The Congressional Record is a unique source of public documentation. It started in 1873, documenting nearly all the major and minor policies being discussed and debated.
“THE CHEMICAL WEAPONS CONVENTION” mentioning the U.S. Dept of State was published in the Senate section on pages S3710-S3712 on April 25, 1997.
The publication is reproduced in full below:
THE CHEMICAL WEAPONS CONVENTION
Mr. KYL. Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent to have printed in the Record various op-ed pieces that relate to yesterday's debate on the Chemical Weapons Convention.
There being no objection, the material was ordered to be printed in the Record, as follows:
On My Mind--Matter of Character
(By A.M. Rosenthal)
For collectors' of flips, flops, mistakes and outrages in the conduct of American foreign policy, last week was a treasure trove, pure heaven. For the national interest it was a pure mess.
Three times the Clinton Administration floundered or double-talked itself into loss of credibility--and on three of the more important international issues facing the country: the treaty on banning chemical weapons, the struggle against state-sponsored terrorism and the war on drugs.
The most immediate issue is the treaty prohibiting production, storage and use of chemical weapons.
This should have been a breeze. Americans could normally be counted on to support international outlawing of chemical weapons, which the U.S. has already forsworn. But a lack of candor at home and of political courage with our allies has made it a tossup as to whether it will pass when it comes up for a Senate vote on Thursday.
Written into the treaty are loopholes that are deal breakers for many senators. Article 10 alone would break it for me.
Article 10 and other outrages.
The article mandates that all signatory countries have the right to the ``fullest possible exchange'' of all materials and information about ``protections'' against chemical weapons. Those materials and techniques could show terrorist nations how to produce chemical weapons that could evade the defense of their chosen victims. Iran just loves Article 10.
Since the treaty was first proposed in the Reagan Administration, four important facts have become part of international reality.
One: Some of America's friends like Russia and Germany, have sold techniques and components of weapons of mass destruction to countries bitterly hostile to the U.S. Two: Under Presidents Bush and Clinton, the U.S. has not shown the willpower to stop or punish the ``friendly'' sellers or their customers. Three: China has become a major rogue distributor, to major rogue nations. And four: America has not been able to stop that either.
Article 10 would permit salesmen of death to peddle chemical-weapon materials and techniques entirely legally, by labeling them ``defensive.''
The answer that the Secretaries of Defense and State gave was that the treaty will go into effect whether the U.S. likes it or not, so we should sign and keep an eye on it from the inside.
There's a far better way. The senate should adopt a proposed amendment making actual U.S. participation conditional on the President obtaining deletion of Article 10 and some other loopholes.
The week's outrage on state-sponsored terrorism sacrifices the right of Americans to get important non-classified information. Washington decided to withhold a white paper about Iranian terrorism it had planned to make public. This came after a German court found Iran guilty of terrorism against Iranian dissidents in Germany, and as information pops up that Iran was involved in the slaughter-bombing of an American military installation in Saudi Arabia.
The white paper was withheld because the State Department does not want to upset European nations that have tried to use ``engagement'' to persuade Iran to behave sweetly, a policy the U.S. says has failed. Hello? State, are you all there?
Drugs: Mexico now is the major transporter of marijuana and Colombian cocaine into the U.S. The hotshot general who headed Mexico's antidrug effort has been arrested as the secret agent of the drug cartels. The Mexican Government had allowed this traitor to go to Washington for embraces and top-secret briefings with his American counterpart, Gen. Barry McCaffrey, without informing any American that their man was about to be jailed.
Bonded to Mexico by Nafta and the peso bailout, an embarrassed White House decided not to lift Mexico's certification as a country doing its best to fight drugs.
Mr. Clinton plans to visit Mexico next month. Instead of preparing Mexico's public to hear some hard truth about their country's contribution to the drug war, last week the Administration began almost apologetically making nicey-nice to Mexico, to put the visit in the ``right light'' for Mr. Clinton.
Underlying these fumbles, mistakes and outrages are not simply defects of policy but of character: the inability to face and correct mistakes and the addiction to evasion and denial. As at home, so abroad.
____
Review & Outlook
chemical reactions
Before today's vote on the Chemical Weapons Convention, we hope that some Senator will twist his tongue around the 20 chemicals listed nearby and read their names into the record. This list makes two important points about what's wrong with the treaty.
First is that many ordinary chemicals can be put to deadly use. The chemicals on this list can be used in such mundane products as laundry soaps, ink and fumigation agents--or they can be used in lethal weapons. Bear this in mind when you hear the President assert that the CWC will ``banish poison gas from the Earth.''
The second point is that the CWC not only will permit trade in these 20 potentially deadly chemicals, it will require it. American companies currently are restricted from exporting these dual-use chemicals under the terms of an organization called the Australia Group, which is made up of 29 Western countries committed to ensuring that their exports don't contribute to the spread of chemical weapons.
But Articles X and XI of the CWC require member countries to transfer chemicals and technology to any other member country that asks. This goes a long way toward explaining why the Chemical Manufacturers Association is so loud in its support of the treaty.
Senators who are still considering how to vote might consider whether selling such chemicals to China or Iran or Cuba will help make the world safe from chemical weapons--or make the world a more dangerous place?
Trade in these 20 precursors for chemical weapons agents, now regulated, would be permitted under the Chemical Weapons Convention:
3-Hydroxy-1-methylpiperidine, Potassium fluoride, 2-Chloroethanol, Dimethylamine (DMA), Dimethylamine hydrochloride, Hydrogen fluoride, Methyl benzilate, 3-Quinuclidone, Pinacolone, Potassium cyanide, Potassium bifluoride, Ammonium bifluoride, Sodium fluoride, Sodium bifluoride, Sodium cyanide, Phosphorus pentasulfide, Diisopropylamine (DIPA), Diethylaminoethanol (DEAE), Sodium sulfide, Triethanolamine hydrochloride.
