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COMMENTARY
October 23, 2002
Stonewall, crumbling
A showdown at the U.N. Security Council became inevitable yesterday when the Russians made clear they could not accept even the watered-down draft of an American resolution demanding the effectual disarmament of Saddam Hussein's regime in Iraq. It was a draft which the administration of U.S. President George W. Bush had been negotiating for a month and had rewritten more than once to assuage chiefly French objections. President Jacques Chirac of France also told media that he was not yet very close to being assuaged. The British are co-sponsors of the resolution and the Chinese who are the remaining veto power on the Security Council have made fairly clear that they will abstain no matter what comes out not wanting to be involved. The nut cannot be cracked and I would expect President Bush to be announcing shortly that it cannot be cracked. Superficially the reasons are as given neither French nor Russians will allow a resolution to be passed with a penalty clause or any other remedy if Iraq fails to comply. They know that anything like that no matter how carefully worded or hemmed with qualifications can give the Americans a pretext to advance. By refusing to table any alternative resolution they are effectively insisting that the U.N.'s own Iraq weapons inspectorate UNMOVIC led by the Swedish bureaucrat Hans Blix proceed in a void. In plain English their position is that the U.N. must unconditionally accept whatever Saddam Hussein offers; and if that isn't enough discuss it again later. Under this superficial position is the nut that can't be cracked. Both the French (and more generally the Europeans) and the Russians are heavily invested in Iraq and its neighbour Iran whose fanatic Islamist regime also threatens to collapse from internal pressure if the precedent is set for "regime change". They want clear but not public guarantees that they will be able to recover their own national interests including vast debts owed them by Saddam from any new Iraqi regime; and they want the right to participate as full partners not in any invasion of Iraq but in the fruits of such an invasion (i.e. their shares of contracts and influence in Iraqi reconstruction). The United States will not give such guarantees and does not believe it wise to mortgage the future of Iraq in such ways. At root the United States has long-term ambitions for the reconstruction of Iraq as the first truly functioning constitutional democracy in the Arab Middle East pour encourager les autres. The Bush people will not attempt this extremely difficult task -- similar in scope to the democratization of Germany or Japan after the last World War -- with their arms tied behind someone else's back. So two weeks before the American mid-term election Mr. Bush finds himself outwardly held hostage by the United Nations. The French and Russians are calculating that he is a conventional politician who will not rock the boat at such a time but will continue at least to talk however pointlessly until the elections are over. My own understanding of Mr. Bush is that the French and Russians have miscalculated. On Friday the Bush administration made clear that it was making its "final offer" -- the farthest it could move towards the French position without sacrificing its own minimum requirements. Since this position is not accepted the game is up. The clock is now moreover ticking for measures must be taken before the return of hot weather to Iraq in the spring. (U.S. troops will have to be provided with heavy and cumbersome protection against Saddam's nerve gas and possibly biological weaponry.) The French and Russians may still entertain the hope that by simply dragging out the process it can see out this winter season and keep Saddam in power for another year. First delay the arrival of the weapons inspectors then let Saddam delay their progress then delay the response to that delay etc. It is the traditional diplomatic way of avoiding hard choices. There is an inherent risk if the process moves too quickly. The U.N.'s own basically toothless inspectorate may nevertheless stumble on something that will provide a pretext for immediate U.S. action. In the meantime both French and Russians are compelled to subscribe for the sake of their argument to the idea that Saddam may not actually have anything to hide -- a position that is ludicrous in the face of historical experience. Hans Blix himself did a neat diplomatic two-step to maintain this position in the face of U.S. assertions: "They may have evidence I am not brushing it aside but in our archive there is no clear-cut evidence." (This was very rich for not having yet gone into Iraq he does not yet have anything at all in his UNMOVIC archive; there was however plenty of material in the old UNSCOM archive needing to be updated.) In short the U.S. has been stonewalled can now be in no doubt that it is stonewalled and we wait for President Bush's response. I doubt we will have to wait until after the election. In Iraq itself the situation is "fluid". In an act which as the Wall Street Journal mentioned yesterday reminds of the last moments of Nicolae Ceausescu in Romania Saddam has emptied the country's gaols. At least so he announced and so the Western media dutifully reported on the basis of having been driven to see a few staged scenes of well-fed prisoners chanting slogans to their leader as they were released (followed by scenes of disorder and chaos). The real extent and intention of this amnesty is currently unknowable. We do know from previous reports of defectors that no serious internal dissidents were likely to have been left alive. The performance itself together with Iraq's recent Alice-in-Wonderland presidential election suggests the Saddam regime is beginning to crumble. To the Arab mind I would think it is a shocking demonstration of weakness. I should expect the average Arab observer to be thinking: "He is doing this under pressure from Bush Bush must be winning." I needn't explain what naturally follows from that. For when Ari Fleischer President Bush's spokesman recently mentioned the "one bullet solution" he was probably remembering Nicolae Ceausescu. David Warren
© Ottawa Citizen
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