Going with a Winner: The world takes sides, or hangs back

National Review, Oct 14, 2002 by David Pryce-Jones

In the left corner, the United Nations; in the right corner, the United States. It looks like something of a championship match. Except that it isn't really, so long as the Bush administration keeps its resolve. It is a question of doing the right and obvious thing: It is unthinkable that a proven killer like Saddam Hussein should be able to deploy weapons of mass destruction. The sole means to that end is regime change. If the U.N. has its way, Saddam will give up some disposable part of his deadly weaponry, keep the rest, use it as opportunity arises, and outlast this President Bush and probably subsequent American presidents too. The prospect of such a man forcibly uniting the Arab world concentrates the mind.

The pitiful record of the U.N. in the Middle East speaks for itself. Far from preventing war, it precipitated it in 1967; stood by impotently in 1973; could do nothing about the Syrian invasion of Lebanon and would have accepted the Iraqi invasion of Kuwait unless the United States had acted; prolonged the Palestinian refugee problem; washed its hands of Israeli security; in short, has been pointless at best, harmful at worst.

But we live in a multilateral world, a strange euphemism which actually translates, "Let me see you furthering my interests better than I can do for myself." Its converse, unilateralism, means "The Americans are behaving in their own interest." Multilateralists devise plausible reasons for a wrong position. The Russians want money out of Iraq. President Putin expects 8 billion dollars, and ex-president Boris Yeltsin, now a ventriloquist's dummy, therefore bellows on his behalf, "We should not allow a U.S. military strike under any circumstances." France wants money too, but also la gloire, and so President Chirac calls for U.N. resolutions the way a prima donna goes for the high note. Out of anxiety to be reelected, Chancellor Schroeder speaks of the American "adventure" and promises to have nothing to do with it, may deny air space to U.S. forces, and wouldn't even support a U.N. campaign, if there were to be one. So the new German pacifism has an anti-American symmetry with the old German militarism. Herta Daubler- Gmelin, the German minister of justice, feels free to compare Bush to Hitler: "Bush wants to divert attention from domestic difficulties. That is a popular method. Hitler has done that before." Hers is a contribution to be remembered for a long time.

At least Tony Blair is convinced of the danger posed by Saddam, and is preparing to publish a dossier from intelligence sources to inform the public. But about 160 members of Parliament have registered dissent, and may vote against him when policy on Iraq comes to be debated in Westminster. Facing a major row with his own party, Blair is pinning his hopes on weapons inspection rather than regime change.

You have to give it to Saddam. Floating the idea of the unconditional return of the inspectors has been enough to launch a dazzling shoal of red herrings. Brought out of deserved retirement, Dr. Hans Blix, a former Swedish foreign minister, is head of the present inspectorate, known by the acronym of UNMOVIC. Hardly had Saddam made his offer before Dr. Blix was coming up with an immense list of "practicalities." For example, several months may be required, according to Blix, before UNMOVIC personnel and equipment are in place. It may be a year before any report on Iraqi weaponry is ready. Then it turns out that inspectors will have access only to military sites. Unconditional means conditional.

Iraqi defectors have informed everybody that Saddam has hidden the manufacturing plants and storage depots of his weapons of mass destruction in civilian sites all over the country, invisible from the air and probably on the ground as well. Seven hundred such sites (some authorities say twice as many) are thought to have been identified, but who knows what the reality is? Previous inspectors found mostly what was left for them to find. Tricks are sure to be played again until Saddam has only to declare that the inspectors still find nothing significant because there is nothing significant to find. That way he can hope to survive inspections and to keep his weapons until he is free to use them. There's also a suggestion that a limited number of U.S. troops should accompany the inspectors. A cut-price invasion of the sort would place all concerned at risk of a provocation or ambush at a time of Saddam's choosing.

An Arab proverb has it that a man who takes sides with a loser is not fit to be a statesman. In the past twelve months there have been 17 anti-American demonstrations in the Muslim world, all of them small- scale, and most of them in Peshawar and Quetta, the two most Islamist cities of Pakistan. The recent arrest after a gunfight in Karachi of Ramzi Binalshibh and other top al-Qaeda operatives did not cause attacks on Americans or their representative institutions like embassies and cultural centers.

Arabs are in a bind. Like everybody else, they know that Saddam is indefensible, and puts the whole Arab world to shame. But to say so out loud seems to be another equally painful way of shaming the whole Arab world. They'd like to be rid of Saddam without anyone noticing. So the press is full of anonymous "senior Arab diplomats" maintaining, "There's no support for regime change," while colleagues are furtively preparing for that very eventuality. Double standards are the order of the day. Jordanian parliamentary deputies, for example, have called on "all Arab countries to move collectively and seriously, and to adopt a united stand to confront any aggression against Iraq and to find ways to bring it out of the ordeal." At the same time, Jordan has allowed American military preparations at the base at Mafraq, and is arranging for cheap American-supplied oil to replace subsidized Iraqi oil.