http://polyconomics.com/showarticle.asp?articleid=2420
To: Website Fans, Browsers, Clients
From: Jude Wanniski
Re: Answers to Yesterday's Quiz
We posted the quiz yesterday, the day the
United Nations weapons inspectors made their
first report to the United Nations Security
Council on their progress to date. Today we
post the correct answers, correct at least
according to our best sources and analysis. If
you got all the answers correct, you are a
certified dove. And vice versa. There is,
though, some room for quibbling.
1. Saddam Hussein now has weapons of mass
destruction. True or False.
False. The U.S. Armed Forces only consider a
nuclear weapon a weapon of mass destruction.
Iraq has neither nuclear weapons nor chemical
or biological weapons, although it may possess
some of the ingredients that would enable it
to develop a chemical or biological weapon.
2. Saddam Hussein has had weapons of mass
destruction in the past. True or False.
False. Iraq had a program to develop a nuclear
weapon and acquired a design for one that
would use highly-enriched uranium (HEU), but
was unable to produce more than a few grams of
HEU when it would take several hundred pounds
to make one nuke.
3. White House officials assert that Iraq has
been training terrorists. True or False.
False. Iraq did support a terrorist network
prior to 1983, but in that year the U.S.
offered to provide support for Baghdad in its
war against Iran on condition that it withdraw
support from the network. There is no evidence
it has resumed.
4. Osama bin Laden's al-Qaeda's terrorist
forces have been operating inside Iraq. True
or False.
True. Al Qaeda is known to have operatives
inside Iraq, but in Kurdistan, outside the
reach of the Baghdad government.
5. In March 1988, Saddam Hussein committed
genocide, killing several thousand Iraqi Kurds
at Halabja with poison gas. True or False.
False. According to the CIA, "hundreds" of
Iraqi Kurds died at Halabja when caught
between the Iraqi and Iranian armies, both of
whom used gas. The U.S. government in 1990
concluded the Kurds who died were victims of a
cyanide-based gas, which the Iranians
possessed, but not the Iraqi army, which used
mustard gas.
6. In August 1988, Saddam Hussein committed
genocide, killing 100,000 Iraqi Kurds with
machine guns, then burying them in mass
graves. True or False.
False. This is an assertion of Human Rights
Watch, which originally reported in 1988 that
100,000 Kurds had been killed by poison gas.
When U.S. intelligence services uniformly
dismissed this as a possibility and that there
was no evidence of mass graves in Kurdistan,
Human Rights Watch altered its story to say
the Kurds were put in trucks, driven south,
machine gunned outside of Kurdistan, and
buried in mass graves. No such mass graves
have been found and the U.S. Army War College
says none exist, that the story was a
"non-event."
7. In June 1990, Saddam Hussein asked
permission of the United States to settle his
border dispute with Kuwait, with force if
diplomacy failed. True or False.
True. Iraq argued that Kuwait was cheating on
its OPEC agreement to produce only a certain
amount of oil per day, and was driving down
the international price of oil. Saddam said
his country would be bankrupt unless Kuwait
relented and compensated Iraq from what it had
stolen from Iraq, by overproducing and by
slant-drilling into the Iraqi oilfields on the
other side of the Kuwait border.
8. In 1990, the United States advised Saddam
Hussein that his issues with Kuwait were a
local matter, and that the U.S. had no
diplomatic obligation to defend Kuwait if
attacked by Iraq. True or False.
True. The U.S. State Department testified
before congressional committees to that
effect: at the time Saddam Hussein was
weighing his options with Kuwait.
9. Saddam Hussein personally assured the
United States Ambassador to Baghdad that he
would take no military action against Kuwait
if the emir of Kuwait -- in a meeting
scheduled to take place in July 1990 -- agreed
to end its "economic warfare"" against Iraq.
True or False.
True. The Ambassador, April Glaspie, was
assured and left on vacation. The emir of
Kuwait decided not to show up at the meeting
in Baghdad, with assurances from the Pentagon
that it would defend Kuwait without an
agreement to do so. Saddam invaded.
