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COMMENTARY
September 28, 2002
Cows on the track
President George W. Bush came out of the summer holidays driving a "Baghdad Express". He would table a resolution in Congress giving him war powers and another in the United Nations setting a deadline for Saddam Hussein to surrender to an armed and intrusive weapons inspection regime. Congress would not be a problem; the U.N. might or might not vindicate its own previous resolutions against Saddam. If it did fine most of the world would be onside when the Americans arrived "formally" in Iraq. (Their special forces are already there informally in considerable numbers.) And if it did not the U.N. would be allowed to go the way of the League of Nations. This Baghdad Express is now late arriving at its first stop. Yesterday was the deadline to place the first of two American-sponsored resolutions before the Security Council. For in the absence of such a prior move Hans Blix the Swedish bureaucrat in charge of a truly toothless inspection force called UNMOVIC will begin negotiating with the Saddam regime on the conditions of its "unconditional" offer to re-admit inspectors and the interminable game of diplomatic footsie will resume where it left off in 1998. A large part of my job is correcting the nonsense you have read elsewhere in the media. Most press reports claim the Bush administration is insisting on a single resolution stating what Saddam must do to avoid an invasion and authorizing an invasion if Saddam then fails to comply by a certain date. They say the French and Russians want to split this resolution into its two component parts. But President Bush proposed "resolutions" in the plural in his address to the General Assembly in the first place and that is not the issue. Moreover what the U.S. finally does in Iraq will be too fast and furious to resemble an "invasion" as conventionally understood. The country hardly needs invading the regime is universally despised within Iraq. "Topped" would be a better colloquial description. Resolution Two can wait -- the one to authorize the topping. It will follow naturally from the logic of Resolution One; and it is because it will follow so naturally that Resolution One has become the sticking point. This alone requires squaring a circle if agreement is to be found among all five veto powers on the Security Council. The resolution is indeed drafted has unqualified British support and is being shown and discussed in Paris Moscow and Beijing. It was too big an issue to be decided within U.N. chambers -- where by long tradition important matters are never settled. And here is the real problem: the British and Americans insist that the Saddam regime comply with all previous U.N. resolutions without exception. These already called not merely for unlimited very intrusive inspections but for the immediate destruction of illegal weapons wherever they were found. The old resolutions further required the complete co-operation of the Iraqi regime not excluding Saddam personally. The inspectors backed by whatever force they would need to remove any obstruction would also have the power to summon any witness from inside or outside the regime and in return for their testimony offer them protection against later retribution. This is all stuff Saddam wriggled out of before by bluff and bluster; stuff he only accepted in the first place to stop the U.S. Army from marching on Baghdad in 1991. Stuff he accepted in the expectation he would be able to bluff and bluster his way out given time. Stuff he expects to bluff and bluster again while in co-operation with international terror organizations he prepares the biggest in his very long string of dreadful surprises. The French Russians and Chinese each among Saddam's major trading partners and each owed billions by the present Iraqi regime are thus each in a position to lose heavily if Saddam falls. It is among the reasons they feel uncomfortable with a resolution that Saddam could not possibly comply with -- since they know as well as anybody else that Saddam indeed harbours weapons of mass destruction. >From this I deduce that even more effort is being put into the terms of secret buy-offs than into the exact configuration of the resolution text. If each of the veto powers are satisfied that their interests in Iraq can be transferred to any new regime then it will be "all aboard". If they can't be satisfied then one or more will pull the emergency cord before the train can leave station. There is one more wrinkle. Even if they pull the emergency cord (i.e. veto the American and British resolution before the U.N.) Mr. Bush will ignore it and ride on. So it is not in their power actually to prevent the Americans removing Saddam. It is only in their power to create huge difficulties for the Bush administration with international public opinion. For they all know that even in the bourgeois democracies there is a huge constituency that considers the United Nations (dominated by a large working majority of self-interested tyrants and dictators) to have more legitimacy than the United States (a liberal democracy). On the other hand the difficulties they could create are unlikely to outlast the scenes of cheering Iraqis greeting the American troops that have liberated them; or the revelations after Saddam's fall of just what he did have up his sleeve. They can only extract their respective prices in advance hence present best efforts. (The most worrisome demand seems to be a private Russian one to get the U.S. to wink at a Russian invasion of increasingly pro-Western Georgia in "hot pursuit" of Chechen and other Islamist terrorists and separatists they believe to be taking shelter there.) The action now turns to the floor of the U.S. Senate where what promised to be easy passage for a Congressional resolution empowering President Bush to take military action as necessary in Iraq and region -- one which would much strengthen the Bush administration's hand at the U.N. -- has been thrown into temporary confusion. On Wednesday the Senate witnessed an improbable eruption of Mount Daschle -- previously thought to be dormant. Tom Daschle the Democrat majority leader in the Senate exploded in very public rage against Mr. Bush's insinuation in a campaign speech that the Democrats were -- by insisting on the complete unionization of the new Department of Homeland Security and other old-fashioned bureaucratic encumbrances -- putting their party interest ahead of national security. This was over-the-top for Mr. Daschle already squeezed politically from the other side by an incredibly irresponsible speech by former Vice President Al Gore Monday angling for the left of the party. Mr. Daschle lashed out at Mr. Bush for doing what Mr. Bush had insinuated Mr. Daschle was doing namely playing politics. (Imagine! politics -- and in Washington D.C.) Since the media love a squabble the President's attempt to assuage and calm Mr. Daschle were largely ignored yesterday and instead reporters combed through Mr. Bush's other remarks for new affronts in the hope of triggering another volcanic emission. Instead Sen. Ted Kennedy found his moment to weigh in (all 120 kilos of him). All this gave cover for Dick Gephardt the Democrat minority leader in the House of Representatives to subtly adjust his previous nearly unconditional support for the Iraq resolution and demand new concessions to Congressional oversight. These were probably worth accepting on their merits and the Bush administration is quickly taking them on board. Nothing has happened to change the destination of this Baghdad Express however; nor even to slow it significantly. Either they will be removed voluntarily or the train will just have to hit a few more cows along the way. David Warren
© Ottawa Citizen
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