Likelihood of Attack on Iraq—But Not a Unilateral U.S. One—Remains High

By Ian Williams

At the end of November, U.N. inspectors had already begun their long-delayed scrutiny of Iraq for weapons of mass destruction. The years spent waiting for Iraq to admit them had given them plenty of time for training in every aspect of their work. They even had courses in cultural sensitivity (training, one can’t help but note, that would certainly benefit much of the current U.S. administration and members of Congress). Pessimists assume that their work will lead to the U.S. going to war with Iraq. Since the passing of Security Council Resolution 1441, however, it is unlikely to be the unilateral American attack that many in the Bush administration wanted, and that the rest of the world feared.

In fact, history will probably record that the opening skirmishes of Desert Storm II were fought in Washington, between the State Department and Colin Powell on one side and Richard Perle, Paul Wolfowitz, Donald Rumsfeld and to a lesser extent, Vice President Dick Cheney on the other. Colin Powell won, and George W. Bush appointed him as his champion like a medieval king honoring a knight triumphant in the lists.

Ironically, the probable result of the secretary of state’s victory over the hawks is that a successful war against Iraq is now more likely than if they had had their way. The unanimity of the vote for Resolution 1441 was unthinkable two months earlier—and would have remained unthinkable if the hawks had had their way in the negotiation both inside Washington and with the other Council members. If war comes, the resolution means that neighboring countries that would not have cooperated before will now do so more willingly.

The high probability of war resulting from 1441 is disturbing. Of course, the half-digested lumps of gristly ambiguity in the final product might make the resolution unappetizing for many purists, but Chancellor Bismarck’s comment, made in a different phase of German diplomacy, that people who want to appreciate treaties and sausages should not watch them being made, applies to Security Council decisions as well. Those who denounced the U.S. for not getting a United Nations’ mandate against Iraq may now have to eat their words, gristle and all.

At the moment, the unanimous decision of the world’s only body with the power to initiate a legal military attack against Iraq has served notice on its rulers that they must cooperate. If, as seems likely, Powell hoods the hawks, and the U.S. waits for another genuine, visible and serious “material breach,” then Saddam Hussain is more than half responsible for his failure to abide by the ceasefire resolution he agreed to in order to save his hide back in 1991.

The unanimity of the vote for Resolution 1441 was unthinkable two months earlier

Looking at Hussain’s record of weapons fetishism and dissimulation, one can only suspect that there will indeed be programs to develop chemical and biological weapons, and the missiles to deliver them, and that the regime will try to hide them. The chances are that they will be found—or that the Iraqis will ham-fistedly try to prevent the inspectors from finding them. In the event of such a material breach of the resolution, there will be, as it says, “serious consequences.”

Even if Saddam Hussain were to cooperate as completely as the resolution demanded, the visible humiliation could well be the final trigger for internal revolt. Already the near riots outside the prisons after Saddam Hussein’s amnesty have the whiff of a “Ceausescu moment”: that critical time when a people senses that their tyrant has lost his clothes.

Despite the concessions to reality and diplomacy that the hawks were forced to make, Washington has certainly triumphed in that Iraq is now the lead subject on the Security Council agenda, although no other member would have ranked it so importantly. Even Bush’s closest ally, Tony Blair, has been vainly trying to point out the importance of the Israel/Palestine issue, both in its own right and in terms of coalition building. The Cyprus question, or the Pakistan-India nuclear stand-off both pose a far more potent threat to international peace and security. Even figured by the number of U.N. resolutions defied, Iraq is far from the worst scofflaw.

It is depressing to think that Ariel Sharon’s attacks on the Palestinian Authority, and indeed on the Palestinians, merited Security Council resolutions six months ago—but now do not even make the agenda. Then President George W. Bush said he thought the Israelis should pull out immediately; now he is about to offer them billions of dollars in aid and loan guarantees—in complete reversal of his father’s stand a decade ago when he defied AIPAC and refused to finance Likud’s settlement policy.

Still, the final text of Resolution 1441 echoes the international sigh of relief that greeted George Bush’s Sept. 12 speech announcing his newfound devotion to the United Nations. And he certainly can claim vindication for a tough line, in that there is no way that Iraq would have admitted the U.N. inspectors if it were not for the American threats.

