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SEN. RICHARD G. LUGAR
Senator from Indiana, USA
OPENING PLENARY SESSION
“How to View 9/ll One Year After”
I’m honored to be with distinguished media persons from all over the world. I admire you. I appreciate the energy that it’s taken to bring you to America, much more so than the energy to come here today, even in the midst of circumstances throughout our city that are somewhat embattled but hopefully will calm down during the day.
We have an agenda here that is very substantial, and let me simply indicate that I come from a full day of Foreign Relations Committee hearings that involved former Secretaries of State Madeleine Albright and Henry Kissinger, and current Secretary of State Colin Powell, testifying yesterday about Iraq, but more important the war on terrorism and what appropriate responses the United States, and hopefully the world as represented by the United Nations, by various alliances and arrangements that we have, should make.
Let me say at the outset that the Senate is on the threshold of a very historic debate on a resolution that would give our president the authority to pursue every diplomatic resource, but at the end of the day, if this does not work in terms of eliminating—that is, destroying—both the weapons of mass destruction and the facilities to produce those in Iraq, then we could be involved in military action. It is a decision that is not taken lightly by any senator or member of the House, quite apart from our administration, nor any of you. It is not the only subject we will discuss today, but it is very central.
The debate in the Senate is likely to occur either at the end of the coming week or the following week, in part because of our election schedule, which should not govern such grave events but does in this case because members are eager to go back to their states and their districts to campaign in races for the Senate and House that are very close and leave control of those bodies somewhat in doubt. So as a result, our schedule is going to be focused on discussions of Iraq and war and peace.
The basic issues that have come to the fore, in my judgment, are that President Bush defined a while back the war on terrorism in this way: that there are obviously cells of terrorists in the world. Al-Qaeda comes to mind as an archetype of this kind of cellular activity in many countries. So on one hand, we draw up a list or find a map and find where there are al-Qaeda cells. We believe there may be some in the United States. We have discovered them obviously in Afghanistan in a big way and in nearby Pakistan. We now are much better students of the activities of Osama bin Laden over the years, but likewise of others who have been associated with various terrorist movements in which from time to time Osama bin Laden played a leading part and sometimes a minor part.
We find all sorts of activities in our own foreign policy, going back at least to the times in which our embassies were bombed, the Khobar Towers bombed, and the very great problems in Somalia. A whole host of things seem to connect dots that we might not have perceived at the time as being connected but now seem to have some relationship. However this may be, the president said we are now committed after the September 11 attack upon our World Trade Center, which killed nationals of tens of countries, in addition to almost 3,000 Americans, and the attack on the nearby Pentagon. We’ve just memorialized those. After a year of rebuilding the Pentagon, we remembered the lives of those who were lost on that occasion.
The country takes that very seriously and says as a country we ought to be working with every nation in the world to share intelligence, to share financial records so that the moneys can be dried up, to encourage good police work internally in countries, as opposed to the sloppy work that accompanied many situations in the past. In these ways, all of us have a stake in rooting out every last cell of persons who do not wish any of us well.
There is a second list of countries that is perhaps equally if not more important. These are countries that possess weapons of mass destruction and/or facilities and the potential for producing weapons of mass destruction, from materials that are produced there or materials that are obtained elsewhere. Our president has said, and I support this idea, that every country that has these weapons or this potential has to be responsible for transparency, so the world knows what they have, where it is, and that it is well guarded and secure so that proliferation cannot occur. From that point, we can visit with each other about the destruction and control of these materials, but what is totally unacceptable is a situation in which there are weapons of mass destruction and facilities and a will to produce more, and irresponsibility—that is, no transparency, no tendency whatever to work for nonproliferation, or destruction, or limitation. In those situations we have rogue states, to say the least.
Worse still, as our president has pointed out, if you have an intersection, a nexus he has called it, between weapons of mass destruction in irresponsible hands and cells of terrorists, you have an extremely volatile, dangerous, and potentially fatal situation for any nation that might be so unfortunate as to be the victim. That is not acceptable.
The predicament in Iraq comes because Saddam Hussein has produced weapons of mass destruction, has used at least chemical weapons on his own people and others, and is attempting, in our judgment, to develop a nuclear weapon. Most of the intelligence estimates are now replete in your papers and in ours, namely an estimate that given the centrifuges that have been purchased and various situations in international trade and the intensity of the effort, Saddam Hussein might be three to five years from developing a nuclear weapon.
However, the footnote always comes at the end of the paragraph. If he should obtain fissile material from other sources and not have to produce the fissile material from scratch in Iraq, then it could be a matter of weeks or months. Well, that’s a very big difference. The world could take the position that we have three, five, or seven years, even though we really have no idea after the last four, when international inspections by the UN virtually ceased. We could speculate, we could share intelligence, and we could say they’re edging closer. The difficulty is that there is a lot of fissile material in the world.
