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COMMENTARY
December 7, 2002
The crunch
About midday today our time Iraq will present the "full confession" demanded of it by the unanimous U.N. Security Council resolution of Nov. 8th. The resolution was foggy on the remedy side but absolutely clear on this: the regime of Saddam Hussein had 30 days to make an absolutely complete disclosure of its illicit weapons programmes. What Saddam will almost certainly do is table a large quantity of distractingly complex but actually empty documents. They will account for the importation and distribution within Iraq of a very large quantity of "dual use" goods. Hidden within this massive paperwork will be no admission that any of these has gone to feed biological chemical or nuclear weapons-building and research. But the dictator's scribes will have done everything they could in the time available to confuse the issue by supplying suggestive false leads. They know they can count on Hans Blix and the U.N. bureaucracy to assiduously follow each of these false leads as they try to "run out the clock" on the winter fighting season. As I write this Mr. Blix has announced that he intends to conceal the most interesting parts of the document from the United States and other Security Council members until he has had time to consider them. This will add another dimension to the confusion. The U.N. bureaucracy has further announced that it will also take the time to carefully collate the Iraqi declaration with more than a million pages it has accumulated from previous U.N. weapons inspections pausing to ask for clarifications as they go along. So far as I can make out the main talking point within the Bush administration has been how much secret U.S. information should be declassified and publicized in response to all this gobbledegook? In other words should the imposters be immediately exposed? It is an interesting question because it tends to split the bureaucratic interests within the U.S. government in new ways: military against military and diplomatic against diplomatic. There is a large potential cost in American and other lives if too much information is given away; a fact that does not interest the media. This must be weighed against the advantage of bringing the U.N. farce to an immediate conclusion and putting the follow-up Security Council resolution -- to authorize military action -- straight on the table. As President Bush has made abundantly clear he will do when he does with or without Security Council authorization. But he has promised at least to consult the U.N. and he will not fail to do that. Therefore it is unlikely the war will start next week. But there is less and less to wait for and more and more to be lost by waiting. For it becomes clearer that more games will be played the more time is allowed to play them. Example: Mr. Blix now says forensic tests of any soil or other samples found by his inspectors in Iraq will be delayed beyond the final deadline for his inspection report in late January. Mr. Blix and his UNMOVIC comedy team of weapons inspectors backed up by the whole U.N. bag of string think they are tying up Gulliver in a thousand little threads. Their problem is that Gulliver is not actually sleeping. And the amount of irritation Mr. Blix has caused by refusing to take his job seriously has become a part of the larger equation. Early this week he met with Condoleezza Rice the U.S. national security adviser in New York. Ms Rice directly demanded on behalf of the Bush administration that Mr. Blix cut out the act and begin debriefing major Iraqi scientists and administrators in isolation from Saddam -- even "kidnapping" them if necessary. He has the clear power and duty to do that under his U.N. mandate. Mr. Blix seems not only to have refused but to have enlisted help from the French and others to apply diplomatic pressure the other way. He is moreover refusing either to expand his investigative team to a reasonable size to add technically competent people to it or to depart from his present practice of visiting Iraqi sites one at a time -- and in caravan with his Iraqi minders who phone warnings to the destination ahead. As I was writing Wednesday this goes beyond mere incompetence. Mr. Blix has clearly been instructed by his masters to cover for Saddam. It is a game of diplomatic brinkmanship. Mr. Blix Kofi Annan the U.N. secretary-general and in the background the French and the Russians and others working from the various different motives I have tried to explain in previous articles are counting on Mr. Bush to be too cautious and diplomatic to call their bluff. They know that the political and diplomatic cost to the Bush administration of calling this bluff -- of identifying the game they are playing a kind of multilateral "monkey in the middle" -- will be very high. It could get very ugly. They are trying to bid that price higher and higher with the help of the purblind and largely anti-American international media elites. They assume that in the end Mr. Bush will prove a conventional politician who will not take political risk beyond a certain point and would rather take his knocks backing down. They have genuinely underestimated how much is at stake here. And I think they have completely misread their man. For here is the plain truth in it's simplest knocked-down form: If the United States and allies cannot eliminate so obvious a malefactor as Saddam the "war on terror" is over and we lost. The future of state-sponsored terrorism is secure the proliferation of weapons of mass destruction will accelerate their use in blackmail becomes inevitable the check on their actual use is relaxed the annihilation of the people of Israel can be safely predicted and the rest of us must learn to live our lives under the threat of smallpox anthrax nerve gas Scuds and radiation. The reader may not think it can be that simple and there would seem to be majorities in Canada and Europe who crave a more complicated view. But as Winston Churchill spent the later 1930s trying to explain to the smug and the intellectually sophisticated it IS that simple. A strong indication that the White House will neither back down nor has lost its way came with the appointment this week of Elliott Abrams as the new White House "point man" for Near East and North Africa (read Israel-Palestine). It broke with tradition: the man who gets that job normally comes from the State Department or the CIA. Mr. Abrams is extensively on record rejecting the defunct "Oslo process" to which large sections of both departments are still committed. He is also among the "human rights activists" - a man who refuses to buy into the thesis again rife among the bureaucrats at State and CIA that Arabs are incapable of democratic self-government (and therefore if you want to replace one dictator you must be ready to install another). He does not believe we are "stuck" with monsters like Saddam and Yasser Arafat through the indefinite future. He is "outside the box" of the old realpolitik consensus -- along with Cheney Rumsfeld Rice Wolfowitz and Mr. Bush himself. For those in Israel and America who welcomed President Bush's June 24th speech on Israel-Palestine policy and then were appalled by State Department backsliding and international diplomatic machinations to obviate the speech Mr. Abrams's appointment came as joyous news. To the New York Times and CNN it came as an inscrutable mystery. But the meaning of the appointment is in fact very clear: The administration remains determined not to allow another sovereign Islamist terror state to be set up in the suburbs of Jerusalem; not even to win support in Europe and among the "moderate Arab governments". Then yesterday Paul O'Neill the treasury secretary and Larry Lindsey the top economic adviser -- the Bush administration's most conspicuous under-performers -- suddenly resigned. (I.e. they were sacked.) The timing was interesting and I would even speculate that there was a message in it for Colin Powell (the secretary of state) and George Tenet (the CIA director) -- that with the mid-term elections out of the way no one is irreplaceable. I am however going out on a limb here. What remains beyond doubt is the commitment of the Bush administration to root out the enemy that appeared from the skies in New York and Washington on Sept. 11th 2001. And not to remove a part of this cancer but the whole thing -- no matter how long it takes no matter what it costs. It would be a lot easier faster and cheaper with the unstinting help of all nominal allies but the job will be done with or without them. The issue may indeed be perceived differently in other capitals but in Washington it is life or death and they've chosen life. David Warren
© Ottawa Citizen
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