What more could a dictator want?
Saddam Hussein escaped annihilation in the Persian Gulf War. For a dozen years, through stalling and subterfuge, he has evaded every order to disarm–and avoided every international threat of severe repercussion. Having outlasted weapons inspectors before, he now sits poker-faced as new inspectors–with no real powers of investigation and no desire to display enough candor to spark a war–dutifully pick at the haystack that is Iraq for the deadly needles Hussein possesses.
Best of all for Hussein, European leaders who last autumn insisted on a narrow UN resolution threatening serious consequences if Iraq didn’t disarm now find the prospect of any real consequences too bloodthirsty to endorse. French and German officials want still more time for Iraq to play hide-and-seek.
The French and Germans have telegraphed to Baghdad the message Hussein no doubt anticipated: If you can occupy the inspectors with a little more rope-a-dope, we’ll keep those American cowboys from starting a war.
This week these issues come to a head. On Monday, the inspectors report to the UN Security Council on their findings. On Tuesday, the president gives his State of the Union address. On Wednesday, the Security Council meets to debate what to do with the inspectors’ report.
To those who just tuned in during the last year, President Bush’s talk of forcibly disarming Iraq may look like a rush to judgment. (As opposed to the French and German reaction, shared to varying degrees by Russia and China: a rush to avoid any judgment whatsoever.)
That is sorely inaccurate. Since the end of the Gulf War, Saddam Hussein has resisted the will of the world to surrender the kinds of horrifying weapons he has used on his own people.
The only reason Hussein allowed inspectors back into his country was that Bush called the UN’s bluff: Enforce your thus far toothless resolutions against Iraq, or admit that you are useless. Braced by that challenge, the UN Security Council voted 15-0 to order Iraq to come clean. By no stretch of the imagination has Hussein complied. His voluminous weapons declaration is a sham. His reaction to inspections is characterized by deception rather than disclosure.
Which leads to the next point: The only prayer of Hussein complying short of war is for an unwavering UN to demand that he do so under threat of military pressure. But with France and Germany back in the appeasement game, eager to please pacifist voters at home (and, particularly in the case of France, no less eager to protect business relations with Iraq), why shouldn’t Hussein stick with a strategy of non-compliance that has served him well for 12 years?
Appeasing Saddam, year upon year, has not worked. There is no prospect that more appeasement will suddenly yield results.
No one is spoiling for war in Iraq. But the best chance to avoid it is to show that the UN will at long last force Hussein to meet its demands. That kind of unity forced Hussein to reopen his country to inspectors. It will take that kind of unity to force him to disarm without resort to bloodshed.
The Bush administration indicated late in the week that it will give inspectors more time to do their work, beyond the release of their report on Monday. Yet, the French and Germans in effect have accused Bush of wanting war at any cost. Judging by their two-faced behavior–supporting last autumn’s UN resolution but now abandoning its threat–the problem is that many Europeans want short-term peace at any price.
