White House anxious to find smoking gun

0 Comments | Insight on the News, Jan 7, 2003 | by Jamie Dettmer

Will there be war with Iraq? In the run-up to Christmas, U.N. Secretary-General Kofi Annan presented the best public face he could, arguing that a U.S.-led war against Iraq isn't inevitable. But according to senior U.N. sources, Annan is far from optimistic about conflict being averted. "He feels he has to do all he can to prevent war, and he'll continue with his efforts right up to the final moment," says a U.N. official.

The fateful consensus among senior U.N. diplomats is that war is coming--and Annan isn't out of step with that point of view. Most believe January remains the likely month for U.S. action, although others at U.N. headquarters in New York City suspect the invasion will take place later in the year.

Who is gunning for war? The Bush administration, U.N. officials believe. Their sense of it is that President George W. Bush can't afford to back down and appear to be like the good old Duke of York in the children's nursery rhyme, marching his troops to the top of the hill and then marching them down again.

"How can he turn around and say Iraq is disarmed and the threat is over?" asks a U.N. diplomat. "This administration has thrived politically in the post-9/11 atmosphere of crisis." He accuses the administration of fueling the sense of crisis.

It is ironic then that the pre-Christmas period also saw the Pentagon hawks temper their rhetoric. Both Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld and his deputy, Paul Wolfowitz, affected measured patience after Iraq filed its 11,000-page declaration announcing that it doesn't have the weapons of mass destruction the Bush administration says it has. Rumsfeld maintained that the Americans were in no hurry to dismiss formally the Iraqi declaration and that it would take time to analyze the Iraqis' claims of having destroyed their entire stock of chemical weapons and of being free of nuclear-weapons programs.

"Is this part of a psy-op effort by the Pentagon to lull the Iraqis into thinking an attack is some way off?" quipped a diplomat. "Or maybe they haven't got all their aircraft carriers lined up."

Or is it a sign the Bush administration now realizes that advancing into war won't be easy? So far the Iraqis have offered the Americans no immediate cause for war--not one anyway that would convince skeptics on the U.N. Security Council and persuade what passes for world opinion that the time has come to throw the dice in the Middle East and take down Saddam Hussein.

U.N. weapons inspectors in their visits to Iraqi industrial and scientific sites apparently have found only scattered irregularities--mostly involving the transfer of equipment monitored by earlier inspections in the 1990s. Iraqi officials have made a great show of resolving the irregularities speedily by identifying where the equipment had been moved.

As INSIGHT goes to press, U.N. sources say suspicious traces of weapons-of-mass-destruction activity have been found but nothing conclusive--although that hardly is surprising given that Saddam has had four years to cover his tracks and hide what he may have.

Meanwhile, the White House continues to insist that it has "clear evidence" that Iraq has persisted in developing weapons of mass destruction. But it hasn't released that evidence, and some in New York at the United Nations, while not doubting that Saddam has continued to fashion gruesome weapons, wonder if the Americans have the details they claim to possess.

That well may leave the Bush administration relying on inconsistencies in the declaration filed by the Iraqis. Whether that will be enough to swing international opinion behind action remains to be seen. Skeptics will argue that the inconsistencies don't prove the Iraqis have continued developing weapons of mass destruction. It also leaves Washington casting about for other damning material and charges, including the midweek claim, again unproved, that Islamic extremists affiliated with al-Qaeda took possession of a chemical weapon in Iraq last November or late October.

With evidence proving elusive that Saddam has resumed work on weapons programs, U.S. officials are piling pressure on U.N. inspectors to intensify their inspections. There is a demand for the U.N. teams to use the full range of powers written into the tough new inspections mandate the Security Council approved Nov. 8. With its eye out for a smoking gun, the Bush administration once again is urging the U.N. teams to fly Iraqi scientists and their families outside Iraq for questioning.

The quality of any evidence against Saddam no doubt will determine how the Security Council reacts to an Anglo-American demand for action. Some senior U.N. officials think Washington and London will decide not to return to the Security Council seeking approval for action on the grounds that to do so could result in a rebuff. British Prime Minister Tony Blair already has said that in his view any material breaches by the Iraqis can be punished without recourse to the Security Council. The British reading of the Nov. 8 resolution is that it includes pre-authorization.