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ments he may have, and then I have a special introduction before we actually begin the hearing.

Mr. Skelton.

[The prepared statement of Mr. Weldon can be found in the Appendix on page 385.]

STATEMENT OF HON. IKE SKELTON, A REPRESENTATIVE FROM MISSOURI, RANKING MEMBER, COMMITTEE ON ARMED SERVICES

Mr. SKELTON. Mr. Chairman, thank you very much. And I take this opportunity to welcome old friends, Dr. Cohen and Dr. O'Hanlon, with us today. I ask that my prepared statement be put into the record.

Congress is facing a constitutional duty sometime within the very near future, and as we speak, a series or a proposed resolution upon which a debate will follow is being glued together.

You and your testimony can be very, very helpful to us in taking us through whole steps that should come to pass rather than our country taking off on a horse and riding off into the sunset. The United Nations has a specific role. It is basically the creature of the United States of America. The Constitution gives us a specific role when it comes to conflicts and wars, and consequently, your testimony will be very helpful to us. And a special thanks for your being with us today.

[The prepared statement of Mr. Skelton can be found in the Appendix on page 388.]

Mr. WELDON. I thank my friend and colleague for his statement and for his ongoing leadership in providing a balanced approach to the issues involving the President's request for support for Iraq.

At this point in time, before our hearing begins, I have the very distinct pleasure and honor to introduce a longtime friend of mine. In fact, I hosted him several years ago for one week in Pennsylvania. He is the current chairman of the Russian Federation Council's International Affairs Committee. Mikhael Margelov from Russia is here. So he is the equivalent of the Chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee.

He started out as an advisor to both President Yeltsin and President Putin. He had his own company in terms of political consulting in Russia when I first met him at Columbia University at a conference three or four years ago. We have been together at a number of conferences, and we met this morning to talk about Russia's interest and concerns about Iraq.

Mikhael, would you like to just say a few words to the Members of Congress here? I mean, I did not ask you to appear as a witness. Perhaps I should have done that, and perhaps you would have accepted. But if you would just like to stand up and say a few words, we have to break in five minutes. But I think my colleagues might be interested in having-in getting a chance to know you.

He is a good friend and a close advisor, I might add, to President Putin.

Mr. Skelton, do you have an objection to that?

Mr. SKELTON. No.

Mr. WELDON. Without objection. Special witness before the House Armed Services Committee, the Chairman of the we can

never get our Senators over here, Mikhael, so we have to go over to Russia to get a Russian Chairman of the Senate Committee to come over and testify.

STATEMENT OF MIKHAEL MARGELOV, CHAIRMAN, INTERNATIONAL AFFAIRS COMMITTEE, RUSSIAN FEDERATION COUNCIL

Mr. MARGELOV. Well, first of all, thank you, Curt, for such generous introduction. It is a great honor for me to be invited for such hearings. Actually I also was invited tomorrow for the hearings at the International Affairs Committee of the House, which are called Russia and the Axis of Evil, and unfortunately I got to know this morning that these hearings are postponed. So I would like to take this advantage to address you, dear colleagues, and say that I think that such a practice of Russian parliamentarians taking part in the hearings here in the U.S., and American parliamentarians taking part in hearings in Russia is quite unique, and I think we have to continue with such practice.

We agreed with Senator Trent Lott on Monday that in the beginning of the year 2003, a senatorial delegation will come to the Council Federation to Moscow to take part in the hearings on Russian-American relations there. So I think that we have to continue such a practice.

Thank you very much.

Mr. WELDON. Thank you, Mikhael. I know that our committee would welcome any comments in writing that you would have on our current discussion about the Iraqi situation and relative to your country's concerns as you outlined to me this morning, about the oil interests that you have in Iraq, the financial obligation that Iraq has to you as a nation, and so I would invite you to provide that information in writing on the record for us to be a part of the proceedings.

Mr. WELDON. With that, I want to thank you for stopping by. And we will now turn to our witnesses.

We do have to break for a series of votes. Would you like to begin now and go as far as we can, and then we have to break for one 15-minute vote and two 5-minute votes?

So, Dr. Cohen, what is your choice?

Dr. COHEN. How long would we have before the vote would begin?

