So what’s Bill Clinton’s reward for pushing the (ill-advised) Chemical Weapons Convention through the Senate last year? Being undercut by the arms controllers at the Organization for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons — the bureaucracy that oversees compliance with the chemical-arms treaty.
In the aftermath of the missile attacks on the Sudanese factory implicated in the production of VX nerve gas, the administration very publicly staked its credibility on soil samples taken outside the factory that contained a chemical known as Empta, used to make VX. So along come the OPCW bureaucrats with an excuse for the chemical’s presence in the soil samples. According to a story in last Thursday’s New York Times (“Possible Benign Use Is Seen for Chemical at Factory in Sudan”), agency spokesman Donato Kinigier-Passigli said an exhaustive search of scientific literature showed Empta might have “legitimate commercial purposes,” including as an anti-microbial agent and fungicide. Of course, it’s never actually been used for a commercial purpose, but who’s to say the Sudanese aren’t great pharmaceutical innovators.
This type of sophistic quibbling, endemic to the “arms-control community,” shows how little multilateral agreements like the Chemical Weapons Convention can be expected to accomplish. Not as little, however, as what the Clinton administration is likely to learn from the experience.
