Saddam has to withdraw

Saddam Hussein has thrown down the glove again, and there can be no fuzziness in the response. Iraq's dictator moved a large armored force to the border of Kuwait because he thought he could rattle the world into dropping the sanctions it imposed on him after his 1990 invasion of that same country. He has to be told that sanctions will not be dropped at gunpoint: that nobody will even think about how they might eventually be dropped until those tanks are back where they belong: and that if he does not pull the tanks back, he could find himself at the losing end of another war.

Some voices have been saying that it is better to abandon the sanctions than to face a new fight. After all, Saddam seems to have complied with most of the rules the world imposed on his military. Why fuss about details? The answer is that what is at issue is far more than details.

The world has yet to see whether the monitoring system designed to check Saddam's compliance with those military limitations will in fact work properly. He still has not recognized Kuwait's right to exist within its present borders, or explained what happened to the Kuwaitis his secret policemen rounded up in 1990 -- both things that the United Nations has called for under pain of continuing sanctions. He has done nothing to ease the barbarity of his rule inside Iraq, another UN demand.

Worse, to drop sanctions now would make the Middle East a much more dangerous place.

-- International Herald Tribune