Mr. WELDON. I would say probably ten minutes before-probably eight minutes before we have to leave to go over and vote. Dr. COHEN. If you would like.

Mr. WELDON. The floor is yours. Your statement will be entered as a part of the record. You are free to make whatever comments you would like to make.

STATEMENT OF DR. ELIOT A. COHEN, PROFESSOR AND DIRECTOR OF STRATEGIC STUDIES, THE SCHOOL OF ADVANCED INTERNATIONAL STUDIES, JOHNS HOPKINS UNIVERSITY Dr. COHEN. Thank you very much, Mr. Chairman. Thank you for inviting me to testify today before you on the question of American policy toward Iraq.

Let me summarize my argument briefly. It is that the choice before the United States is a stark one, either to acquiesce in a situation in which the regime of Saddam Hussein can restore his economy, acquire weapons of mass destruction and pose a lethal threat to his neighbors and to us, or we take action to overthrow him.

In my view, the latter course with all of its risks is the correct one. Indeed, the dangers of failing to act in the near future are unacceptable. To that end, Congress should authorize the President to initiate large-scale military action against Iraq and give him the widest possible latitude in acting, even in the absence of additional U.N. authorization to do so.

Let me describe the nature of our conflict with Iraq, outline what I think are the two strategic choices that we have, and briefly consider the implication of that choice. A famous saying has it that war is a continuation of policy by other means. In the case of Saddam Hussein, however, policy is a continuation of war by other means. Saddam Hussein has waged war against the United States and the community of civilized states since 1991. After the successful conclusion of ground and air operations in February of that year, most Americans thought the war had ended. We cleaned up the equipment, we brought back most of the troops, we held victory parades, and we congratulated ourselves.

The government believed, as did many observers, that Saddam would surely fall, and at worst, U.N. inspections would finish the job that bombing had begun. The United States would be able to neuter the regime, even if it didn't destroy it. How wrong we were. Under the eyes of Americans soldiers, Saddam's soldiers massacred Iraqi citizens hoping for liberation. The U.N. inspections, backed as they were by American and foreign intelligence, and imposed upon an Iraq that was still reeling from a battlefield debacle, uncovered some dismaying facts: that the Iraqi nuclear program, for example, is far more extensive and more advanced than we have known, and that most of it had escaped destruction.

We learned, too, that Iraqi research on and production of chemical and biological weapons were well in advance of anything that we had suspected before the war. Unlike the case of nuclear weapons, furthermore, even the very competent and, I would add, brave professionals working for the United Nation's Special Commission on Iraq, UNSCOM, could not stay ahead of a very cunning opponent who intended to retain these weapons at all costs. Indeed, by 1999, we were outmaneuvered by the Iraqis who had negotiated the replacement of UNSCOM by the United Nation's Monitoring, Verification and Inspection Commission (UNMOVIC), which is a far weaker organization, working at arm's length from the United States and her allies, and UNMOVIC has been a dead letter until recently.

To these undisputed facts, add the Iraqi attempt on the life of the first President Bush, Iraq's sponsorship of suicide bombing in Israel, its ceaseless torrent of hatred and incitement directed against Americans and the United States, its hosting of terrorists to include the late unlamented Abu Nidal, and its relationship with al Qaeda.

Let us remember above all that on a daily basis the Iraqi military does its best to kill American and British pilots maintaining

the southern and northern no-fly zones put in place with U.N. support. If repeated and brazen attempts to shoot down American aircraft and kill American pilots are not acts of war, I don't know what is. If we have escaped without loss, it is a tribute to our skill and his bad luck.

The United States then has been at war with Iraq since 1991. Only the level of violence has changed, not the substance of the relationship or the intentions of the Iraqi regime. Since the middle of the 1990s, moreover, Iraq has been winning the war. It has done so despite the best efforts of American diplomats and soldiers to include short campaigns such as Desert Fox in 1998.

Iraq has violated Security Council resolutions and injunctions with impunity. It has dismantled the U.N. inspections regime, which was only partly effective at the best of times. It has slipped out from under sanctions as well. Today Iraq produces something like 2.4 million barrels of oil a day, up from a postwar low of 300,000 barrel a day, and not far short of its pre-1991 production

rates.

