For anyone interested, here is another article from the New York Times.
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/10/08/po...rint&position=
October 8, 2004
THE SANCTIONS
U.S. Report Says Hussein Bought Arms With Ease
By ERIC LIPTON and SCOTT SHANE
WASHINGTON, Oct. 7 - Enriched with billions of dollars raised by exploiting the United Nations' oil-for-food program, Saddam Hussein spent heavily on arms imports starting in 1999, finding six governments and private companies from a dozen other nations that were willing to ignore sanctions prohibiting arms sales, the report by the top American arms inspector for Iraq has found.
The purchases, which included components of long-range missiles, spare parts for tanks and night-vision equipment, were not enough to allow Iraq to significantly rebuild its conventional military or create a viable chemical, biological or nuclear weapons program, according to the report by the inspector, Charles A. Duelfer, which was released Wednesday.
But the relative ease with which Mr. Hussein was able to buy weapons - working directly with governments in Syria, Belarus, Yemen, North Korea, the former Yugoslavia and possibly Russia, as well as with private companies in Europe, Asia and the Middle East - is documented in extraordinary detail, including repeated visits by government officials and arms merchants to Iraq and complicated schemes to disguise illegal shipments to Iraq.
"Prohibited goods and weapons were being shipped into Iraq with virtually no problem," the report says. "Indeed, Iraq was designing missile systems with the assumption that sanctioned material would be readily available."
The report suggests that Mr. Hussein was justified when, speaking at a gathering of leaders of the Iraqi armed forces in January 2000, he boasted that despite efforts by the United States and the United Nations to isolate Iraq, he would still be able to buy just about whatever he wanted. "We have said with certainty that the embargo will not be lifted by a Security Council resolution, but will corrode by itself," Mr. Hussein said in the speech, a remark that is quoted on the cover of the chapter in Mr. Duelfer's report that details the ineffectiveness of the embargo.
The report is replete with names, dates and documents detailing negotiations over arms purchases and technical advice, which continued until just days before the United States-led invasion in March 2003. An Iraqi memo from 2000 tells military officials in Baghdad that the deputy general manager of the French company Sofema, a military-component marketer, will be bringing a company catalog so that they can "discuss your needs with him."
President Bush, speaking to reporters on the South Lawn of the White House on Thursday, said the report demonstrated that Iraq was determined to illegally rebuild its military. "Saddam was systematically gaming the system, using the United Nations oil-for-food program to try to influence countries and companies in an effort to undermine sanctions," he said.
While the scope of the inquiry did not extend beyond Iraq, the report raises fundamental questions about the effectiveness of sanctions, a tool the United States has frequently used as a foreign policy tool short of military action. Offered lucrative contracts by Mr. Hussein, both arms suppliers and government officials seem not to have hesitated to ignore United Nations trade restrictions, going so far as to disguise tank engines as agricultural parts.
What actions, if any, the United States will take toward sanctions violators is unclear, as are the implications for current United States standoffs with nations like Iran and North Korea over nuclear weapons programs. But sanctions remain one of the few options in many complex international disputes.
"They're often better than nothing," said Joshua Muravchik, a resident scholar at the American Enterprise Institute who is writing a book on the United Nations.
The illicit trade accelerated as the years passed and the threats of possible military action by the United States increased, with the number of deals among the top suppliers climbing from about 5 transactions in 1998 to more than 15 in 2000 and more than 35 in 2002, the report says.
North Korea and Belarus made perhaps the most aggressive effort to sell advanced military equipment to Iraq, the report says, delivering items that included radar technology that was ultimately used against American attack planes.
President Aleksandr Lukashenko of Belarus was involved in the deals, the report says, noting that he "was anxious that illicit trade should continue on a regular basis and requested that a firm called Belarus Afta be established in Baghdad as a clearinghouse for illicit military trade."
A spokesman from the Belarus Embassy in Washington said that any items sold to Iraq complied with United Nations' rules. "We have always maintained and we continue to maintain that all these accusations are preposterous," said the spokesman, Valentin Rybakov.
Among European allies, France's military industry had extensive contacts with Iraqi officials. The report describes, for example, repeated trips by an executive from the French company Lura, which sold Iraq a tank carrier.
Other private companies from Jordan, China, India, South Korea, Bulgaria, Ukraine, Cyprus, Egypt, Lebanon, Georgia, Poland, Romania, Taiwan, Italy and Turkey offered or sold items that supported Iraq's conventional arms programs or could have been used by Mr. Hussein to make weapons of mass destruction, the report says.
No American individuals or companies were named in the report as supplying Iraq with military goods or other prohibited items. But a number of United States companies and at least two American citizens are listed as having received oil vouchers that permitted them to profit from the oil-for-food program.
Unlike hundreds of voucher recipients from other countries, the American recipients are not named in the report but only listed as "United States company" or "United States person," an omission that a government official said was required by American privacy laws.
In January, an Iraqi newspaper, Al Mada, ran a list of 270 recipients of oil vouchers that appears to closely parallel the list in the Duelfer report. That list included two Americans, Shaker al-Khafaji and Samir Vincent, neither of whom could be reached for comment on Thursday.
Iraq went to great lengths to build a missile system with a range longer than the limits imposed by the United Nations, a major technological challenge that required the import of an array of banned parts. Companies from China and Russia sold, or negotiated to sell, missile guidance systems, the report says. A Polish company supplied a propulsion system. An Indian company built and sold Iraq a missile-fuel processing plant.
In some cases, governments moved to stop the illicit trade. In 2002, for example, Indian authorities arrested executives at NEC Engineering, which the report says imported solid propellant ingredients for Iraqi surface-to-surface missiles.
The report describes in detail the extraordinary measures taken to move illicit goods into Iraq and to cover the tracks of violators. Iraqi diplomats smuggled radar-jamming devices in diplomatic pouches. An airline created by Iraq and Belarus used four Boeing 747's to move goods from Minsk, the Belarussian capital, to Baghdad "under cover of humanitarian aid missions."
"During the sanction years, traders used a pool of private dhows, barges, and tankers to smuggle oil out and commodities into and out of Iraq's southern ports with relative ease," the report says.
The report also cites evidence that the Jordanian government closely monitored illegal shipments and canceled an inspection arrangement with Lloyd's Register Group of London, an independent monitor of trade, to make smuggling easier.
-Rudey
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