Senator Helms out to sabotage Chemical Weapons Treaty

By Jonathan Power

LONDON (JP): Senator Jesse Helms, chairman of the U.S. Senate's Foreign Relations Committee, has hit the bull's-eye with one of his poison-tipped arrows once again. If not terminally dead, the Chemical Weapons Treaty is seriously wounded and will be in the intensive care unit for some indeterminable time. America doesn't need enemies abroad when it has patriots of this hue at home, who see every step, if internationally brokered, towards a more peaceful and law-abiding world, as an attempt to choke America's own freedom. In the Cold War days these types clothed their ultra-chauvinism in anti-communism. Now that the Red Emperor has no clothes we can see it for what it is -- crass narrow-mindedness.

Helms used his same deadly arrows to fell the Law of the Sea treaty, a well-crafted, hard fought text for unmaking the lawlessness of the seas and oceans, whose imperative has just been underlined once again by the slinging match between Beijing and Tokyo over a group of oil-rich, offshore islands to which they both assert ownership.

Helms also effectively stalled the ratification of the SALT 2 Treaty. By holding up U.S. ratification at a critical time last year he allowed his backwoods counterparts in the Russian parliament a free reign to launch their own torpedoes. Instead of, as agreed by presidents Bush and Yeltsin, superpower nuclear armories coming down to a third of what they were in Cold War years and the promise of future deep cuts in a new SALT 3, we are left all these years later with massive nuclear armories and the whole momentum towards nuclear disarmament frozen in its tracks.

Should we be surprised then that India has made it a condition for agreeing to the new Test Ban Treaty that the nuclear powers commit themselves anew to serious nuclear disarmament? We don't know for certain yet if the Indian position is sufficient on its own to sabotage over time the effective implementation of the treaty, but, actually, it is almost a moot question when Helms can insure -- with Robert Dole's backing -- that the one remaining superpower is not going to ratify it.

The great paradox of the Chemical Weapons Treaty, of course, is that while U.S. administrations, with Australian help, have done the lion's share of the pushing to get this treaty almost universally agreed, America needs it the least. The richer and more industrialized a country, probably the less important it is.

To call chemical arms "the poor man's nuclear weapon" is a half truth. They're "a poor man's nuclear weapon" only when used against a "poor man" -- as when Saddam Hussein used them in 1988 to destroy the Kurds in Halabja and again in the final two years of his war with Iran.

But used against an industrialized country that can afford sophisticated defenses, a population can be protected without enormous expense by being issued with masks and suits. Israel did this during the Gulf War.

Yet, even if it be true that America needs the treaty the least because it can most afford the necessary protection, this doesn't mean that it can easily allow Senator Helms his way. America has friends and investments all over the Third World. It doesn't want to see any of them devastated by a chemical attack and it has a serious vested interest in extending the rule of law.

Although the treaty cannot plug every hole -- like the use of the nerve agent sarin by a terrorist cult group in the Tokyo subway last year -- as long as kitchen sinks and fertilizer are still available, it will make it much easier to identify and isolate major proliferators. It may not be possible to totally disarm a Saddam Hussein of his weapons of mass destruction even with the unprecedented intrusive monitoring measures now deployed by the UN, but the treaty can help define by international consensus what is regretfully permissible in war and what is outrageously not. The treaty does work to narrow down the number of outlaws.

All these treaties in fact are part of a quilt of international ethics and legal norms that have been slowly stitched together since the early years of the century. On one occasion Hitler ripped them asunder and Saddam Hussein has had a pretty good go lately. But the last thing we need is for Senator Helms to help in the task.

Why did the League of Nations fail against Hitler and why is it that its successor, the UN, is so disparaged today? For one principal reason on both occasions -- the support of the public was not there. Our political class, like many of their forebears before World War II, are not educating the public in the vital question of why we should give international institutions sustenance.

If we want to live in a lawless world without any attempt to build codes of peace then hurrah for the likes of Senator Helms. If we want it otherwise then we will all, Americans or not, have to struggle hard for it.