10. After quickly occupying Kuwait, the Iraqi
army positioned itself on the border of Saudi
Arabia and threatened an invasion. True or
False.
False. The U.S. government advised King Fahd
that Iraq was poised to invade Saudi Arabia.
King Fahd sent scouts to check and they could
find no sign of the Iraqi army. But when the
Pentagon showed aerial photographs of the
army, King Fahd agreed to join the coalition.
Commercial aerial photographs of the region
subsequently showed no signs of any Iraqi army
movement at the border area. The details are
still Pentagon classified.
11. After Iraq's invasion of Kuwait by Iraq in
August 1990, Iraq immediately offered to
negotiate a withdrawal in response to the UN
demand that it do so. True or False.
True.
12. Before President Bush gave the go-ahead
for Operation Desert Storm in 1991, Saddam
Hussein agreed to unconditional surrender, and
began moving his troops out of Kuwait. True or
False.
False. There was no "surrender," but two days
before Desert Storm, USSR President Mikhail
Gorbachev informed President Bush that Saddam
had agreed to leave Kuwait without conditions,
and in fact Radio Baghdad reported its troops
would be returning. As U.S. ground troops
moved into Kuwait from Saudi Arabia, the Iraqi
Republican Guard was already moving back into
Iraq. When Colin Powell said the plan was to
encircle the Republican Guard and "kill it,"
he did not know the elite troops were already
gone.
13. The reason the United States and its
coalition allies only lost 143 troops in the
Gulf War is that the Iraqi army was
ill-equipped, demoralized, and did not put up
a fight. True or False.
False. The Iraqi army had been ordered to
withdraw and it only provided a cover for
retreat. Its conscripts suffered heavy
casualties as the coalition forces fired upon
the retreating army in what became known as
"the turkey shoot."
14. The Iraqi army committed atrocities during
the brief occupation of Kuwait, including the
killings of Kuwaiti newborn infants by taking
them out of their incubators. True or False.
False. The Kuwait government hired a NY public
relations firm to drum up support for U.S.
military action to oust Iraq. The firm came up
with the atrocity story, which was
subsequently exposed when it was revealed the
source was the daughter of the Kuwait
information minister, who claimed to be in the
hospital.
15. When the Gulf War ended in 1991, the
United Nations resolved that the economic
embargo on Iraq would be lifted if Iraq
destroyed its chemical, biological and nuclear
weapons programs within six months. Iraq
refused to do so. True or False.
False. Iraq did not refuse to do so, but spent
the next six months destroying all the
nuclear, chemical and biological programs that
it had been working on in the 1980's. When the
UN inspectors arrived, they complained that
Iraq should not have destroyed the weapons,
but should have waited for the inspectors to
verify their existence and supervise their
destruction. Several of the "gaps" in the
inspection process that UNMOVIC says are still
open involve this early snafu.
16. White House officials now insist U.S.
policy toward Iraq changed from disarmament to
"regime change" in the Clinton administration.
True or False.
False. "Regime change" was the policy of the
first Bush administration, which never
intended to lift the sanctions on Iraq until
Saddam Hussein had been deposed. It was,
though, Secretary of State Madeleine Albright
who was the first official to say publicly in
1997 that the U.S. would oppose the lifting of
sanctions as long as Saddam was in power, no
matter what the inspectors found. But
President Bush had said as much in 1991.
Former President Nixon also urged his
followers to oppose lifting of the sanctions
as long as Saddam remained in power.
17. In early 1993, Saddam Hussein ordered the
assassination of former President Bush while
he was visiting Kuwait City, the assassin
confessing he had been given a bomb by the
Iraqi secret service. True or False.
False. At the time, the CIA reported the Iraqi
secret service must have been involved, as the
bomb found by the Kuwaiti police had the
wiring "signature" of the Iraqis. In his
December 5, 1993 investigative report in The
New Yorker, "A Case Not Closed," Seymour Hersh
found the wiring was of the most common sort.