Mention was made in the introduction, and I appreciate this, of Senator Nunn, the former senator from Georgia, former chairman of our Armed Services Committee, and my partner 11 years ago at the beginning of the Nunn-Lugar Act on Cooperative Threat Reduction. Russian officers came to us after the fall of the Soviet Union, sat around the table with us and said, you folks in the United States spent $6 trillion attempting to defend yourselves against our weapons of mass destruction. But, the Russians said, we’re here to tell you that affairs in Russia are moving toward the chaotic. The Red Army is breaking up. The security around tactical nuclear weapons is weak. The Wall Street Journal conveniently described how you could cart them off on a flatbed truck. They’re very mobile and proliferation is very possibl
The Russians estimated there were at least 13,000 of them, and that probably the strategic and tactical total is in the ballpark of 30,000. They also mentioned chemical weapons all over Russia and the newly independent states. They did not mention biological laboratories. That has come along in due course, and there is still a great sense of denial on the part of many Russians that the biological was ever weaponized, although clearly the dual-purpose laboratories that I have visited extensively have all sorts of potential to eliminate the livestock of any country, if not the human beings. So all of that is there, and the Russian officers who came to us said, you ought to do something about it.
We’ve attempted to do that. The Cooperative Threat Reduction Act in its 11th year has taken over 6,000 warheads off missiles aimed at the United States or other countries. Most of these warheads have now been disassembled, and that is dangerous and tough work to do. When the fissile material is removed, if it’s plutonium it goes to Mayak, which is out in the Urals, another Nunn-Lugar facility that accommodates more than 6,000 warheads’ worth of fissile material plutonium. It is in the process of being completed and trains are on the way with the material.
In the case of highly enriched uranium, with halting success but still plowing ahead, the United States has been buying this, 50 tons at a time, and downgrading it into low enriched uranium so it could be used in nuclear power plants in a peaceful way and is really off the charts in terms of use by anyone for a nuclear weapon.
I would simply say, in Russia now, even after all our work together, with Russians and Americans putting the fences up, there are seven large installations that contain 40,000 metric tons of chemical weapons. In Shchuch’ye alone, one that I’m tremendously interested in because we’re on the threshold of working with the Russians on a neutralization program that would destroy one-seventh of the whole stock, there are in that installation 1.9 million shells of various sizes. The smallest are about this size, 85 millimeters. For the sake of argument I asked a Russian major to photograph my picture putting one of them into the proverbial thin suitcase. Two more would have fitted in the suitcase. That photograph is all over Russia because they understand the predicament and they want to guard against it, as we do.
To the best of my knowledge, all 40,000 metric tons are there, but hardly a pound of it has been destroyed, even though the Russians signed the Chemical Weapons Convention and ratified it in the Duma five years ago. It’s not lack of political will or mistrust. They simply don’t have the money. The Russian military budget is arguably in dollars about $8 billion. The comparable American military budget is $390 billion. That’s a very large difference, and one reason why American work with Russians in this way is very important.
Now I take your time with this because we are having an argument even within our own country. At the behest of our military people, I offered legislation to extend the Nunn-Lugar Act to other countries, which is to say that if Indians or Pakistanis or anybody happens to find some nuclear material out there in the Afghanistan region as part of that war, we will be in a position to seize it and dispose of it. Thus far in our Congress, there are still members of the House of Representatives who feel that the Nunn-Lugar Act ought not to ever extend beyond Russia. The president is not one who feels this way, and hopefully we’ll come to a different conclusion. So we have our own arguments and our own perceptions, even as we’re tremendously worried about weapons of mass destruction in Iraq.
My purpose is simply to say our focus has to be fairly broad. Recently, while I was in Russia in the latter part of August, I read of success by my partner, Sam Nunn. They had picked up some nuclear material in Belgrade. It was only a $7 million project, $5 million from the Nuclear Threat Initiative that has been funded essentially by Ted Turner and that Sam Nunn now heads, and $2 million from American sources. They at least seized that material in Belgrade that was dangerous, that people there wanted removed, and took it back to Russia for safe storage.
The proliferation problem is severe. If the question is, can Saddam get his hands on material, of course he can. Not without difficulty, but it is out there in the world and most of it’s in this country and in Russia. We all have to be concerned about that.
Having said that, the fact is that a very arduous attempt is going to be made through UN inspection teams. I would guess that the Security Council will pass the resolution. The president told us yesterday, as has Secretary Powell, that he has sent Mark Grossman, an undersecretary of state, to Russia. Likewise, he will go to China. He will visit with the French. We will do our very best to try to get a strong Security Council resolution. Likewise, we need the assent of all the nations of the world, in as broad a coalition as possible, to say to Saddam Hussein, give up weapons of mass destruction, identify the laboratories and let us destroy them, eliminate them. Let us eliminate any doubt about this proposition.
