Gulf War Syndrome - 13 December 1996

On the hundredth anniversary of the death of Alfred Nobel, the man who invented first dynamite, and then the Nobel Peace Prize, Saddam Hussein presided over a ceremony, to the cheers of an assembled multitude, that saw him open a six hundred mile pipeline, which for the first time since the beginning of the Gulf War, will deliver Iraqi crude to terminals on the Turkish coast.

Some experts on our side were quick to say that for some time the oil will be inferior, but it will turn into good oil and it will be delivered at the rate of six hundred and fifty thousand barrels a day. That's what the United Nations is allowing Saddam to maintain under an agreement that permits him to sell six billion dollars worth of oil for the purpose only of buying the medicines, the food and other necessities most of the Iraqi people have gone without for five years.

That was one sanction that the United Nations was able to enforce. And for the people of Iraq, you may be sure that Saddam made it the whole story: a deliberate, heartless American – mainly American – policy of punishing not him, so much as the people of Iraq, denying medicine to the sick and food to the hungry children.

The rest of the story, the invasion of Kuwait, the defeat of Saddam after a hundred days war, the trashing of the Kurds, the Iraqis hear little about. And as for the most serious part of the truce agreement – to have Saddam turn over to the United Nations all supplies, all depots, all means of building nuclear weapons – he has frustrated and enraged whole teams of United Nations inspectors.

The new United States Senate will go into this successful defiance of the most serious penalty of the allied Iraqi peace agreement, and the main question that's expected to arise is quite simply: is Saddam in worse or better shape today to fight a war than he was in 1991? Some senators, some experts at the Pentagon, believe now that he's in better shape. Not that they think he has hidden away, fully assembled nuclear weapons, but what we know or fear he does have, is a useable stockpile of nerve gas and other items of chemical warfare.

In the long stretch since the end of the Gulf War, Saddam has taken on more, not less, of a sinister cast because of the steady, widespread appearance of suspicious illness: various diseases which veterans of the Gulf War have blamed on exposure there to chemical weapons.

The complaints rose first here in the form of appeals from sick men to the veterans associations and hospitals, and then took the more ominous form of accusations against the Defense Department, the Pentagon, which began perhaps a little too brusquely by denying any such ailment as what was called "Gulf War Syndrome." For once the precise word "syndrome" was correctly used, for what the old soldiers were complaining about were clusters of symptoms that collectively pointed to one diagnosis, a single cause: the Gulf War.

In the beginning, the sick men – and they were undoubtedly sick in unusually large numbers – were dubbed by some doctors as an interesting case of mass hysteria, an epidemic of hypochondria, which is a well-known feature of war afflictions. But then the Czechs moved in. The Czechs, we discovered, are the world's experts on chemical warfare, its forms, its practice, its detection. The Czechs reported that the bombing of a chemical weapons dump had released great quantities of nerve gas that had wafted towards many thousands of allied troops.

Finally the Pentagon has broken down and said its later investigating, has shown that there was an exploded chemical dump and that it, and other identified sources, had indeed infected the troops with dangerous chemicals. And last week, the British raised their voices and claimed that their own investigation had confirmed the worst of the rumours and that many hundreds of British soldiers too were identifiable sufferers.

The first glum reaction of old congressmen, of especially incumbent Democrats who have promised deep cuts in defence, is that reparations for the sick thousands of Gulf War veterans is going to cost many unaccounted for millions.

For once these alarms and excursions – some of the main concerns of American foreign policy – resounded more in the United Nations' headquarters here in New York than in Washington, which is bustling about uncontentious business so as to wind up and get home for the holidays.

The bitter fight over the next secretary general – a hundred and eighty odd nations for Boutros Boutros-Ghali versus one against – has not made the United States any more popular, and the now well-known fact that the United States is a couple of billion dollars behind in its dues has revived, among the Africans, the old Central and South American stigma: Uncle Sam, the bully from the North.

It's not a happy time for a new secretary of state to take over, even though Miss Madeleine Albright in the United Nations vote on giving a second term to Mr Boutros Boutros-Ghali made it clear, without saying so, that she was acting under orders. The most obvious and refreshing thing about her appointment to succeed Mr Christopher is that she is the first woman secretary of state in American history.

About a week or ten days before her appointment was decided on, or better say announced, a small delegation of women waited on the president – I don't know if in the flesh or by note, memorandum or fax – to remind him that if there was one factor weightier than another why he won the election, it was the extraordinary ratio of women who voted for him: five for Clinton against three for Dole.

At any rate the message had gone to the White House right after election day from many women's organisations that they expected to receive recognition of their power by larger representation in the administration. So far, since he was first elected, he has matched President Reagan's appointment of the first woman justice of the Supreme Court by adding another one in Justice Ginsburg three years ago.

By then too, he'd appointed the first woman attorney general of the United States, Miss Janet Reno, who has weathered many storms, most boisterous of which was the FBI's stumblebum behaviour at that Waco Texas cult building. But it seems she will remain to face several more.

Mr Clinton had bad luck with his first run of women appointees who were caught on what at the time, most of us would have said was a careless but forgivable infringement of the rules: not paying the social security contribution of a hired hand, a maid, a servant. Today it's practically the first thing the president's men bring up, though infinitely more serious flaws in appointees get, apparently, cheerfully overlooked.

Miss Madeleine Albright will have no trouble at all in being confirmed by the Senate. The one figure it's essential to have on your side is the chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee. Whoever he is, he's a person of remarkable, some say absurd power. He's the first man who can object to the president's appointment of an American ambassador anywhere. If he doesn't like the man or woman, he can refuse to bring up the name before his committee, so the Senate will not get the chance to vote at all.

At the moment the chairman is an old Republican, the courtly, wily Senator Jesse Helms, the forever re-elected gentleman from the tobacco country. There cannot be another politician in the country who, in the face of the onslaught of criticism that falls on the tobacco companies, blithely goes on protecting the jobs of the two hundred thousand tobacco workers he represents.

Senator Helms is a most courteous and smiling character to meet, an unlikely hater of many types, but he has withheld the appointment of dozens of ambassadors for as long as two years. I think he suspects all foreigners. He has no use for the United Nations, especially for Mr Boutros Boutros-Ghali. And you might think that he would be against a nominee for secretary of state who came from there, but he has publicly declared Miss Albright to be a "gutsy lady" and, though she might wince at the phrase, I'm sure she's grateful for it.

Miss Albright has other distinctions. She is the second refugee from Hitler to become secretary of state. Henry Kissinger was the first. Her father was a Czech diplomat who was thrown out of the country first by the Nazis and then by the communists. The daughter consequently arrived in the United States at the age of eleven, went to the public school – which, as you know here, means for the public – in Massachusetts, got a scholarship to Wellesley, married her college sweetheart, and pretty soon was getting up before dawn to work on a PhD in international affairs before rousing and taking care of her daughters. She got into democratic politics a quarter of a century ago, fourteen years ago was stunned to hear from her husband that he was going his way alone.

She has followed every issue at the United Nations and led the debate on many of them. She urged, without success, an early use of force to help Bosnia, and she is best remembered for turning to the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, General Powell, and saying: "What's the point of having this superb military you're always talking about if we can't use it?"

She sounds from such odd quotations like a crusader. She's not. Simply so far, a tough negotiator who just now has no illusions about, but much interest in, Saddam Hussein. She is not an ideologue, but, as a refugee of tyranny who remembers the indignities in her bones, she does have a moral centre. Not all America's problems abroad is she likely to want to have settled by expediency.

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