It was more likely Kuwait was alarmed at the
statements of the new President, Bill Clinton,
who said he was open to negotiations with
Baghdad and the lifting of the sanctions. The
"assassination" report ended all possibility
Clinton could do so, and left him with the
"regime change" policy.
18. The "No-Flight" zones in Northern and
Southern Iraq that have been enforced since
1992 by the U.S. and British air forces were
authorized by the United Nations to protect
the Iraqi Kurds in the north and the Iraqi
Shi'ites in the South. True or False.
False. There has been no UN authorization for
"No-Flight" zones, which are the creations of
the U.S. government on the rationale that they
are needed to protect the Kurds and the
southern Shi'ites. The policy was created when
the U.S. encouraged the Kurds and Shi'ites to
revolt against Baghdad after the Gulf War.
19. Saddam Hussein drove all the Jews out of
Iraq after the 1967 Israeli war against Egypt.
True or False.
False. It was the previous government of Abdul
Karim Kassim that encouraged the some 200,000
Jews of Iraq to leave, given the hostile
reaction to the '67 war among Iraqi Muslims.
The Ba'ath Party government that followed did
hang some Jews as Israeli spies, but there
never has been persecution of Iraqi Jews by
the Ba'ath government and there are still two
functioning synagogues in Iraq. Seven percent
of the population is Catholic.
20. In 1998, Saddam Hussein refused to permit
the UN inspectors to come onto presidential
palace sites and when they insisted, he kicked
them out of Iraq. True or False.
False. The original 1991 UN resolutions that
created the first inspection regime allowed
Iraq to keep the palace grounds off limits. In
1998, though, faced with threats of bombing by
the Clinton administration, Iraq opened all
"sensitive sites" including the palaces to
UNSCOM inspectors as long as certain
modalities were followed. It was when the
inspectors asked to inspect the Ba'ath Party
headquarters in Baghdad for evidence of WMD
without regard to the agreed-upon modalities
that Iraq refused entry. This led the U.S.
State Department to instruct the inspectors to
leave Iraq as the incident was deemed
sufficient for the U.S. to bomb Iraq. The
fallout from the incident led the United
Nations to dissolve UNSCOM and create UNMOVIC,
which takes the inspectors out of control of
the U.S. or any other government.
21. Even if Iraq now has no nuclear weapons
program, it could start one up as soon as the
UN inspectors leave and have a nuclear weapon
within six months or a year. True or False.
False. Iraq had a clandestine nuclear program
in the 1980s in violation of its agreement not
seek nuclear weapons under the
Non-Proliferation Treaty. It could do so
because it could import the materials needed
to build a nuke and assemble them in places
unknown to the International Atomic Energy
Agency. The IAEA in 1998 closed this loophole,
which means that all materials that could
conceivably be used to build a nuke or make
fissile material have to be cleared through a
Nuclear Suppliers Group. And even after the
IAEA inspection team completes its work under
UNSC 1441, it will retain the right to repeat
inspections of Iraq under new protocols
developed by the agency to make the process
airtight.
* * * * *
As an associate editor of The Wall Street
Journal from 1972 to 1978, Jude Wanniski
repopularized the classical theories of
supply-side economics. His book, The Way The
World Works , became a foundation of the
global economic transformation launched by the
Reagan Administration. He founded Polyconomics
in 1978 to interpret the impact of political
events on financial markets, keeping
institutional investors informed on U.S. and
world events that bear on their decisions. His
network of long-standing relationships with
members of the Executive and Congressional
branches, the Federal Reserve Board and
leading opinion makers augments Polyconomics`
analysis. Mr. Wanniski, and Polyconomics,
Inc., have achieved recognition worldwide for
the efficacy of the supply-side
political-economic model. Mr. Wanniski holds a
B.A. in Political Science and an M.S. in
Journalism from the University of California,
Los Angeles.