SADDAM WINS
Bolton, John R.
SADDAM WINS by John R. Bolton IN AN ASTONISHING PAIR OF REPORTS at the end of last week, the Washington Post and NBC revealed that the Clinton administration has repeatedly sought to limit the...
...would finally compel a consensus that the strategy of containment is doomed and there is no alternative to replacing the Iraqi regime...
...Now, "the next time" is here, perhaps even precipitated by the administration's own blunders...
...secretary general Kofi Annan made a deal with Saddam with Washington's full support...
...With the September opening of the U.N...
...But time is depressingly short, and the potential damage for the United States, in the Gulf and around the world, is enormous...
...More important, an unfettered Iraq will certainly work full tilt to rebuild its arsenals...
...arms inspector, remained in New York cooling his heels...
...Instead, they argued for "containing" Iraq...
...The United States is completely unprepared for this challenge...
...The oil-for-food program should also be dramatically scaled back or eliminated, forcing Iraq to make painful choices...
...And steps must be taken to remove Saddam from power...
...If the press reports noted above are true, of course, we now know why...
...What can be done...
...This is a code phrase for normalization of Iraq's international status, giving Saddam Hussein what he has sought since 1991: an end to economic sanctions and weapons inspections...
...Covert operations could include arming and training Iraqi resistance groups—and especially recruitment of high-ranking military officers perhaps willing to move more quickly...
...The Security Council condemned Iraq's withdrawal of cooperation as "totally unacceptable" but did not threaten "the severest consequences" for Iraq—as it had in its resolution endorsing the Annan deal in March—or suggest the use of force if Iraq remained defiant...
...There will be nothing to prevent it from presenting the world with a fait accompli and simply announcing its possession of nuclear, biological, or chemical weapons at any time...
...Secretary General Annan, faced with the collapse of the agreement he had negotiated, has called for a "comprehensive reassessment" of Iraq by the Security Council...
...inspectors and the Clinton administration to pretend its policy had been vindicated...
...At a minimum, the House and Senate foreign-affairs committees should return from recess to conduct immediate hearings...
...They justified President Clinton's decision not to use military force in February as strengthening both our political position and our ability to use force "the next time...
...in 1990 and the U.N.'s weapons-inspection system...
...This would end any impression that Saddam can outlast or outcheat U.N...
...The "Persian Gulf coalition," long neglected by Washington, has almost disappeared...
...But acting on that conclusion would mean applying force—which requires vigorous political leadership, unlikely to materialize during the remaining life of this administration...
...Indeed, if true, these reports could create a domestic political crisis for the president that will make him long for the return of the Lewinsky scandal...
...As predicted in these pages, Annan's deal lasted only until Iraq decided the moment had come to challenge it...
...If some such actions are not at least tried, humiliation will be the kindest word for what President Clinton will have permitted to befall us...
...Before this news broke, Iraq had nearly succeeded in throwing off both the economic sanctions imposed by the U.N...
...inspections...
...Even the administration's supporters never regarded it as a permanent solution...
...John R. Bolton is senior vice president of the American Enterprise Institute...
...In January 1998, the Lewinsky scandal increased the risks to the White House of an assertive response, and the following month U.N...
...Another weak and inadequate response from the White House— belying its confident promises in February—would further demonstrate the administration's dishonesty in foreign policy...
...If we are seen bending the knee to Iraq, our credibility, restored by President Reagan's rearmament and President Bush's military and diplomatic conduct of Desert Storm, will again be tarnished...
...Even a minimally acceptable policy must confront Saddam in the short term...
...In response to Saddam's last major act of defiance, in October 1997, the United States should have pledged to overthrow his regime and end its threat to the region...
...With the president's truthfulness under severe assault, the outlook is about as dismal as can be...
...Annan dispatched his personal envoy, Ambassador Prakash Shah of India, to Baghdad last week for further negotiations with Aziz, while Richard Butler, chief U.N...
...In the Bush administration, he served as assistant secretary of state for international organizations...
...The Clinton administration is doing all it can to divert public attention from the necessity of thwarting Saddam's gambit and what may be its own complicity...
...If true, these reports show behavior by the Clinton administration that goes well beyond its normal incompetence and amounts to what can only be called malfeasance in office...
...Without such leadership, secretary of defense William Cohen's recent boast that the United States has more than ample firepower in the region is hollow at best...
...If true, these reports lay the foundation for a national-security scandal of immense proportions, reflecting an unprecedented level of duplicity that Congress must fully expose...
...The Annan agreement allowed the Iraqis to pretend to cooperate with U.N...
...Yet Saddam Hussein was seeking Security Council legitimization of what he had essentially secured on the ground...
...His weapons program, although diminished by the U.N.'s seven-year effort, never altogether ceased, and Iraq is now poised to do openly what it has been doing furtively since its military defeat in 1991: develop, build, and deploy weapons of mass destruction...
...sanctions to be lifted while Saddam remains in power and that Washington will use its veto in the Security Council to this effect...
...No one in New York was surprised by press reports that Annan's proposal came "just hours" after a telephone call with Iraqi deputy prime minister Tariq Aziz...
...Such measures would not bring immediate results, but they would show Saddam and the world that the United States had moved beyond mere posturing...
...To allies and opponents alike, it will seem that the United States, in a flashback to the Carter administration 20 years ago, is undergoing another humiliation in the desert...
...General Assembly due to inundate Manhattan with heads of government, foreign ministers, and their retinues, there is every prospect that the secretary general soon will seek the full rehabilitation of the Baghdad regime...
...The president should announce, for example, that Iraq's record is so appalling that the United States will never permit the U.N...
...But by then, the Clinton administration had effectively ignored Iraq for almost five years...
...SADDAM WINS by John R. Bolton IN AN ASTONISHING PAIR OF REPORTS at the end of last week, the Washington Post and NBC revealed that the Clinton administration has repeatedly sought to limit the work of United Nations weapons inspectors in Iraq...
...Ideally, Saddam's latest insult to the U.N...
...Administration officials—led by secretary of state Madeleine Albright—have, in the past few months, attempted to prevent the special commission responsible for Iraq's disarmament from conducting surprise inspections of sites the inspectors believed contained likely evidence of Iraqi development of weapons of mass destruction...
Vol. 3 • August 1998 • No. 47
