| WASHINGTON
- March 25 - Dear President Bush and Prime Minister Blair,
On February
5, 2003, Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld made statements
to Congress and the press suggesting that the United States may
be contemplating the use of chemical "riot control agents" during
the Iraq war. Press reports indicate that the US may also be considering
the use of chemical incapacitating agents.
Proponents
of chemical riot-control agents and chemical incapacitating agents
argue that they are non-lethal and humane alternatives to the
use of deadly force and will help reduce civilian casualties.
In fact, as the Russian theatre hostage crisis demonstrated, chemical
incapacitating agents are far from non-lethal. They can be as
lethal as many other weapons of war. Civilian lethality in the
Russian incident was 15%, comparable to the levels of lethality
achieved using military firearms, artillery, and grenades (1).
Furthermore, in a complex military setting containing both combatants
and civilians, lethality will likely be concentrated among civilian
populations who will lack access to the protective gear that the
Iraqi army, which has been trained to use chemical weapons, is
likely to have. Finally, history shows that chemical agents of
any type can end up being used to supplement and enhance lethal
force, rather than to reduce it, and that once chemical agents
are used, their use can rapidly escalate.
The United
States and the United Kingdom are among the 150 States Parties
to the Chemical Weapons Convention (CWC). This treaty explicitly
prohibits the use of either chemical incapacitating agents or
riot control agents for war-fighting purposes. Any military effort
to bring Iraq into accord with the international legal norms enshrined
by the CWC would be undermined by the use of riot control agents
or chemical incapacitants which every other State Party considers
banned by the CWC.
The use of
banned weapons by the United States or its allies would also significantly
undermine the CWC and the very international norms we seek to
uphold, and could stimulate the further proliferation of chemical
weapons.
In the interest
of national and global security, the United States and all of
its allies must uphold the standards of international behavior
that they seek to enforce and must not use chemical incapacitating
agents or chemical riot control agents in the war with Iraq.
Marie Chevrier,
Ph.D., Associate Professor of Political Economy, University of
Texas at Dallas
Dr. Michael
Christ , Executive Director, International Physicians for the
Prevention of Nuclear War
Ian Davis -
British American Security Information Council (BASIC)
Trevor Findlay,
Executive Director, Verification Research, Training & Information
Centre (VERTIC)
Lisbeth Gronlund
and David Wright - Co-Directors, Global Security Program, Union
of Concerned Scientists
Edward Hammond,
Director, The Sunshine Project, US/Germany
John Isaacs
- President, Council for a Livable World
Daryl Kimball
- Executive Director, Arms Control Association
Robert K. Musil,
Ph.D.,M.P.H., Executive Director and CEO, Physicians for Social
Responsibility
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