Dealing With
Saddam the Song Might Be Mightier Than the
Sword
By JONATHAN POWER
LONDON--If Saddam Hussein bothered to
read Paul McCartney's hand-written eulogy after the death of
his wife, Linda, we can be sure that he laughed/simply
didn't understand the sentiment/uttered an expletive--or all
three. The partnership of Paul and Linda symbolised not just
the rewards of marital harmony but a change deep in the soul
of western culture. William Rees-Mogg, a former editor of
the conservative London Times, described it approvingly in
his recent column as a "reaction against the world of
masculine discipline, of khaki and rifles, the world culture
in the first half of the century, in the direction of peace
and love."
Hence, it is no surprise that when
today's West, with leaders at its helm who matured in the
sixties and seventies, come up against the machismo of
Saddam Hussein there is an enormous gulf of understanding
that diplomacy finds hard to bridge and that, perversely,
creates a vacuum that gives the old school hawks in the
West, who marginally still call a lot of the shots, to have
the major say, just.
Recall the U.S. Senate's vote to go to
war against Saddam Hussein in 1991 was passed by a mere
three votes. And in February's crisis President Bill Clinton
revealed how little military maneuver a modern day western
power has. As Professor Martin van Creveld of the Hebrew
University in Jerusalem so appositely observed recently,
"Clinton's wrangling with the UN Security Council and its
emissary Secretary-General Kofi Annan brings to mind the way
in which medieval rulers once required the pope's consent
before going to war. Now, even the world's sole remaining
superpower finds it extraordinarily difficult to go to war
without first obtaining the sanction of international law.
Thus the recent crisis may be remembered more as a
stepping-stone towards delegitimizing war between
nations."
Again, however, the sirens of
confrontation with Saddam are being sounded. This week the
Security Council reviewed its sanctions policy, deciding to
keep it in place, unchanged, and in effect marking the start
of another crisis with Iraq over the terms of access for UN
weapons inspectors. The chief UN weapons inspector, Richard
Butler, had reported that Iraq was still refusing to
cooperate in the provision of detailed information on its
biological and chemical weapon programmes.
Washington is polarising again. There
are those who are now pressing the Administration to follow
through on its previous threat to bomb Iraq again if UN
weapons inspectors are actively disrupted. But within the
White House there is now a welcome shift of opinion, away
from automaticity in military action. Instead the threshold
for a military bombardment is being raised. Non-cooperation
with inspections will not lead to air-strikes. They would
only be triggered by the open deployment of chemical and
biological weapons or actual threatening moves against
Kuwait or Saudi Arabia.
At last the White House appears to be
getting Saddam in perspective, resisting the inflated
old-school rhetoric of those who see him as a latter day
Hitler. The invasion of Kuwait was not the Anschluss. An
invasion of Saudi Arabia would not be the Sudetenland. The
Republican Guard is not the 5th Panzer division. Indeed
after the Gulf War Iraq's airforce and navy are almost
non-existent and most of its tanks are immobilised for want
of spares. The country is economically on its uppers and its
nuclear weapons programme, according to the inspectors of
the International Atomic Energy Agency, effectively wound
up. All that remains perhaps is research on biological and
chemical weapons.
But two things are now clear, despite
the misleading hyperbole earlier in the year. Bombing could
never get rid of these research laboratories--they can be
moved and re-created fairly easily. And even if such weapons
exist they could do only limited damage, given both the
nature of the weapons themselves and Saddam's chronic lack
of delivery vehicles. They are fairly slow-moving weapons,
unlike nukes, allowing cities to be evacuated, peoples to be
innoculated and the effects to be treated. Casualties might
be severe but not on the scale the misused phrase "weapons
of mass destruction" suggests.
It is a great step forward that the
Clinton Administration has exited the chorus that
exaggerates Saddam's threat. But something else is still
missing. The Security Council needs a carrot to go with its
stick policy of sanctions. At the moment the western
position is clouded in unuseful ambiguity.
Clinton has to realize that such an
unyielding policy convinces practically the whole of Iraq to
believe that America is demanding the impossible. Clinton
also has to accept that America becomes stronger if its
allies in the Security Council can whole heartedly back its
position, rather than just shuffling along behind it as they
do at present. A united front, even if cast at a lower level
of confrontation, is more likely to pressure Saddam to
compromise than an all or nothing policy.
The Clinton Administration,
ex-protestors of the sixties themselves in many cases, need
to inhale the new political culture of the West. The song is
mightier than the sword, Linda McCartney might have said.
And that needs to be factored into the superpower's decision
making.
April 29, 1998,
LONDON
Copyright © 1998 By JONATHAN POWER
Note: I can be reached by phone +44 385 351172; fax
+44 374 590493;
and e-mail: JonatPower@aol.com
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