PERSPECTIVE ON CHEMICAL WEAPONS : This Crime Rates Sure Punishment : The President shouldn’t veto a good bill that sets mandatory penalties for use or sale of these terrible weapons.

Out of the chaos of the last few weeks of Congress came legislation that would substantially improve the ability of American exporters to compete in the world market for high-tech goods. But the President is threatening to pocket-veto the bill, letting it die on his desk without a signature.

The veto looms as a result of a provision to deter the sale and use of chemical and biological weapons. It appears that President Bush, champion of mandatory sentencing for most criminals, recoils from the idea that companies that sell chemical and biological weapons and countries that use them should be faced with certain punishment. The legislation would mandate a minimum of 12 months of sanctions against an offending company or country before a President could, in the interest of national security, lift them.

The President’s opposition stems, I am told, from his desire to maintain flexibility in the ever-changing international arena. As a believer in flexibility in foreign policy, I have questioned whether we are obsessively denying the President the right to choose his own course. But what requirements would the President need the flexibility to waive? Under the bill, a chemical-weapons seller would be denied U.S. government contracts and barred from selling to the American market for one year. Countries would be subject to sanctions that include denial of subsidized American credits, foreign aid and arms sales. Not exactly the death penalty.

A look at the history of U.S. policy toward Iraq suggests that some inflexibility is called for. President Ronald Reagan, who could have used the powers of his office to punish Iraq’s use of chemical weapons--first against the Iranian army and later against its own unarmed civilians--chose to take no punitive action. Moreover, he fought tooth and nail against legislation requiring action in the future.

A little more than a year later, President Bush waived the requirement to impose sanctions on Iraq after Congress, still in response to that country’s unpunished use of chemical weapons, killed Baghdad’s industrial-development loans through the Export-Import Bank, which is subsidized by U.S. taxpayer money. Given the opportunity to waive the sanction, the President immediately and inexplicably did so.

If Congress has taken on the mission of mandatory sentencing for international crimes, it is because of a long and consistent pattern of executive-branch aversion to disturbing an international complacency that has overlooked such heinous crimes against humanity as the gassing of innocent civilians.

President Bush himself entered office on a platform of ridding the world of the scourge of chemical and biological weapons. His election year saw revelations that German companies had supplied chemical-weapons facilities to Libya. This year, dozens of German businessmen suspected of aiding the Iraqi chemical-weapons program have been prosecuted. Now 210,000 American troops face those weapons.

An Administration spokeswoman asserts that congressional action in this area constitutes “objectionable intrusiveness into executive branch prerogatives and (is) potentially fatal to our efforts to cooperate with friends and allies.” (My emphasis.) No one is talking about killing alliances and relationships with other countries. But there must still be a few issues over which we are willing to bruise a few international sensibilities. If there aren’t, then we don’t have much of a foreign policy anyway.

Selling and using chemical weapons is a crime of the greatest magnitude. It requires certain and immediate punishment. The President would do well to ignore the pleas of his lawyers on this one, do the right thing and sign this bill.