Now skeptics abound that Saddam is ever going to do this, because Saddam in the past has been fairly reckless in terms of his foreign policy. I appear on television shows with people who say, Saddam is not suicidal. Perhaps. Nevertheless, his invasion of Kuwait was an extraordinary miscalculation historically. How could he have conceived that there would be no resistance in the rest of the world to this, resistance that would lead to as many as 500,000 troops coming after him? That was a severe miscalculation. As it turned out, this was not suicidal because the troops did not pursue Saddam to Baghdad on that occasion. They repelled aggression, as was the UN resolution’s intent.
But even before that, most strategists see that Saddam’s attacks upon Iran bore absolutely no relevance to the military situation at the time but were an extraordinary gesture of somebody ill advised. Some suggest that Saddam does not take advice very well from people who offer pessimism, that these people are quickly dispatched from his presence, if not worse. So perhaps there is an unreality about the world. I don’t know.
But in this case, if there’s a miscalculation, at the end of the day I would predict that the United States by a very large majority will authorize our president to use military force, hopefully in combination with a vast majority of countries of the world, and military force will in fact change the regime.
At that point, we all have a very large task, if that is the outcome. The outcome in Iraq must be a new government that offers a better prospect for the Iraqi people. There are many optimists. Secretary Powell was very optimistic yesterday. We can find representatives of all of the ethnic groups—given all the long hostility they’ve had, that will be difficult—that could work together. They could form a representative government that could begin a democratic idea, which could utilize the talents of extraordinarily talented people in Iraq. That could be a model for Middle East change.
Pessimists say we don’t understand the Middle East. We don’t understand the Sunnis and the Shiites and the Kurds, and that may well be true. We are all going to school rapidly. But nevertheless, as Secretary Powell said, there must be some hope, some opportunity, some optimism at the end of the day with this. There will have to be staying power by not only the United States but by every nation that is involved in trying to make certain that there is a sound government in Iraq, a good citizen of the world.
Beyond that, we will have to make sure we finally find the weapons of mass destruction. We hope that somebody will lead us to those dual-purpose sheds where biological and chemical work goes on. It’s hard to observe from the air or the ground. We hope there are scientists who will tell us of their experiments and what was involved. We all hope for this, but it’s not a foregone conclusion. This is why I, among others, am trying to raise these questions even as we discuss the awesome questions of war and peace. It is the aftermath, a better future. How do we arrive at it? How do we do so together? How, as media people, do we cover this in an accurate way so that people all over the world understand various points of view and can come to a very critical weighing of the evidence as their governments come to them and ask for their support, and try to figure out where we will all be in this particular historical epic of time?
I’m optimistic about the situation in the sense that I believe that we are going to be successful as a world in the war against terrorism. I’m not optimistic enough to think that we will ever find every cell and every terrorist, but I do think that effectively through intelligence, through the drying up of funds, through good police work, through our own vigilance as citizens, that we will in fact ensure for ourselves and for our children safer lives than the hand that we are dealt for the moment.
I am also confident the United States has staying power to fight the good fight with other nations that want to resist terrorism, that want to contain weapons of mass destruction. In the same way that we have worked with the Russians to destroy over half of the nuclear warheads, we are equally determined if they are prepared to work with us to destroy the other half.
I've just come from Surovatika in Russia, where four missiles every month, SS–17s, –18s, and –19s, come across the assembly line. All will be destroyed, Moscow treaty or not, so long as the United States maintains the program and so long as the window of history remains open in our relations with the Russians. And that is significant for every nation. The SS-18s are the ones that had 10 warheads apiece, the so-called MIRVed vehicles that had been a menace for many years. There was no one absolutely certain where they were targeted, but every nation hostile to Russian interests was at least a potential target. All of that is in the process of being destroyed serially. That has to be our course. Not only to control but to diminish the hazards, even as we worry about their misuse by terrorists.
As I say, I think we have good momentum. I hope that we have sufficient follow-through, all of us, in terms of the political systems in our countries and people who understand the issues. Therefore, I salute you again as the people who can make certain that everyone is informed. There will be different points of view and different tactics and different advice, and I think we must accept that, and in fact rejoice that there is vigorous debate. But at the end of the day we are people who believe in freedom, people who believe in human rights, who believe in the destiny of each one of us to be responsible, to have opportunities to live our good lives, and to pass on to our children a better world. That’s the situation which I find exciting every day. That’s why I find public service to be the most remarkable opportunity I could have had.
I thank each one of you for allowing me to give you these thoughts this morning at a time that is fateful for our country, and perhaps for each one of yours. Thank you very much.
