Where the Burden Lies
In a major newspaper this week, the chief American architect of the Oslo Accords took a firm stand against letting Saddam get away with half-compliance with UN demands. Now that he’s not in charge of anything, he offers the tough view of how to tame a dictator – having failed to tame the dictator that was his purview:
In a major newspaper this week, the chief American architect of the Oslo Accords took a firm stand against letting Saddam get away with half-compliance with UN demands. Now that he’s not in charge of anything, he offers the tough view of how to tame a dictator – having failed to tame the dictator that was his purview:
At any point… (Saddam) could have had sanctions lifted if he had been prepared to do what was required of him… From the beginning he failed the test… he failed his responsibility to cooperate… His determination … was not about avoiding humiliation… it was about preserving his ability to pursue his ambitions and designs… Many have said (he) is homicidal, not suicidal, and that when faced with the alternatives of survival or acceptance of disarmament, he will accept disarmament. Maybe, but I doubt (he) feels he is truly being faced with that choice. In his mind, he believes he has been able to maneuver inspection regimes before, and this one… ultimately will be no different. And he may be right. (He) will certainly try to create the impression that he is complying… He will count on the chief inspectors not wanting to declare he is in violation of his obligations… The temptation… will be to declare that Iraq has taken a step in the right direction and that they remain willing to work with it.
The same, clearly, would have been well-applied to Yasser Arafat under the now-defunct Oslo process. He could have, he should have, but underneath he knew he didn’t have to because he believed his “inspectors” – or the Israelis or the Americans – wouldn’t destroy their beloved “process” by having to relate to its failures. So they pretended the failures didn’t exist and he pretended they didn’t either.
Arafat understood that his transgressions were cost free for him and so he committed bigger and bigger ones. But the price for Israelis and Palestinians has been horrendous. More than 2,000 Palestinians and Israelis have died in the war Arafat started, and all the promises for Israeli security and Palestinian democracy and civil society are trash. Because no one put the breaks on Arafat, the Palestinians are poorer, angrier, more radicalized and less likely to achieve an independent state any time soon. And Israelis are devastated by losses that include not only their children, but also their (maybe naive, but certainly real) hopes that Palestinian nationalism could be a force for the betterment of the region and a model for Arabs elsewhere.
When it comes to Iraq, the burden is not on the inspectors to find what Saddam has hidden. The crucial point is that the onus is on him to prove he doesn’t have what he is not supposed to have.
The UN Security Council resolution last week called Iraq in “material breach” of previous resolutions regarding disarmament, but offered Saddam one more chance to make good on his obligations. The burden lies on him to produce, but it lies equally on the United States, the United Nations Security Council and the rest of the world to hold him to it. Even the practitioners of the “Art of Oslo” – the art of overlooking the obvious – have seen the light.