For most U.N. members, President Bush’s speech removed the frightening prospect of the world’s most important nation flouting the U.N. Charter and the major principles of international law on which the post-WWII settlement depends. Thus many were prepared to accommodate Washington’s whims—even fairly lethal ones—to preserve the appearance of legality. Those who were uncomfortable were so not out of concern for Saddam Hussain, but more out of worry for the implications for themselves.

Credit Where Due

Although the resolution was an American victory (even if the hawks are too far out in orbit to recognize it), credit is still due to the foreign diplomats who ground down some of the most unacceptably spiky portions of the original U.S. draft. Besides the much more public French and Russian role, even the British quietly exhorted a multilateral approach under cover of their publicly uncritical support.

All of them tried to bolster Powell in the internal Washington fights. One factor which probably helped Powell’s case with the president was public opinion. Despite the hard right’s pressure, Bush has shown pragmatic attention to polls on other issues (for example, his silence over Social Security privatization during the November elections). When Bush refers to Iraq’s terrorist connections with Sept. 11, most foreigners roll their eyes in disbelief. A Pew research poll, however, showed that a frighteningly high proportion of Americans, 66 percent, think that Iraq was involved in the Sept. 11 attacks. Nevertheless, those same polls showed that there was not much enthusiasm for American unilateral action against Saddam Hussain without allies, and the opposition in the Security Council almost certainly exacerbated the worries of the public.

In the end, Powell, leveraging the resistance of the French-led coalition in the Security Council, invoking the support of the British, and helped by the polls, was able to win in both senses. Apart from deferring to international legality, the final draft has come a long way from its take-it-or-leave-it origins. When Baghdad originally accepted inspections, it visibly annoyed the president. But he soon recovered, and the final resolution, while strict, genuinely gives Iraq a chance to avoid war by cooperation with UNMOVIC and the IAEA. It also avoids giving the U.S. the automatic right to attack on which the hawks originally had insisted.

Powell’s internal victory allowed him to deploy diplomatic skills that achieved a result unmatchable by the bluster of the hawks, whose inflexible positions could scarcely muster a bare majority in the Council before. It is a lesson in effective diplomacy for Bush, and a big boost to the secretary of state’s position.

On the other hand, despite Powell’s pragmatic and principled commitment to multilateralism, the administration’s good cop/bad cop approach is worrying in its implications. In effect, the other members of the Security Council have given deputies’ stars, search warrants and a near enough definitive promise of arrest and execution if anything is found, to an American lynch mob. In return, Washington has not even renounced its claimed right of unilateral attack.

On a more positive note, it has in effect pledged not to exercise its claims—if the U.N. does the “right thing” and provides multilateral sanction for what the U.S. wants. Similarly, the original American position was that it did not want a second resolution. By the end, however, its stand was more that it did not need one. Once it agreed to a recalled meeting of the Council to consider any Iraqi breaches, it had in fact paved the way for the French hastily to table a new resolution authorizing the action that Washington was certain to take anyway.

It is inconceivable that the U.S. would oppose, let alone veto, such a resolution when the time came, and, taken together, the two resolutions would make the military task of attacking Iraq so much easier when the time comes. After all, as Powell knows from the first Gulf war, even a superpower needs allies to conduct operations far from home.

On the other hand, having put so much effort into the resolution and the U.N. road, it should be apparent to the president that the U.S. would take a severe diplomatic beating if it tried to rush to war without an excuse reasonable enough to convince the Security Council. That was tested when the hawks shouted that Iraqi shots at patrolling U.S. and British aircraft breached clause 8 of the resolution, which says that “Iraq not take or threaten hostile acts directed against any representative or personnel of the United Nations or the IAEA or of any Member State taking action to uphold any Council resolution.”

Their efforts to railroad the administration into war failed—not least because in Security Council negotiations, precisely this scenario had been mentioned and U.S. diplomats had disclaimed it, since they knew that its fellow Security Council members did not believe that the patrols over the no-fly zones had in fact been authorized by the U.N.

Under the timetable, Iraq had until Dec. 8 to provide a “full and frank” disclosure of its weapons programs. If it is actually full and frank, and the inspectors find no evidence to the contrary (or the U.S. satellites and intelligence sources cannot), then Iraq could actually be on the road to an end to sanctions when the inspectors’ work is complete. In that sense, the Bush administration’s hard line will have done Saddam Hussain a big favor by pushing him against his will into doing the right thing. Few people, however, expect him to take the opportunity.

Ian Williams is a free-lance journalist based at the United Nations.