HOME
DV NEWS
SERVICE ARCHIVE SUBMISSIONS/CONTACT ABOUT DV
Meet
the Real WMD Fabricator
A
Swede Called Rolf Ekeus
by
Alexander Cockburn
August
4, 2003
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
platoon of mad Straussians. 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 US 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. US ambassador to
the UN Madeline Albright notoriously said to Lesley Stahl of CBS, of the lethal
sanctions which killed over half a million Iraqi children, "we think the
price is worth it", but Ekeus was the one who furnished the UN's diplomatic
cover for that repulsive 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-l990s on that Saddam Ussein 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, l995, in Amman, from the lips of
General Hussein Kamel, who had just defected from Iraq, along with some of his
senior military aides. Kamel 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, Kamel was categorical. The UN 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
Kamel carried it out. As he told Ekeus that night, "All weapons,
biological, chemical, missile, nuclear, were destroyed." (The UNSCOM
record of the session can ne viewed at http://www.fair.org/press-releases/kamel.pdf).
In similar debriefings that August Kamel said the same thing to teams from the
CIA and MI6. His military aides provided a wealth of corroborative details.
Then, the following year, Kamel 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 thousand wasted and died. The war
party thumped the drum over Saddam's WMDs, and Kamel'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 Kamel 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 US 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 wade through
raw sewage to enter the main hospital in Baghdad and watch children die or ride
in a Humvee and wait for someone to drop a hand grenade off a bridge and blow
his head off.
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 UN.
Alexander Cockburn is coeditor of The
Politics of Anti-Semitism, and the author of The Golden Age is In Us
(Verso, 1995) and 5 Days That Shook the World: Seattle and Beyond
(Verso, 2000) with Jeffrey St. Clair. Cockburn and St. Clair are the editors of CounterPunch, where this article first
appeared.
* The
Terrible Truth (Part MMCCXVILL)
* A Whiner
Called David Horowitz Moans at Sid Blumenthal and Imagined CIA Slur