Where is Maggie Thatcher when we need her? Shortly after Iraq invaded Kuwait, she met with President Bush and told him, “This is no time to go wobbly.” There is no one around to tell that to Bill Clinton. And wobbly he went.
Saddam Hussein once again plays the pull-America’s-chain game and Clinton meekly permits a return to the status quo ante. Saddam expels United Nations inspectors, spurns previous agreements, and brings the United States to the brink of war. He does this with impunity. Indeed, with each pull of the chain, he gains.
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Last February, he got Kofi Annan to neuter the UN arms inspection regime. This time around he got Annan’s pledge to work to lift the post-Gulf War economic sanctions.
What’s wrong with this crazy game is not the injustice–justice took a holiday when George Bush allowed Saddam to survive the Gulf War–but the incentive. It is simply perverse to reward Saddam. It guarantees that he will do it yet again.
Saddam gains, too, by America’s loss. And the loss is considerable. Not only in treasure–for the third time in a year, a $1 billion-plus buildup–but in morale. There are only so many times you can send fighter pilots to the brink, put warships on battle alert, recall B-52s as they approach enemy airspace, without demoralizing the troops.
And nothing so demoralizes as a show of irresolution by the high command. Clinton was given an extraordinary opportunity to strike a massive blow against Saddam. And he flinched.
Rarely have the stars been so aligned in our favor. As in 1990, Saddam badly miscalculated. The expulsion of the UN inspectors was such a blatant provocation that it left him totally isolated. He lost Russia. He lost China. He lost France. And then fatally, he lost the Arabs.
The crucial event was the unusually strong resolution coming from eight Arab states (Egypt, Syria, Saudi Arabia and five Gulf states) blaming the crisis and all its consequences on Saddam. Their declaration that whatever disaster befell Iraq would be on Saddam’s head was a bright green light to Clinton from quarters that for years had been flashing nothing but yellow and red.
Never in the years since the end of the Gulf War have conditions been better to severely weaken, if not bring down Saddam. Compared to 1991, his position is militarily and politically weaker and, with Westerners having spent seven years roaming around his country, our intelligence is correspondingly better. Even the moon was on our side: waning (dark nights are safer for bombers).
Unable to distinguish a crisis from an opportunity, however, Clinton blew this extraordinary opportunity. Saddam’s overt dismissal of the UN inspection regime presented Clinton with a clear, understandable, universally accepted casus belli. It is now gone.
Clinton now claims that nothing is lost: If Saddam does not live up to his word–as we know he will not–and the inspectors are obstructed, Clinton says he is prepared to strike again.
Fat chance. If Clinton was reluctant to attack when he had unanimous international support and a clear casus belli, what are the chances he would go to war if chief arms inspector Richard Butler is, say, delayed entry to a wing of a pharmaceutical plant? Risk 10,000 Iraqi dead (the military’s estimate of casualties from an initial strike) over some obscure, messy inspection “modality”? The very idea is ridiculous.
The moment has passed. And for what? For a return of the UN Special Commission? By this administration’s own admission, UNSCOM has been increasingly ineffectual. Since Clinton’s last great self-proclaimed victory over Saddam (Annan’s February mission to Baghdad), UNSCOM has been an empty shell. That is why Scott Ritter resigned: UNSCOM’s phantom inspecting reprised that old Soviet workers’ joke, “They pretend to pay us. We pretend to work.”
The administration confuses ends and means. UNSCOM is a means to the end of disarming Iraq’s weapons of mass destruction. Does anyone doubt it will be thwarted again?
The end of U.S. policy is, to the greatest degree possible, to disarm, disrupt and destroy Saddam’s regime. A relentless air campaign had a good chance of doing that.
Yes, 40 days of air war did not do it in 1991. But Saddam was much stronger in 1991. And the fact that this time around he was so desperate to avoid the coming American attack belies the defeatists here who think it would have failed or even backfired.
Saddam obviously did not think so. He maneuvered his way out of this crisis because he genuinely feared the possible chain reaction of a massive American attack. His fear was our opportunity. Clinton let it pass.