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COMMENTARY
September 5, 2002
Everything on the line
President George W. Bush began putting his cards on the table yesterday meeting with senior Congressional figures from both major U.S. parties and promising that he would secure the approval of both Houses before taking formal action against Saddam Hussein's regime in Iraq. The resolution likely to be presented sooner not later will probably be similar to the one the first President Bush sought before liberating Kuwait -- and which he got on a very close vote. (I wouldn't expect the vote on this one to be very close for opposition to it could entail political suicide.) The current President Bush is also now booked into a heavy round of consultations with European and other leaders. There will be less or no publicity for his direct conversations with the heads of various Gulf and regional states. At this point he would be wasting his time talking with such as President Hosni Mubarak of Egypt or any of the other "moderate" Arab leaders who have objected publicly to an invasion of Iraq. Mr. Mubarak for his part retaliated yesterday. He let Ahmed Abu Zeid the chairman of an Egyptian parliamentary committee make a public statement of solidarity with Iraq then gave it his personal imprimatur by broadcasting it officially. The Egyptian government has been seething since President Bush capped foreign aid to it in protest against the imprisonment of Saad Eddin Ibrahim Egypt's leading pro-democracy figure. The government-owned newspapers are doing their best to orchestrate a kind of anti-American danse macabre in the "Arab street" -- the standard method used by the Arab world's autocrats and dictators to stomp out budding democratic movements. With the Saudi Arabians the Bush administration is still compelled to play a double game. The House of Saud sits on too much oil and too close to the zone of conflict to risk an open breach. I expect that will come later. In the meantime the U.S. appears to have removed all military equipment that will be needed for strikes against Iraq to the smaller Gulf sheikdoms and other jurisdictions where their presence is sanctioned by long-term security agreements dating from the 1991 Gulf War. Security for these bases is a growing concern. Another advantage of the smaller jurisdictions is that -- to put it plainly -- the population base for local insurrections is smaller. At the risk of frightening some readers it should also be noted that the unpublicized U.S. build-up in the region has been carefully scattered. As I now understand while the advantage of not putting "all the eggs in one basket" is self-explanatory there is an especially urgent reason for this. At any moment before or after the first formal U.S. strike Saddam is likely to try to hit any U.S. base he can reach with biological or chemical weapons. He cannot be left in a position where a single "lucky strike" could knock out a substantial part of the U.S. force arrayed against him. By saying this I point directly to the problem the Bush administration has in preparing the world for what is to come. They cannot be entirely candid about the enemy's potential strengths without giving arguments to the "peace constituency". And yet it is precisely because of the hideous and growing capabilities of Saddam and other regional psychopaths that the U.S. has no choice but to act -- once again sooner not later. In effect both sides in the debate are wrong -- the people who think Iraq will be a cakewalk and therefore ask What are we waiting for? ; and the people who think we mustn't attack because it might unleash forces larger than we can contain. The truth as I understand it is opposite both propositions: it won't necessarily be a cakewalk but the U.S. must attack before its enemies are in a position to wreak even greater havoc. The longer he waits the bigger the final conflagration and Mr. Bush knows it. If there is any comfort for him it is coming from Europe at the moment though you would not guess this from mainstream media reports. At one level the U.S. has been briefing the Europeans as they have demanded with more and more candour. And the response to this has been positive almost everywhere. Standing up fairly courageously to the anti-American danse in the "European street" and at the U.N. summit in Johannesburg Prime Minister Tony Blair of Britain reminded that 9/11 was not just a threat to America. "They can perfectly easily have done it in London or Berlin or Paris or anywhere. ... If Britain and if Europe want to be taken seriously as people facing up to these issues do then our place is facing them with America -- in partnership but with America." While this was not met with a chorus of "amens" there is a much greater awareness among European governments today than several months ago of just how much is at stake. Moreover opinion polls across Europe show a continuing rise in support for a U.S. invasion of Iraq (six in 10 are now in favour if the U.S. consults its allies which it is now doing; rising to seven in 10 in Britain and the Netherlands. Support levels in the U.S. are around 85 per cent). This has its own dampening effect on Europe's anti-American bureaucratic and intellectual elites: the people who make the most noise. The real diplomatic fissure that is now opening is between the "moderate" Arab governments and the "progressive" European democrats who have previously given them cover. And yet the Arab leaders are panicking for very good reasons. Each feels himself to be on top of a rumbling volcano and with the U.S. losing its patience for the traditional duplicity of Arab diplomacy they are left with nowhere to run for safety. All lines are converging towards the one end. I would not be surprised after reading recent remarks by Defence Secretary Donald Rumsfeld and gleaning other hints from elsewhere in the Bush administration if the U.S. is also planning to place a fresh resolution before the United Nations. This would probably take the form of a demand that Iraq grant unlimited access to weapons inspectors by a specific date -- what the Saddam dictatorship agreed after its defeat in Kuwait (to stop the Americans from marching into Baghdad) but then unilaterally rescinded in 1998. It would be a resolution with no negotiable provisions; one which would leave Saddam no wiggle room whatever. It was a similar wiggle-proof U.N. resolution demanding an Iraqi withdrawal from Kuwait that preceded the U.S. attack in the Gulf War of 1991. It will be recalled that under Bush p?re the U.S. went in the very night the deadline expired. (Alas Saddam will also recall this.) Such a resolution could easily be couched as a renewal of previous U.N. resolutions which were never properly enforced. It will thus leave intended fence-sitters with a choice between vindicating the integrity of the U.N. and openly abandoning it. From the U.S. and allied point-of-view the thinking will be if this new resolution passes fine; if it fails the U.N. may be shown to have lost its remaining credibility and will become perforce the first major casualty of the impending war. I have no doubt the Bush administration is willing to put it on the line like this. David Warren
© Ottawa Citizen
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