The Iraq Survey Group Report

All the evidence gathered by the Iraq Survey Group shows that Saddam Hussein was far from being an imminent threat to the U.S. when we invaded Iraq. The latest report released this past week (see the CSMonitor article) describes how Saddam had ended his WMD programs in order to satisfy U.N. sanctions in the 1990s, but refused to admit that he had done so for fear of tipping off Iran to his weakness.

The report chronicles how Saddam sought to end the U.N. sanctions in the hope of someday restarting his WMD programs. He saw Iran and Israel as his top two enemies with the U.S. the third threat on his list simply because he thought we would eventually seek to oust him. The lack of WMDs in Iraq at the time of the American invasion just further proves how far out of touch the current U.S. administration remains. U.N. sanctions had been effective--they had worked!!

Of course, the reality also remains that Saddam was abusing the U.N. oil-for-food program by bribing officials of the U.N., Germany, France, and Russia. He had accumulated over $11 billion from the U.N. program, mostly to keep his government afloat. His eventual goal was to convince Germany, France, and Russia to help remove the U.N. sanctions. The evidence here suggests, however, that U.N. sanctions do indeed work if all the major players get on board and stay on board in the process.

There are many things we can learn from this report, and from U.S. actions leading up to the war on Iraq. The greatest of these must be that international cooperation and unified multilateral international actions are more effective than unilateral American actions in dealing with rogue states. We must take this lesson with us to the table in dealing with Iran and North Korea. Mulitnational efforts can be effective if all nations operate in a unified voice against WMDs and the threat of nuclear proliferation, in particular.