The West and Saddam

It remains to be seen whether or not the agreement signed by United Nations Secretary General Kofi Annan and Iraqi Deputy Prime Minister Tareq Aziz in Baghdad yesterday will remove deadlock from the weapons monitoring process in Iraq. The same question hangs over the threatened U.S.-led bombing raid on Iraq in punishment for a lack of cooperation with the UN weapons monitoring team.

The success of the accord depends not only on the reception it meets with in the United Nations Security Council -- and in Washington -- but also on the sincerity of Iraqi President Saddam Hussein, who has shown himself to be very unreliable in the past.

Saddam, despite past indifference to loss of life among his subjects, cannot once again be as mindless as when in 1990 he ordered his troops to invade Kuwait. If Saddam ignores the United Nations accord he will lose the support of Russia, France and the Arab nations who oppose the U.S. attack. Optimists believe that Saddam has common sense enough to realize he can ill afford to alienate such hefty diplomatic backing.

Whatever may come of the Baghdad accord, it will serve as a lesson for Saddam, Washington and other western countries. Washington needs to ponder the cause of its diminishing popularity among former allies, especially Arab nations. These countries believe that an attack will hurt the innocent and be wholly impotent in arresting Iraqi production of chemical weaponry.

Arab nations feel Washington must be reminded that Iraq is not the only country to regularly defy the United Nations. Israel at times has been guilty of the same behavior, a stance made possible by double standards in American foreign policy.

The Arab nations seem aware that in all likelihood Saddam will eventually turn his weapons on one of their number. Despite vicious rhetoric directed against the pariah Israel, Saddam has only ever used his military power against Moslem neighbors and has yet to take part in any war against the Jewish state.

But Iraqi chemical weapon strikes are still a remote threat alongside the daily and vindictive actions of Israel toward the Palestinians. By refusing to support a U.S. strike, Arab nations are saying that they want to see U.S. President Bill Clinton's Middle Eastern policy formulated in Washington and not in Jerusalem.

The current crisis should also provoke western countries into reflection on the role they played in transforming the Iraqi tyrant into a regional power through support provided during the Iran-Iraq war of the 1980s. Aid provided by western countries included compounds used in his biological weapons program, a nuclear reactor (later bombed by Israel), radar, high technology warplanes and the so-called "growth medium" used in the manufacture of bacteriological weapons. The West continued to supply these munitions, even after Iraq used poisonous gas against Iranian soldiers in the mid-1980s and later against Kurdish civilians in 1988.

This was done in the hope that Saddam would become a bumper against the "danger" of the newly-established Islamic Republic of Iran, which western countries saw as a menace to their allies in the region.

Some of these same countries now see Saddam as the greatest danger in the region. Others see him as a beneficial tyrant who should be protected from further punishment in order that he pay his debts to western countries or provide them with business opportunities.

In the flux of international relations, where self-interest is at the heart of policy, there is no friend or foe who can ever be considered permanent. Ironically, that is how the mission of peace which produced the Baghdad accord will be evaluated -- its success will hinge on how skillfully it matches its peaceful goal to the self-interest of the two loggerheads.