The Carnegie Endowment has just published "Iraq: A New Approach," a report on eliminating Iraq's Weapons of Mass Destruction. It offers a new, middle ground option built on the idea of multilaterally enforced, coercive inspections. What follows are excerpts from the paper on coercive inspections by Carnegie Endowment President Jessica Mathews. The entire report is available at www.carnegieendowment.org/iraq.

In light of what is now a four-year-long absence of international inspectors from the country, it has been widely assumed that the United States has only two options regarding that threat: continue to do nothing to find and destroy Iraq's nuclear, chemical, biological, and missile programs, or pursue covert action or a full-scale military operation to overthrow Saddam Hussein.

This paper proposes a third approach, a middle ground between an unacceptable status quo that allows Iraqi WMD programs to continue and the enormous costs and risks of an invasion. It proposes a new regime of coercive international inspections.
A powerful, multinational military force, created by the UN Security Council, would enable UN and International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) inspection teams to carry out "comply or else" inspections. The "or else" is overthrow of the regime.

The middle-ground option is a radical change from the earlier international inspection effort in which the playing field was tilted steeply in Iraq's favor. It requires a military commitment sufficient to pose a credible threat to Iraq and would take a vigorous diplomatic initiative on Washington's part to launch. Long-term success would require sustained unity of purpose among the major powers. These difficulties make this approach attractive only in comparison to the alternatives, but in that light, its virtues emerge sharply. Inspections backed by a force authorized by the UN Security Council would carry unimpeachable legitimacy and command broad international support.

If successful, it would reduce Iraq's WMD threat to negligible levels. If a failure, it would lay an operational and political basis for a transition to a war to oust Saddam. The United States would be seen to have worked through the United Nations with the rest of the world rather than alone, and Iraq's intent would have been tested and found wanting. Baghdad would be isolated.

Compared to a war aimed at regime change, the approach greatly reduces the risk of Saddam's using whatever WMD he has (probably against Israel) while a force aimed at his destruction is being assembled. On the political front, coercive inspections avoid the looming question of what regime would replace the current government.

Core Premises: Several key premises underlie the new approach.

• Inspections can work. In their first five years, the United Nations Special Commission on Iraq (UNSCOM), which was responsible for inspecting and disarming Iraq's chemical, biological, and missile materials and capacities, and the IAEA Iraq Action Team, which did the same for Iraq's nuclear ones, achieved substantial successes.
• Saddam Hussein's overwhelming priority is to stay in power. He will never willingly give up pursuit of WMD, but he will do so if convinced that the only alternative is his certain destruction and that of his regime.
• A credible and continuing military threat involving substantial forces on Iraq's borders will be necessary both to get the inspectors back into Iraq and to enable them to do their job. The record from 1991 to the present makes clear that Iraq views UN WMD inspections as war by other means. There is no reason to expect this to change. Sanctions, inducements, negotiations, or periodic air strikes will not suffice to restore effective inspections.
• The UNSCOM/IAEA successes also critically depended on unity of purpose within the UN Security Council. No amount of military force will be effective without unwavering political resolve behind it. Effective inspections cannot be reestablished until a way forward is found that the major powers and key regional states can support under the UN Charter.

Negotiating Coercive Inspections
There is now agreement that Iraq has not met its obligations under UN Resolution 687 (which created the inspections regime) and that there is a need for the return of inspectors to Iraq. Perhaps paradoxically, U.S. threats to act unilaterally against Iraq have the potential to strengthen this limited consensus. France, Russia, and China strongly share the view that only the Security Council can authorize the use of force-a view to which Great Britain is also sympathetic.

All four nations know that after eleven years of the United Nations' handling of the issue, a U.S. decision to act unilaterally against Iraq would be a tremendous blow to the authority of the institution and the Security Council in particular. Thus, U.S. threats provide these four countries with a shared interest in finding a formula for the use of force against Iraq that would be effective, acceptable to the United States, and able to be authorized by the Council as a whole. That formula could be found in a resolution authorizing multinational enforcement action to enable UNMOVIC to carry out its mandate.

