Beyond The ‘Great Glaspie’: Commerce’s Misdeeds Surpass State Department Kow-Towing To Iraq

It may seem difficult to top U.S. Ambassador to Iraq April Glaspie’s recent statement that "[She] didn’t think…that the Iraqis were going to take all of Kuwait," a succinct and thoroughly damning indictment of the State Department’s policy toward Saddam Hussein. If anything could do so, however, it is the mounting evidence that the Commerce Department systematically turned a blind eye to the adverse national security implications of a variety of sales of militarily relevant technology to Baghdad.

This evidence has been graphically documented in numerous press accounts. These include: a front-page article in the Washington Post on 13 September by R. Jeffrey Smith; a front page two-part series by Glenn Frankel in the Washington Post (16 and 17 September 1990); a one-hour ABC "Special Report" by Peter Jennings entitled "A Line in the Sand" which aired on 11 September; a one-hour expose on PBS’ "Frontline" also aired on 11 September; and a column by William Safire in the New York Times of 17 September under the headline "Calling to Account."

Such reports have a common bottom-line: The Commerce Department strenuously resisted efforts by those responsible for safeguarding the national security to check the hemorrhage of dual-use high technology destined for Iraq’s ballistic missile and chemical, biological and nuclear weapons programs. With a contemptuous arrogance usually found only among the denizens of the Deparment of State, Commerce officials dismissed those who contended these sales were reckless and ultimately highly dangerous as nothing more than nuisances, or in the words of one ranking Commerce officer, Wayne Berman, mere "ankle-bitters."

Even more striking than the horrifying litany of Commerce actions now becoming public is the utter silence of those in Congress charged with overseeing that Department’s export control activities. Ironically, the contrast between the widely differing congressional responses to the Bush Administration’s pre-Kuwait policies toward Iraq is in sharpest evidence in a single committee, the House Foreign Affairs Committee.

Two days ago, the Committee properly lambasted Assistant Secretary of State John Kelly for his pivotal role in defining those policies. And yet, not a murmur of reproof has been heard from the Committee’s Subcommittee on International Economic Policy and Trade about Commerce’s counterpart role on exports to Iraq. Interestingly, just a few months ago, it was this same subcommittee that voted out legislation, subsequently adopted by the full House on 6 June 1990, which would greatly relax U.S. export controls and sharply diminish the influence of the Defense Department in opposing ill-advised transfers of militarily relevant technologies.

As a result of the Subcommittee’s pressure — and that emanating from allied capitals — the Commerce Department succeeded in effecting a massive decontrol of heretofore restricted technology. One affected category was industrial high temperature gas furnaces; even those capable of contributing to the manufacture of ballistic missile and nuclear warhead devices became eligible for sale anywhere overseas.

Not surprisingly, such furnaces were near the top of Saddam Hussein’s shopping list. In due course, an American company, CONSARC, contracted to sell Baghdad $10 million worth of these furnaces. As several press reports have now revealed — even when the Commerce Department was confronted with clear evidence from CONSARC itself of the military purposes such furnaces could serve in Iraq — it determinedly pressed for the sale to proceed.

"This case dramatically illustrates the dangerous consequences of decisions made in haste to slash the list of technologies controlled for national security purposes," said Frank J. Gaffney, Jr., the Center’s director. "At the very least, it should give pause to those Members of Congress who appear hell-bent-for-leather to secure approval of Commerce’s deficient approach to U.S. technology security in next week’s House-Senate conference on the Export Administration Act."

The Center applauds other congressional committees, notably the Joint Economic Committee and the House Government Operations Committee, for their decision to hold their own hearings on this affair — starting with the Joint Committee at 9:30 a.m. tomorrow. In so doing, they are leaping into the sorry breach created by Rep. Sam Gejdenson (D-CT), chairman of the International Economic Policy and Trade Subcommittee, and his committee colleagues.

The Center believes that the evident unwillingness of the duly constituted oversight committee to investigate a mess to which it has contributed begs a troubling question: Can an investigation of the disasterous implications of an inadequate technology security policy be entrusted to those in Congress who seem determined to ignore it — and who perhaps hope thereby to conceal their own culpability for bringing this export crisis about?