[Peace-discuss] US rejects real compromise

[patton paul]

U.S. rejects real compromise
Thu Mar 13, 7:27 AM ET
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Phyllis Bennis

The claim that Washington has tried to go the extra mile in search of a
United Nations (news - web sites) Security Council compromise flies in the
face of reality. The U.S. is insisting on canceling inspections and
choosing instead a catastrophic war, just when U.N. inspections and
disarmament are showing real results.

Britain's so-called compromise is simply a cover designed to win over
reluctant Security Council members opposed to the call for war but afraid
to anger Washington. It doesn't compromise on substance, only on the date
the war would begin. This war risks, according to internal U.N. estimates,
up to 500,000 Iraqi civilians dead and wounded, and no one knows how many
American troops will perish.

And it's wrong because there is no need for war. Chief weapons inspectors
Hans Blix and Mohamed ElBaradei told us last week that U.N. teams spread
across the country found no evidence that Iraq (news - web sites) was even
trying -- let alone succeeding in efforts -- to revive its destroyed
nuclear-weapons program.

There was no evidence that Iraq had mobile laboratories for
biological-weapons production. There was no evidence that the much-hyped
Iraqi attempt to purchase enriched uranium from Niger ever happened. To
the contrary, the documents Washington and London gave to the inspectors
turned out to be forgeries.

Iraq has been contained -- by war and 12 years of cruel sanctions that
damaged Iraqi civilians far more than the regime -- and it has been
qualitatively disarmed. The inspectors' disarmament work is not quite
finished yet; both Blix and ElBaradei said they needed a few more months
to complete their tasks. Almost half of Iraq's al-Samoud missiles already
have been destroyed, and as Blix said, ''These are not toothpicks.''

Is it possible that some shreds of prohibited weapons remain? Sure it is.
(Scientists say that any of the original stock of chemical or biological
weapons that escaped destruction the first time around would likely have
turned into a harmless goo by now.) But Iraq is not a serious threat. Not
to its neighbors and certainly not to the U.S. population

Still Washington is not compromising. Instead, it is embarked on a
reckless, extremist course of deadly action. And it doesn't have to be
this way.

A real compromise resolution is circulating quietly among a number of
capitals. Germany is interested; other countries are as well. It sets
deadlines and includes plans for human rights, finishing disarmament,
democratization and more. What it doesn't do is call for an automatic war.
And it gives the U.S. credit for putting pressure on Saddam Hussein (news
- web sites) to make the inspections work.

Other dictators will acquire weapons of mass destruction in years to come.
Unless we want a world of endless war, strong U.N. inspections and the
serious disarmament of existing weapons of mass destruction everywhere are
the best route to real security.

Phyllis Bennis, author of Before & After: U.S. Foreign Policy and the
September 11th Crisis, is a fellow at the Institute for Policy Studies.