____
Review & Outlook
Lott's Mirrors
Trent Lott's problem with the impending Senate vote on the chemical weapons treaty vote is not merely that it binds the U.S. to deal with the likes of Cuba and China. The larger question for Republicans is whether they can cope with the Clinton Presidency, a political hall of mirrors invariably reflecting any given reality back into the body politic as something slightly off-center.
So with the chemical weapons treaty. The issue is being represented to the public as a huge vote on foreign policy, which typically means an austere, almost hyper-intellectualized debate free of the usual, grimy domestic constituencies. We should be so lucky.
If that were true, this treaty would already be dead. The Senate today is full of men and women who've never had the opportunity before to vote on one of these arms-control projects. Some of them must be wondering how the subject ever got so mystical. We ourselves have watched arms-control tiltings since the days of Camelot, and we'd like to reassure the younger class of Republican Senators that if they feel there is a certain ``lightheadedness'' about this effort, their instincts are correct.
President Clinton was panting over the weekend. ``There is no such thing as perfect verifiability,'' he said of the kind of weapons a Japanese cult cooked up in a bathtub. His
``bottom line''--will we go from leading the fight against poison gas to joining the company of pariah nations this treaty seeks to isolate?''--sounded like something from an AFL-CIO commercial on Social Security. And of course, even a flawed treaty would be ``an advance over no treaty at all.''
This is liberal sentimentalism at its worst. It says, Our hearts are in the right place, so let's not let a bunch of operational details get in the way of doing the right thing. Presumably this policy woolly-mindedness, in both domestic and foreign politics, is precisely what the current crop of Republicans came to Washington to stop. And that they did with the welfare reform act.
So why all the drama over this vote?
Mainly because the real drama is in watching Trent Lott figure out which path he should take in leading the Republicans safely through the Clinton hall of mirrors between now and the off-year elections in 1998. Just ahead, there is the budget mirror, the capital-gains mirror, the MFN mirror, the Helsinki mirror and any other issue that might require the Republicans to balance on a tree limb with Bill Clinton.
The case for waving through a terribly flawed chemical weapons treaty is that a grateful Bill Clinton will be inclined to do deals with the GOP on the budget, capital gains and the like. This strategy inevitably casts Trent Lott as the President's errand boy, the Charlie Brown of politics, willing to believe that this time Bill Clinton won't pull the ball like Lucy of the promises--that he won't double-cross Mr. Lott as he did on the CPI adjustment, that he won't sic Bob Rubin on a capital-gains cut the way he did on the balanced budget amendment.
The only reason that Beltway Republicans would consider playing this game again with so unreliable a partner as Bill Clinton is their belief that absent deals of some sort, the Democrats in 1998 will accuse them of obstruction and failure, all the while running TV ads about Republicans and
``poison gas.''
Until a few weeks ago, the treaty almost certainly would have passed for these reasons. But then the broader interests of the Republican Party stepped forward to be heard. Jack Kemp and Steve Forbes came out against the treaty. Four former GOP Secretaries of Defense--Weinberger, Cheney, Rumsfeld and Schlesinger--testified against it. Grass-roots conservatives such as Grover Norquist and Gary Bauer joined the active opposition.
These people want, as do we, the party's legislative accomplishments to reflect identifiable Republican beliefs. Notwithstanding the participation of Republican Presidents, arms control today is an idea flowing entirely from a Democratic liberal's view of the world. This chemical weapons treaty perfectly reflects that view. It is a state of mind that would regard Senator Lott's objection to sharing chemical-weapons defense technology with Iran as a ``killer amendment,'' and that would solve the Lott objection by promising only to give Iran
``emergency medical supplies.''
We're about to go through a few days of high Washington drama before the vote as all eyes focus on the
``undecideds.'' This group now includes GOP Senators Hatch, Bennett, Nickels, Hutchison, Abraham, Santorum and of course Majority Leader Lott. We suspect most of this group knows the treaty should fail on its merits. The larger question is what they believe should define the Republican Party--what they see in the mirror, or reflections from the mirrors Bill Clinton puts before them.
____
[From the Los Angeles Times, Apr. 21, 1997]
Kirkpatrick: The Threat Will Remain
Ratifying the Chemical Weapons Convention will not prevent the manufacture or use of chemical weapons because the convention is neither verifiable nor enforceable. Proponents attempt to dismiss the many loopholes in the treaty with the assertion that nothing is perfect. But perfection is not the question.
Proponents also seek to minimize the fact that the rogue states and countries with the most highly developed programs either have not signed or have not ratified the treaty--Syria, Iraq, North Korea, Libya have not signed at all. Russia, which has the most chemical weapons, has not ratified, and China has not completed the ratification process. Of course, signing will not prevent signatories from breaking their promises not to produce noxious gases, as Russia has recently broken a promise to the United States.
Will U.S. ratification make the world safer? Did the Maginot line make France safer? To the contrary. It created a comforting illusion that lulled France into a false sense of security and facilitated Hitler's conquest.
The world is less dangerous today than during most of my lifetime. I cherish this sense of lessened threat. But we are not so safe that we can afford to create a false sense of security by pretending that we have eliminated the threat of chemical weapons. President Clinton said, ``We will have banished poison gas from the Earth.'' It will not be so. We had better do some hard thinking about how to defend ourselves and the world against the poison gases that have been and will be produced.
____________________
