Military strike against Iraq won't pay for America

By Gwynne Dyer

LONDON (JP): "The ratings are so good, Clinton's already planning the next scandal," said the TV comedian, referring to the highest-ever public approval ratings for the U.S. President only a week after the story broke about his alleged sexual liaison with young White House staffer Monica Lewinsky. For the moment, at least, the American public has chosen to believe Clinton's denials.

And that explains why U.S. Secretary of State Madeleine Albright, in the Middle East to round up support for a U.S. strike against Iraq, can now confidently predict: "It's not days away, and it's not months, so that leaves weeks."

Many American commentators (and most foreign ones) spent the past week predicting that Clinton would bomb Iraq to distract Americans from the scandal engulfing the White House. But that was nonsense: Clinton is clever enough to know that it wouldn't work.

Americans are not stupid, and even the insular and nationalistic Washington press corps would have joined up the dots for the American public if they suspected that that was Clinton's game. So long as Clinton was seen as a beleaguered president on the brink of impeachment, his trouser problem actually protected Saddam Hussein. Both American and world opinion would condemn a U.S. strike against Iraq as merely the diversionary tactic of a desperate man.

But now Clinton has demonstrated his continuing support in American public opinion -- approval ratings of 67-72 percent in weekend polls -- and that changes everything. The polls have set Clinton free to act against Iraq, and the action is imminent.

Russia, France and Turkey are all sending special diplomatic missions to Baghdad this week to try to talk Saddam Hussein down from his high horse. UN Secretary-General Kofi Annan has just offered to double the amount of oil Iraq is allowed to sell every six months to pay for humanitarian imports (to US$5.2 billion), in order to give Saddam a face-saving retreat. They are all quite frightened of what will happen if he doesn't back down.

This time it won't be a few cruise missiles one afternoon and then back to diplomacy. The target this time is the weapons of mass destruction (chemical and biological warheads mounted on modified Scud missiles) that Saddam has allegedly buried away in sites he has declared 'presidential palaces' and closed off to UN arms inspectors. Getting them would not be easy.

In 1995, senior officials from the Pentagon, the State Department and the intelligence agencies took part in a three- week war-game at the U.S. Naval War College in Newport, Rhode Island that was based on a new shoot-out with Iraq. It quickly got out of control, with Iraq using biological weapons in the Gulf and in terrorist attacks on U.S. cities. In the end, the U.S. used nuclear weapons on Iraq.

War-games are not total fantasies. The people playing them are those who would make the real decisions, and they were appalled by the outcome. But when U.S. Assistant Secretary of Defense Kenneth Bacon was asked last week whether the United States would reply to an Iraqi use of biological weapons with 'nuclear penetrating bombs' on the Iraqi weapons sites, he said: "I don't think we've ruled anything in or out in this regard. Our position is that we would respond very aggressively."

These are not the traditional air-bursts that devastate entire cities, but buried and largely 'contained' nuclear explosions. Moreover, Bacon was talking about retaliation for an Iraqi first use of germ weapons. Nevertheless, even conventional U.S. strikes could cause 'spillage' of Saddam's poison gas, anthrax, etc. killing thousands of Iraqis -- and Bacon was actually talking about the first combat use of nuclear weapons since 1945.

Is this wise? True, Saddam is a monster. He invaded Iran in 1980 and caused the deaths of almost a million people in an 8- year war. He invaded Kuwait in 1990, and it took the biggest coalition war since 1945 to get him out. He has fired missiles at Israel, and sponsored terrorist strikes around the planet.

His troops and torturers have killed more Iraqis than all the other regimes to rule Iraq in this century, including its Turkish and British colonial rulers. Even after his defeat in the Gulf War, he continued to work on weapons of mass destruction. There are no loopholes in the arms inspection regime he was forced to sign in 1991, no exemptions for 'presidential sites', but he began to defy the UN as soon as he detected divisions in the Security Council.

Saddam deserves to be punished -- but is the price too high? It could be.

The worry is not so much that strikes on Iraq would kill off the Israeli-Palestinian 'peace process'; Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has already done that quite effectively. Nor is the risk of driving Arab regimes into Saddam's arms any greater than last time; the 'Arab street' has an emotional loyalty to any Arab country against any foreigners, but the governments of Saddam's neighbors have no illusions about him in private.

The risk is simply that air strikes cannot force Saddam into submission unless they are escalated to terrifying levels of destruction, for otherwise he is at no personal risk. And since nobody is willing to commit ground troops to Iraq, the U.S. has no other strategy for finishing what the air strikes would start.

If you don't know how to finish, then don't start. Or at least, don't start yet -- and there is no real urgency. Saddam has been hiding these weapons for years already without using them.

The best interim strategy is the one suggested recently by General Merrill McPeak, former U.S. Air Force Chief of Staff. Extend the 'no-fly' zone to cover the whole of Iraq, including Baghdad: that will meet the psychological need to 'do something'. Keep the pressure on militarily, but don't go off half-cocked. And wait for something to turn up. Quite often, it does.