Hawks in a box

Flummmoxed by Saddam's latest move, Bush's Iraq hawks are desperately trying to find a way to justify an invasion anyway -- but they're just flapping their wings.

By Joshua Micah Marshall

Sep 20, 2002 | For weeks the White House has been pressuring Congress to vote before the November election on a bill authorizing the president to wage war on Iraq. On the surface, today's news that the Democrats are now willing to schedule such a vote appeared to signal a White House victory. Actually, the Democrats' newfound willingness to give the president his "use of force" resolution is more a sign of how much the consequences of such a vote have diminished since late last week and how far the debate over Iraq and WMD has spun out of the administration's control.

After weeks of saber rattling by administration hawks led to widespread speculation that the United States was prepared to launch an invasion even without U.N. sanction, President Bush's speech before the world body last Wednesday decisively recast the Iraq debate, swelling the president's support at home and getting erstwhile allies like Russia and France -- who opposed American unilateralism -- to start pressuring Iraq to readmit inspectors or else.

The speech was rightly hailed as a triumph for the president. But much less attention was given to the change of policy that brought that shift in debate or its implications.

For months, White House policy has been regime change, pure and simple. For all its Cheney-ite bluster, the president's speech at the U.N. shifted the policy and debate to Iraqi compliance with a panoply of U.N. resolutions. That was a key victory for the policy favored by Colin Powell, and America's allies reacted accordingly. But Saddam's rapid decision to call the president's bluff exposed the consequences of the president's policy change -- not pleasant ones for administration hard-liners.

No one believes Saddam has had a true change of heart about inspections and weapons of mass destruction. Certainly, he'll take every chance he can get to evade or obstruct the truly invasive inspections that could denude him of his WMD arsenal. But until he does so -- until he stiffs the inspectors and gives the U.S. the pretext to attack -- the administration has little real choice but to go along with the process taking shape at the U.N., the one the president himself called for. Yesterday the president told reporters: "It's [Saddam's] latest ploy, his latest attempt not to be held accountable for defying the United Nations." No doubt it is a ploy, or at least a play for time. It would be different if the president had gone to the U.N. and said, "Time's up. Saddam never complied with the Gulf War resolutions. Now we're going to invade. Anyone who wants to join us is welcome to come along." But he didn't. He dared the U.N. to redeem itself by forcing Saddam to comply with its resolutions. Having said that, he has little choice but to let the U.N. try to force Saddam to make good on his pledge or see if he'll try to wriggle out of it. And, as many hawks are now beginning to realize, that could take months or even years. If Democrats now seem less skittish about giving the president a vote, it's likely because he now seems locked into a policy tied to the U.N. and one that might drag on for some time.

Some administration supporters insist that the president has simply gone too far out on the limb to walk back. "We've reached a point of no return," says one D.C. Iraq-hawk in close touch with regime-change supporters in and out of the administration. "The rhetoric was just too high the last two weeks. It's like 'No New Taxes.'"

But the rapid turn of events has left most ardent supporters of regime change in the press floundering in a mix of disingenuousness and denial, unable to come to grips with the implications of the president's policy or the changed state of the debate either at home or abroad. The turn of events has left some of the White House's most fulsome advocates in the press busily eating words that they wrote only a week before. Last week Weekly Standard executive editor Fred Barnes predicted the president would take the "gamble" of daring Saddam to readmit inspectors, a choice Barnes believed Saddam either could not or would not do. If he did he would "quickly lose control of his own government and fall from power," Barnes wrote. Today Barnes seemed to have forgotten everything he'd written just days ago. Now he doesn't think the president was taking a gamble at all. Saddam's "disingenuous offer of a return to unconditional arms inspections" changed nothing, Barnes now writes, and only demonstrates that Saddam is "doomed."

Barnes' boss at the Weekly Standard, influential regime change advocate William Kristol, takes a longer, more nuanced view. "At the end of the day," Kristol told Salon on Tuesday, "Saddam can't live with an inspections regime that would deprive him of his weapons of mass destruction. Bush can't live with Saddam with weapons of mass destruction. So I think we're on course to regime change." (Like many of the key hawks, Kristol believes that Saddam sees his WMD as literally the basis of his power, both in terms of his prestige inside and outside the country and his regional power aspirations. In the hawks' view, asking Saddam to give up his WMD is basically tantamount to asking him to relinquish power.)

But the argument that Saddam's obsession with keeping his WMD will precipitate war in the short term, rather than the long, runs up against certain key elements of the hawks' own reasoning and, to some degree, simple logic. If Clinton was never serious about overthrowing Saddam and if Bush really is deadly serious about overthrowing Saddam's government -- and Saddam knows that -- that gives him a level of incentive to comply he's never had before. Certainly, Iraq will haggle over details. And if Bush lets up the pressure, Saddam will welsh on his new commitment. But as long as Bush doesn't let up the pressure, Saddam seems likely to comply just enough to avoid giving the United States any pretext to attack. If that happens, much of the momentum for war built up over the summer could dissipate, as 9/11 recedes further. The inspections game could drag on for a year or more. And that thought makes regime-changers see red like nothing else.

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