The critical element will be that the United States makes clear that it forswears unilateral military action against Iraq for as long as international inspections are working. The United States would have to convince Iraq and others that this is not a perfunctory bow to international opinion preparatory to an invasion and that the United States' intent is to see inspections succeed, not a ruse to have them quickly fail. If Iraq is not convinced, it would have no reason to comply; indeed, quite the reverse because Baghdad would need whatever WMD it has to deter or fight a U.S. attack.

Implementing Coercive Inspections
Under the coercive inspections plan, the Security Council would authorize the creation of an Inspections Implementation Force (IIF) to act as the enforcement arm for UNMOVIC and the IAEA task force. Under the new resolution, the inspections process is transformed from a game of cat and mouse punctuated by diversions and manufactured crises, in which conditions heavily favor Iraqi obstruction, into a last chance, "comply or else" operation. If Iraq chose not to accept inspection, or established a record of noncompliance, the U.S. regime-change option or, better, a UN authorization of "use of all necessary means" would come into play.

Overall control is vested in the civilian executive chairman of the inspection teams. He would determine what sites will be inspected, without interference from the Security Council, and whether military forces should accompany any particular inspection. The IIF must be strong and mobile enough to support full inspection of any site, including so called sensitive sites and those previously designated as off limits. "No-fly" and "no-drive" zones near to-be-inspected sites would be imposed with minimal advance notice to Baghdad. Violations of these bans would subject the opposing forces to attack. In the event surprise fails and "spontaneous" gatherings of civilians attempt to impede inspections, rapid response riot control units must be available.

The IIF must be highly mobile, composed principally of air and armored cavalry units. It might include an armored cavalry regiment or equivalent on the Jordan-Iraq border, an air-mobile brigade in eastern Turkey, and two or more brigades and corps-sized infrastructure based in Saudi Arabia and Kuwait. Air support including fighter and fighter bomber aircraft and continuous air and ground surveillance, provided by AWACS and JSTARS, will be required.

Operationally, on the civilian front, experts disagree as to whether UNMOVIC's mandate contains disabling weaknesses. Although some provisions could certainly be improved, it would be unwise to attempt to renegotiate Resolution 1284. Some of its weaknesses can be overcome in practice by tacit agreement (some have already been), some will be met by the vastly greater technological capabilities conferred by the IIF, and some can be corrected through the language of the IIF resolution.

Four factors are critical:

• Adequate time. The inspection process must not be placed under any arbitrary deadline because that would provide Baghdad with an enormous incentive for delay.
• Experienced personnel. UNMOVIC must be able to take full advantage of individuals with irreplaceable, on-the-ground experience.
• Provision for two-way intelligencesharing with national governments. UNSCOM experience proves that intelligence sharing with national governments is indispensable. Inspectors need information not available from open sources or commercial satellites and direct access to defectors. For their part, intelligence agencies will not provide a flow of information without feedback.
• Ability to track Iraqi procurement activities outside the country. UNSCOM discovered covert transactions between Iraq and more than 500 companies from more than 40 countries between 1993 and 1998. Successful inspections would absolutely depend, therefore, on the team's authority to track procurement efforts both inside and outside Iraq, including at Iraqi embassies abroad.

Conclusion

War should never be undertaken until the alternatives have been exhausted. In this case that moral imperative is buttressed by the very real possibility that a war to overthrow Saddam Hussein, even if successful in doing so, could subtract more from U.S. security and long-term political interests than it adds. In this case an alternative does exist.

It blends the imperative for military threat against a regime that has learned how to divide and conquer the major powers with the legitimacy of UN sanction and multilateral action. The only real question is can the major powers see their mutual interest, act together, and stay the course? Who is more determined -Iraq or the P-5?

Additional Resources:

• "Iraq: A New Approach," Special Carnegie Report, 5 September 2002
• Iraq Chapter (16) - Deadly Arsenals (pdf)
• Iraq Country Resource Page

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