that UNSCOM would never report favorably and that the Security Council would never vote to lift sanctions. Consequently, as former Deputy Prime Minister Tariq Aziz declared, “We could have sanctions with inspectors, or sanctions without inspectors.” Further, though unrelated to UNSCOM, the US administration’s public policy evolved from containment to regime change.[5]

The UNSCOM experience both helped and hindered subsequent inspection efforts.  The heated debates about Iraq in 1998 and up to 2001 focused on the limits of UNSCOM—and later United Nations Monitoring, Verification and Inspection Commission (UNMOVIC)—inspections. UNSCOM conducted an array of inspections using techniques and tools limited only by the imagination, not resolutions. Even with all this, inspections were seen to come up short. The aftertaste of this experience has tended to poison subsequent inspection proposals. UNSCOM is held up as an example of the necessity of immediate unconstrained access to all sites anywhere. Anything less may simply provide a false sense of security behind which a party can hide prohibited capabilities—or so the argument goes.

There was also a negative legacy to UNSCOM in that the promised benefit to cooperating with UNSCOM, i.e. sanctions relief, was never granted. Moreover, Iraq was invaded—after it no longer had significant WMD capacity. If I were Kim Jong-un, I’d think twice before I went down that path.

However, on the plus side, subsequent events have illustrated that though imperfect, the inspections provided a great deal of information to those who were most anxious about Iraq’s WMD potential.

Ensuing events painfully illustrated this. The absence of UNSCOM in Iraq led to growing anxiety about what Saddam might be up to. There were no inspectors who regularly visited dozens of sites in Iraq, including non-declared locations. UNSCOM’s steady reports to the UN provided a baseline of knowledge that was lost when UNSCOM left. After that point, assessments of Iraq WMD were made with vastly less information and the tendency was to make conservative guesses based on very little new or accurate information. They were also subject to over-weighted influence of defectors (and key ones were bogus).

In Washington, post 9-11, risk tolerance suddenly changed, and the weak intelligence about Iraq had enormous consequences. The absence of UNSCOM was a major factor. So while UNSCOM may not have achieved its perhaps unachievable standard, subsequent events suggest it was much “better than nothing.” Politicians have to make the call whether they care more about the risk from overconfidence through imperfect inspections, or the risk of greater uncertainty from no inspections.

From the perspective of the inspected party, the UNSCOM legacy is more negative. UNSCOM had extremely high standards of intrusiveness, and any lack of cooperation was interpreted as retention of WMD. Saddam was not excused as probably having other sensitive things he did not want the inspectors to examine. Later, the Iraq Survey Group came across all sorts of things Saddam would not want public, including details of the operations of his intelligence service (or Mukhabarat), his prisons, his illicit finances, bribes paid to senior foreign officials, agent operations in assorted countries, domestic surveillance, etc.[6]

Building on the UNSCOM experience

While all weapons inspection circumstances are unique, it is possible to point to a few specific impacts UNSCOM has had in subsequent cases.

As noted above, the standard of intrusiveness set by UNSCOM was unmatched at least since the Inter-Allied Control Commission that implemented disarmament of Germany after the Versailles Treaty—like UNSCOM, another case of coercive disarmament.

In virtually every political debate about sufficiency of an inspection regime, at some point a comparison with UNSCOM is made. Usually, it is those who argue against the sufficiency of a proposed agreement that make such a comparison. UNSCOM provides a high bar, perhaps inhibiting achievement of an adequate solution.

A more tangible lesson addresses a shortcoming of the agreements surrounding UNSCOM. The implicit problem with UNSCOM resolutions related to the prospect of potential lifting of sanctions on Iraq in the event of a positive report on WMD accounting. Few believed Saddam would continue to comply once the world was doing business with Iraq again. The prospect of UN Security Council agreement to restore sanctions was dubious. In the Iran JCPOA agreement this weakness was addressed in principle by the creation of the “snap-back” provision. That would allow for restoration of sanctions with a less demanding trigger.

In the case of Syria, in 2013 there was a quick international consensus to enable the Organization for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons to enforce chemical weapons disarmament as an alternative to pending military action. The UNSCOM experience informed this decision. This was not exactly coercive disarmament, but it resulted from a crisis, not the usual diplomacy. The structure, legalities, inspection modalities, and destruction techniques used in Syria had a direct lineage from UNSCOM.

Washington certainly drew on the experience of UNSCOM. Moreover, Russian Foreign Minister Lavrov was quite familiar with UNSCOM, having been ambassador to the UN during much of UNSCOM’s work. Russian influence on Syria was potent and convincing to Bashar al-Assad. Judgments about the success of the effort vary, but it is certainly the case that a large quantity of chemical weapons capacity was eliminated. Syrian failure to continue compliance is a serious problem, but the UN has evolved to address the question of “attribution,” using assorted inspection techniques (and people) evolving from UNSCOM.

Biological weapons inspections

The notoriously difficult challenge of monitoring bioweapons limits was addressed by UNSCOM and is worth deeper consideration. However, it is worth briefly noting a couple of points about UNSCOM’s biological weapons work. First, UNSCOM did unearth the evidence of Iraq’s program and caused the regime to finally acknowledge the program. The inherent difficulty was accounting for the amount of agent produced and its disposition left substantial uncertainty.

However, UNSCOM also designed and implemented an extensive system of monitoring a large number of sites deemed to be potentially related to biological weapons work. The detailed protocols for inspections and data retention provided a key baseline for staying in touch with people, universities, commercial enterprises, etc. It was extensive and may not be repeatable. It also could not provide high confidence of detection of violations in any given instance.

Over time, UNSCOM judged that its net provided a high enough risk of detection to Iraq, that Iraq could be deterred from reconstituting its program. But UNSCOM only controlled one part of the deterrence equation—the probability of detection. The consequences to Iraq of cheating would be determined by politicians. UNSCOM biological weapons experts certainly advanced the ability to monitor bioweapons agreements, but achievement of a full monitoring regime remains elusive—especially considering the risk of non-state actors that might try to develop biological weapons.

Observations

There will always be tradeoffs with any inspection regime. Technical evaluations are judged in political environments. Politicians like to point to the technicians, and the technicians point to the politicians. Adequacy of a mechanism is not a question of perfection, but “good enough” or “better than nothing.” Those evaluations vary widely. The history of UNSCOM offers a stark comparison of the uncertainty and risk attached to its presence in Iraq and the subsequent uncertainty and risk resulting from its absence. At least in the Iraq case, it suggests leaning toward the “better than nothing” position and perhaps accounting for risk with other national security tools.