Saddam's two-way bet on row with UN may succeed

By Gwynne Dyer

LONDON (JP): "When we took this decision," said Iraq's ambassador to the Arab League, Nabil Nijem, in Abu Dhabi on Monday, "we were expecting, as in the past, that America would take hostile positions, including the use of military means against Iraq."

In other words, go ahead and use your cruise missiles; you don't scare us.

This is the first time that Saddam Hussein has actually tried to end the work of the United Nations Special Commission (UNSCOM) that was set up to destroy Iraqi weapons of mass destruction after the 1991 Gulf War, and most people assume he cannot succeed. Most people may be wrong.

By setting a deadline for the expulsion from Iraq of all American members of the UNSCOM team (10 out of a hundred people), Saddam has called a showdown on the whole process of eliminating Iraq's chemical and biological weapons. And he could win it.

Saddam is an absolutely rotten strategist, because he understands little about the world outside Iraq. So he has made huge blunders, like twice invading neighboring countries (Iran in 1980, Kuwait in 1990) in blatant disregard of both common sense and the urgent warnings of his own diplomats and intelligence chiefs.

But the Iraqi dictator is an absolutely brilliant tactician, and this time he has got a very promising situation to exploit.

For six years now, UNSCOM has been trying to ferret out Saddam's chemical and biological weapons programs, while the International Atomic Energy Agency has been doing the same for his nuclear weapons projects. It is a game of hide-and-seek in which Iraqi officials have routinely dragged their feet, lied, and cooked the books in order to conceal and hang onto as much they can.

At the beginning, the Iraqis admitted only that they had 11,000 chemical weapons. (They could hardly deny that, since Saddam had been openly using poison gas against both Iranian soldiers and his own restive Kurdish population).

But they denied having any biological or nuclear weapons programs.

Since then, one at a time, the UN inspectors have uncovered and shut down four nuclear weapons projects. They discovered that Iraq had imported 40 tons of biological growth medium to produce anthrax and botulism cultures in quantities big enough to kill everybody in the world.

They found 150,000 chemical weapons plus more than 100 missile delivery systems, including Scud missiles with anthrax and botulism warheads aimed at Riyadh and Tel Aviv.

It's been like pulling teeth. "The pattern is to declare the minimum you can get away with, but never declare the full truth," said a former UN inspector. But recently, UNSCOM has been getting close to one of the remaining unsolved mysteries: what became of 750 tons of chemical precursors for lethal VX liquid nerve agent that Iraq had imported before the Gulf War.

The Iraqis claimed that most of it was destroyed in Allied bombing raids during the war, and that they unilaterally destroyed the rest shortly afterwards. UNSCOM kept looking, however, and its chief weapons inspector, Richard Butler of Australia, sees a link with the current crisis: "I think we were getting hot, and maybe that's part of the reason why (the Iraqis) took this decision."

In banning Americans from the UN inspection teams working in Iraq (and even more in threatening to shoot down American U-2 spy planes that overfly Iraq in the service of the UN), Saddam is going for broke. The UN cannot let Baghdad dictate the nationality of its inspection teams, so either he backs down or else the teams must stop their work. In effect he is challenging the whole arms inspection regime. Why now?

Iraq's ostensible reason for launching this confrontation -- to retaliate against a UN Security Council resolution that threatened a travel ban on Iraqi officials who interfere with the UN's work in the country -- simply doesn't make sense. But neither is it worth it just to protect Saddam's nerve weapons.

There are no plausible domestic reasons either. Apart from one easily thwarted coup attempt in June, 1996, Saddam's secret police seem to have the country well under control.

It's true that the disputes within the ruling Takriti clan -- most senior regime members come from the small town of Takrit, north of Baghdad -- are getting increasingly lethal. Saddam had two sons-in-law killed in February, 1996, after they defected to Jordan and then unwisely returned to Iraq. His own son Uday was badly wounded in an assassination attempt last December. But it's hard to see how an external crisis would distract attention in what is essentially a family quarrel over the spoils.

So give the man credit for tactical intelligence, and assume that he has some achievable goal in view. What is it?

There are two major restraints on Saddam left over from the Gulf War: UNSCOM, which restricts his war-making capabilities, and the UN trade sanctions that sap Iraq's economic strength. What Saddam has found (or thinks he has) is a tactic that will end either one or the other.

He saw the divisions over the recent UN resolution censuring Iraq's evasions on the arms-control front. Ten Security Council members voted for it, but five others, including permanent members France and Russia, abstained. So he reasons that if the Security Council ever did find the nerve to vote for decisive military action against Iraq, France and/or Russia would veto it.

If he's wrong, then he can just back down at the last minute. If he's right, then the United States might try to bring him to heel unilaterally -- but the Clinton administration, lacking international support and fearing a domestic backlash if there were significant numbers of American casualties (five or more, in this context), would not go beyond cruise missile attacks and the like.

That didn't work in 1993, or 1994, or last September. It wouldn't work this time either. As Nabil Nijem said, the Iraqis have discounted this sort of "military means" in advance. So either Saddam frees himself from the UNSCOM regime -- or an embarrassed Security Council saves face by negotiating a relaxation of the UN trade sanctions in exchange for UNSCOM's return.

That is Saddam's two-way bet, and it may succeed.