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COMMENTARY
September 18, 2002
Diplomatic treat
Strange to say there was an argument going on within the Bush administration at the beginning of the summer. According to various "hawks" within the Pentagon and elsewhere including one even in the State Department the United States should act unilaterally on Iraq in self-defence and avoid letting the United Nations get involved. Why? Because once the U.N. has its claws in Saddam Hussein has the opportunity to confuse the field with all kinds of diplomatic impostures. Example: on Monday four days after President George W. Bush went before the United Nations the Iraqi government announced that it would "unconditionally" allow U.N. weapons inspectors to return to Iraq -- on the condition that they "respect the sovereignty of Iraq". This in turn opened the field for discussing the precise meaning of this ambiguously broad condition for the next thousand years or until the Iraqis have nuclear weapons (whichever comes first). It was of course intended to put the U.S. in the condition of negotiating at a disadvantage among a horde of duplicitous merchants-of-death in a Middle Eastern bazaar. Mr. Bush was fairly warned. Nevertheless it was in anticipation of just such delights that he went to the U.N. anyway. The Europeans want appearances maintained and since the appearance of maintaining them comes at no great cost there is no reason to appear grudging. It goes a little deeper than that. More is to be gained than lost by passing through that U.N. swamp and draining it on the way to Baghdad. Last Thursday before his audience of diplomats and statesmen Mr. Bush uttered his three most powerful words since "axis of evil"; words only they would fully understand. The ones he chose to put before the General Assembly were: "League of Nations". Either the U.N. will prove that it can deal effectively with the present world crisis or the U.S. will let it go the way of its predecessor. (Even the offer to rejoin UNESCO was a less-than-gentle reminder of the organization's total dependency upon U.S. support and goodwill.) That the Americans had anticipated Saddam's imposture was clear enough yesterday: the White House press secretary was ready with the phrase "rope-a-dope" to describe Saddam's "unconditionality". The Secretary of State Colin Powell dismissed it in his own choice of monosyllables during a photo-op at New York's Waldorf-Astoria while the Saudi foreign minister Saud al-Faisal sat haplessly beside him with a face full of pain. The British foreign secretary Jack Straw explained that the word "unconditional" lacks meaning until the operative new U.N. resolutions are phrased the old ones having now passed at least four years into the fog of history. The carts are already hitched behind the American engine which is not going to stop building steam. Saddam's latest try-on came as a mild surprise to members of the Security Council who were discussing among themselves a sequence of two resolutions. The first of these will specify exactly what the Saddam regime must do in order to avoid the second. Both will lack ambiguity. Let me spell out what the United States is asking for off the record but not far off it: First truly unlimited and unconditional searches not only to find but to eliminate on site and immediately when found any and all Iraqi weaponry and ordnance that was banned under previous U.N. resolutions. Not a team of polite international bureaucrats but a search-and-destroy mission backed up by military force deployed on hair-trigger alert against the obstruction and intimidation with which the Saddam regime slowed or defeated all previous investigators. Second both inspectors and military to be led by U.S. officers. They will report back not only to the U.N. but to the Bush administration in "live time" and have the exclusive benefit of U.S. satellite and other intelligence sources conveyed to them also in "live time" without any possibility of Iraqi interference or interception. In other words the old UNSCOM's rules of engagement rather than those of the new UNMOVIC (which is the rather fey inspection corps the U.N. created to replace the former while under pressure from Saddam). The U.S. cannot afford to share intelligence information with others who might pass it to Saddam or to America's other enemies; but nor can any serious investigation be carried on without the help of e.g. the latest generation of eyes in the sky. Third the ability to interview or interrogate all witnesses from without or within the Saddam regime without Iraqi monitoring. This necessarily includes being able to offer protection to each person after each is debriefed. The logic requires that ultimately even Saddam himself must be accessible to inspection to say nothing of his 60 vast presidential estates. It is by following this logic to its conclusion down any circular Baghdad road that we return to Mr. Bush's original premiss. The Iraqi regime must be changed. The regime itself is the danger to world security: there is no way it will cease to be so until Saddam and his cronies are gone. This is the view of the Bush administration. It happens also to be the truth. David Warren
© Ottawa Citizen
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