Site Presented By
Tuesday, Nov 24, 2009
Chief U.N. weapons inspector Hans Blix's nuanced report won't resolve the diplomatic impasse between the U.S. and its European allies. But Bush seems ready to invade anyway.
Jan 28, 2003 | Chief United Nations weapons inspector Hans Blix delivered a tougher-than-expected critique of Iraqi disarmament efforts Monday, and though he stopped well short of condemning the regime of Saddam Hussein, it seemed clear that the Bush administration would use the report to bolster its argument for an invasion.
Under attack from France, Germany, Russia and China for racing into war before the inspection process was complete, the White House is certain to give Blix's comments a prominent place in Tuesday night's historic State of the Union address. The White House will carry its argument back to the U.N. later this week.
Blix would have made the White House happier if he'd uttered the phrase "material breach" in describing Iraq's lack of cooperation, or if his inspections colleague Mohamed ElBaradei hadn't joined leading members of the U.N. Security Council in asking Bush to forestall war so that inspectors could continue their work.
Still, the arms inspection team seemed to concur with repeated complaints from the White House in recent weeks that Saddam was acting in bad faith rather than moving to willingly disarm, as required by a United Nations resolution. "Iraq appears not to have come to a genuine acceptance -- not even today -- of the disarmament which was demanded of it, and which it needs to carry out to win the confidence of the world," Blix said in one especially strong rebuke.
Once played up as an important milestone on the road to war, Blix's report nonetheless seemed somewhat anticlimactic, coming at a time when Bush appears increasingly committed to launching a preemptive invasion of Iraq, regardless of what the inspectors find.
"The train has already started moving," says P.W. Singer, a foreign policy specialist at the Brookings Institute, noting that approximately 150,000 American troops have been sent to the region. "You don't deploy that many troops without an intent to use them. It's very hard to imagine any scenario where we'd be satisfied enough to pull them back."
The White House has seemed to follow a carefully crafted script in recent days, with escalating warnings and rhetorical attacks that could pressure Saddam into exile or persuade dissident forces to mount a coup. Then again, the gambit may be more straightforward: With administration officials uniformly warning that time is running out and insisting that Great Britain, Australia and other countries would join the U.S., they may simply be preparing the world for war.
Speaking through an unidentified source, the administration signaled late last week that it might be willing to give the inspectors more time. But that may be a few token weeks -- a cosmetic gesture that would give the U.S. and its allies time to get their troops and equipment into place. That's unlikely to mend the rift between Washington and its traditional European allies, such as France and Germany, who want inspectors to be given additional months, if not seasons, to complete their work.
"There's still fundamental difference about what constitutes a material breach," says U.N. expert Kenneth Rodman, professor of government at Colby College in Maine, referring to the type of obvious Iraqi violation that could trigger a war. For the U.S., the onus is on Saddam; for most Europeans it's on the inspectors.
In Monday's report, Blix detailed the questions that still remain about Iraqi stockpiles of deadly materials, including the nerve gas VX, artillery shells filled with mustard gas, and anthrax, something Iraq claims to have destroyed in the past.
Blix is scheduled to return to the U.N. in mid-February to deliver another update, but by then it will probably be even more obvious that war is imminent, with the U.S. moving toward an invasion in spite of resistance from France, Germany and Russia, among others.
In a series of recent interviews, experts in global diplomacy worried that such an approach by the Bush administration could do damage to the U.N. and to U.S. global credibility, with effects that may felt long after the battles in Iraq have ended.
Waging a war without U.N. authorization "would do real damage to the United Nations," says Mitchell Reiss, dean of international relations at the College of William and Mary in Williamsburg, Va.
Following the passage of the unanimous Security Council resolution last November, some U.N. observers hoped the international caucus could replicate its achievement of the Gulf War, when it corralled an expansive coalition and validated then-President George H.W. Bush's plan to remove Saddam's troops from Kuwait by force. Back then, Iraq's violation -- invading the sovereign nation of Kuwait -- was so obvious that the U.S. was able to rally international support for its position.
This time, however, arguing that Saddam must be hit preemptively has been more difficult. And in retrospect, the White House's key U.N. victory last autumn was not the clear-cut winner it was made out to be.
For the United States, and for Bush, there would be many drawbacks to invading without U.N. support. Some costs could be political: By a 2-1 margin Americans don't want the U.S. to go to war alone and without backing from the world body, according to a recent Newsweek poll. Already, the emerging field of Democratic challengers to Bush are making a point of challenging his rush to war.
If the White House does abandon the U.N., "it will damage U.S. credibility for years," says Joseph Cirincione, a senior associate at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. "It will look like a façade, that our interest in the U.N. and weapons inspections was fake."
That loss of credibility would be felt especially strongly in the Middle East, where the U.S. badly needs allies, says Singer. He notes that, tactically, the lack of U.N. cooperation would make it much more difficult for the U.S. to enlist the aid of key regional allies, such as Turkey and Saudi Arabia, whose governments are still reluctant to embrace a U.S. war effort that remains unpopular with their people.
The U.S. would also find it easier, and less expensive, to reconstruct Iraq following the war if the invasion were conducted under the auspices of the U.N. A recently completed study for the Association of the United States Army estimated that the cost of rebuilding Iraq would run $16 billion the first year alone and that 75,000 troops would have to remain on the ground following the war.
"If we go it alone, there might be a feeling among the international community of, 'It's your mess, you clean it up,'" says Reiss.
Others, though, argue it will be the U.N. that suffers in the long run for not being able to work with the United States. "After the war, how will Americans think about the U.N. if it turns out the United States cannot rely on the U.N. to help protect itself?" asks Tom Donnelly, a resident fellow at the conservative American Enterprise Institute, a Washington think tank.