The stark facts are that inspections are dead, and sanctions are dead, and they cannot be resurrected. There are too many countries that will assist Saddam in preventing us from really bringing them back to life. They have many motives: greed, desire to curry favor with Bagdad, anxiety about domestic opinion, a principled horror of war, a desire to take the United States down a peg or two, fear of the precedent set by the overthrow of this kind of regime or the consequences that would flow from it.

The international argument about inspections is, therefore, a sham, a mask for other concerns and intentions. There can be no question of Iraqi's good faith. It does not exist. Everything, everything that a decade's worth of experience can teach us is that we have only two choices, deterrence of the regime or its overthrow. Is Saddam Hussein in the long run deterrable? He has twice launched ruinous, unprovoked wars of aggression against his neighbors. He has attempted to assassinate a former American President. He has evinced an unshakable determination to acquire the most lethal weapons devised by man. He has shown a willingness to use them, on civilians first and foremost, beginning with his countrymen.

He is a man who swam to power in a pool of blood and has exercised power not merely with brutality, but with a sadism that is notable even by the standards of the last century. His daily discourse is that of slaughter, and his deeds match his words.

An argument in favor of deterrence is a declaration of faith in the rationality of Saddam Hussein. It is an argument that he will not fulfill his repeated specific and bloody threats directed against us, his neighbors in Israel. It is an assertion that he will refrain from the use of biological weapons that have no return address. It is a contention that he understands power, justice, prestige, and above all revenge, more or less as we do. It is a belief that is contradicted by his career, which is one of ferocity, miscalculation and destruction. That leaves us the choice of war, as problematic as that may be.

What are our prospects in such a case?

Mr. Chairman, would you like me to pause now?

Mr. WELDON. If you don't mind, Dr. Cohen, we have to go over for these votes. So if that is a good point for you to stop, we will come back as soon as we are finished. And, my colleagues, if you would like to say hello to Chairman Margelov before you leave, I would appreciate you stopping down at the front and have a chance to say hello to him before he has to leave.

The committee stands in recess until these votes are over. [Recess.]

Mr. WELDON. The committee will resume now that we have finished our votes and our witnesses have replenished their bodies. We will begin-continue our testimony.

Dr. Cohen, the floor is yours, and you may continue with your statement, and then we will move on to Dr. O'Hanlon.

Dr. COHEN. Thank you, Mr. Chairman.

Just to recap very briefly. I had made the case that really there are only two policy options before us. One is to attempt to deter Saddam Hussein; the second one is war. And I made the case as well that it seems to me that deterrence was, as I put it, a declaration of faith in the rationality of Saddam Hussein, and that I thought that was both implausible and dangerous.

That leaves us the choice of war, as problematic as that surely is. What are our prospects in such a case? I think it is unwise to try to forecast costs and casualties. I recall very well the debate before the Gulf War of 1991, and how completely wrong such estimates turned out to be, even those made by the government. And I am even more reluctant to try to forecast war plans, because it seems to me if one is wrong in doing that, one is foolish, and if one is right, one is something considerably worse than foolish.

Nonetheless, there are four important points to note: First, that the Iraqi military today is a shadow of its former self, a third the size it was in 1991, poorly equipped, demoralized, perhaps most importantly of all haunted by memories of its last encounter with the United States. It simply cannot be a machine like the one we faced in 1991, and that, of course, crumbled under our attack.

Second, in recent times the American military has consistently surprised both observers and indeed itself. Before the Gulf, Yugoslav, and Afghan Wars, we were told that our forces faced unprecedented challenges that they could meet only at great cost, if at all. In each case they achieved their objectives more effectively and more creatively and with greater economy in the expenditure of blood than anyone could have imagined. In the future resumption of outright hostilities with Iraq, the same is likely to be true, and in ways that no outside observer can, I hope, predict.

Thirdly, the lesson of recent wars is that coalitions are not ends, but means, and that a fixation on international consensus leads to a feeble strategy. In the current context the United States would certainly like the support of many countries, but it needs the active cooperation of a handful: Kuwait, some of the Gulf States, and one would hope Turkey, Jordan and possibly Saudi Arabia.

Our British and Australian allies provide valuable military assistance and confirmation of the view that Saddam Hussein is indeed an implacable menace. Beyond this, the chances are very good that once our intention to act becomes clear, other states will find

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