Beginning of the end for U.S. Middle East hegemony

By Gwynne Dyer

LONDON (JP): Everybody has won, so they shall all have prizes.

United Nations Secretary-General Kofi Annan, in his first major crisis since taking over the job, has delivered the goods. He may look too tame and urbane to beard the 'Beast of Baghdad' in his lair, but the deal he has brought back to New York meets the key U.S. requirement of unlimited access to Saddam Hussein's palaces, with no time limit, for UN arms inspectors.

U.S. President Bill Clinton has managed, if only for a moment, to adopt a rather more 'presidential' posture than the one that now pops into everybody's imagination when his name comes up. He might have preferred the longer distraction that a bombing campaign against Iraq would have provided, but the military futility and huge diplomatic costs of that option made it unpopular even in the Pentagon and the State Department.

Even Russia claims a hand in the success, pointing out that it was Foreign Minister Yevgeny Primakov's call to Saddam on Saturday, warning that there was no support even in Moscow for time limits on the inspection process, that pushed Saddam into making a deal.

But the big winner is certainly Saddam himself. He is still only 60, and he expects to be in power long after all the other players in the drama have retired from office. He plays a long game, and he has just improved his long-term position immensely.

The chemical and biological 'weapons of mass destruction' that we have been hearing so much about recently were never more than minor pieces in a much bigger game. The Iraqi leader has used poison gas against his own people and against Iranians, but he didn't use them against his Arab neighbors, Israel, or their Western backers even at the time of the Gulf War, when he still had thousands of chemical and bacteriological warheads.

Saddam refrained because the retaliation would have been huge: it was the one act that would have united them all in a determination to bring him down. So he was hardly likely to use those weapons now, even if he has hidden a few away -- and the U.S. and Israeli governments knew that very well, despite all the recent public-relations nonsense about gas masks and anthrax vaccinations.

If chemical weapons were really the issue, then Washington would be gearing up for a massive strike against Libya (where it claims that Muammar Qaddafi has a huge poison gas facility under construction), not against Iraq. For both sides, Iraq's alleged weapons are just markers in a game that is really about sanctions.

For seven years now, the United States has used the hunt for these weapons as an excuse to maintain crippling economic sanctions against Baghdad. Sanctions, in turn, are a key part of the American policy of 'dual containment' against Iraq and Iran, the two countries it fears might overthrow what is currently (for the U.S.) an almost ideal status quo in the Middle East.

Iran has 60 million people, a lot of oil, and a (fading) Islamic revolutionary fervor, but its ability to spread its anti- Western ideas on the other side of the Gulf was always greatly constrained by the fact that Iranians are not Arabs. Iraq has only 22 million people, but it is Arab -- and it is the only Arab state to have both oil and water, which makes it potentially the greatest economic and military power in the Arab world.

Iraq was well on its way to attaining that position before Saddam blundered by invading Kuwait in 1990, and incurred the economic sanctions that have now reduced his country to penury. And though the Iraqi dictator is a murderous and unimaginative thug, he does come from a political tradition, that of the Ba'ath Party, that is militantly revolutionary, anti-Western, anti- feudal (and, at least in its original incarnation, anti-religious as well).

Even if he has not a single idealistic bone in his body, Saddam Hussein has always adhered to the Ba'athist ideology because it maximizes the potential importance of his own and his country's role in the world. Making Iraq the greatest Arab power, overthrowing the 'treacherous' pro-Western monarchies of countries like Saudi Arabia and Jordan, and leading a great Arab coalition in a final assault on Israel was and is his long-term strategy.

He may well think that it is now back on track, for what Kofi Annan (and probably Washington) will have to accept in return for unrestricted weapons inspections is an end to economic sanctions against Iraq within the next year or two. The rest of the world, and particularly the rest of the Arab world, is simply no longer willing to use military force to maintain the sanctions.

Saddam is no diplomatic genius. He understood the obvious fact that the inspections were a way of justifying continued sanctions, so he has tried on several occasions to force a negotiation by creating a crisis over access for inspectors. It didn't work in the past, because the coalition against him was still strong. It has worked now because the coalition has fallen apart.

It has fallen apart because the United States could not deliver on the promises it made to its Arab allies in 1990. Since the election of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu's government in Israel, the Arab-Israeli peace process has ground to a complete halt. The hypocrisy of going to war over Iraq's defiance of UN disarmament resolutions, while Israel sits unchallenged on hundreds of (unadmitted) nuclear weapons and huge areas of Arab territory, is just too much for Arabs to swallow.

As a result, even those Arab regimes that have good reason to fear Saddam dare not support military action against him, for fear of the reaction of their own deeply disillusioned populations. Saddam threatens their survival in the long run, but American attacks on Iraq would threaten their survival in the short run.

Saddam will probably keep his word on weapons inspections this time, at least until sanctions are lifted. But they will be lifted, and that will probably mark the beginning of the end of American hegemony in the Middle East.