[amc] America's War Train Is Leaving the Station
- From: "Ray Gingerich" <RGingerich@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
- To: "ACPJ" <acpj@xxxxxxxxxx>
- Date: Mon, 3 Feb 2003 19:06:21 -0800
February 2, 2003
ALL ABOARD
America's War Train Is Leaving the Station
By SERGE SCHMEMANN
NITED NATIONS - In challenging the United Nations last fall to join in the
attack on Saddam Hussein, President Bush did not say, You're with us or against
us. He said something far more shrewd: Either you're with us, or you're
irrelevant.
That has been the standing warning ever since, put most bluntly by Secretary of
Defense Donald H. Rumsfeld when he dismissed the two big holdouts, France and
Germany, as "old Europe." Sure, we'll consult you, President Bush told the
world in his State of the Union address, "but let there be no
misunderstanding": we're going in with you or without you.
If measured by the way the world was lining up last week, the approach has been
effective. In September, when the administration began to talk seriously about
going after Mr. Hussein, the questions were whether this was necessary or
productive or a vendetta.
The skepticism has not waned, but most world leaders today are thinking less
about how best to deal with Mr. Hussein than about how to deal with an
unstoppable superpower.
The open letter of support for Washington from the leaders of eight European
countries (Spain, Britain, Italy, Poland, Hungary, the Czech Republic, Denmark
and Portugal), which was published in The Wall Street Journal last week, talked
far more about the importance of American leadership than the evil of Iraq. "No
misunderstanding here, sir," they seemed to be telling Mr. Bush.
The letter followed hard on another boost for the administration's case, the
surprisingly stern report by Hans Blix, the chief United Nations inspector for
chemical and biological weapons. Instead of dwelling on his team's failure to
find much evidence of such weapons, Mr. Blix swung his weight behind
Washington's main charge: that Iraq had shown no inclination to disarm.
"Iraq appears not to have come to 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 and live in peace," Mr. Blix said, reading a list of
things Iraq had not explained.
It hardly seemed to matter that nobody seriously expected Mr. Hussein to lead
inspectors to his stash of illegal poisons or rockets, or to let his scientists
tell all. In the United Nations corridors, the discussion was no longer whether
the evidence was compelling, or whether France or Germany had some telling
points. The talk was about when the war was likely to start, and with whom.
United Nations officials were already looking past a war, expecting a major
role in helping refugees and rebuilding Iraq. Arab ambassadors pondered the
dangers of allowing their streets to perceive the war as a clash of
civilizations, and spoke in hushed tones about the "Saudi idea"- convincing Mr.
Hussein to flee while he could. ("Very foolish,"" the Iraqi ambassador,
Mohammed A. Aldouri, said when this was put to him.)
"We're on a different page now," said a Western diplomat as Security Council
members left their chamber. American diplomats barely concealed their
satisfaction.
"Their brilliance all along is that they created the aura of inevitability,"
said John. J. Mearsheimer, a political scientist at the University of Chicago.
"Opponents throw up their hands and say, it's inevitable."
There was still no convincing evidence that Iraq was in cahoots with Al Qaeda,
he said, nor any compelling intelligence of active efforts to develop weapons.
Polls around the world still showed deep skepticism about the need for war,
even in Britain.
Mr. Bush promised that Secretary of State Colin L. Powell would finally show
the Security Council some real intelligence this Wednesday. But officials
privately warned against expecting the sort of sensational show-and-tell that
Adlai E. Stevenson produced for the United Nations 40 years ago to prove Soviet
missiles were in Cuba.
France and Germany were already saying that if Mr. Powell did produce hard
evidence, this would be another reason to give the inspectors more time, to
follow it up. Other skeptics wondered why, if the evidence was strong, it had
not been shown.
In short, a hoopla was inevitable. "The diplomatic window," the American
ambassador, John D. Negroponte, told the Security Council, "is closing."
That, an American official said, was not a verbal flourish. The entire Security
Council, he said, had agreed to the resolution on Iraq that was hammered out
last November. The resolution contained three central requirements: that Iraq
"cooperate fully" with inspectors; that the inspectors report any failure to
the Council; and that if they do, the Council immediately convene. The Iraqis
had failed, the inspectors had reported, and from the highest pulpit of the
land President Bush had summoned the Council.
The diplomacy, however, was not yet over. Meeting with the British Prime
Minister, Tony Blair, on Friday, President Bush seemed to soften his position,
saying he would "welcome" another United Nations resolution. But he also
maintained that it was not necessary and that he would only support "another
signal that we're intent upon disarming Saddam Hussein."
In the end, most diplomats expected that the United States would prevail and
that even France would fall in line. After all, during the bitter debate about
the International Criminal Court, one European official noted, "The United
States blinked more often, but France blinked last." This was not a time when
any country wanted to end up on the wrong side of the United States.
THE administration had shown a superpower can get its way by making clear that
it is prepared to go it alone. If the military operations succeed - if Mr.
Hussein and his cronies were toppled quickly and without too many dead, or,
even better, if he went voluntarily into exile - history demonstrates that all
the bludgeoning and resentments would soon be forgotten, and the world would
celebrate a great common victory.
But what if the operation goes wrong? That, critics said, was when all the
resentments generated over months of strong-arm tactics could backfire.
"Have we weakened the anti-terrorism alliance?" said Samuel R. Berger, the
national security adviser to President Clinton in his second term. "And if we
wind up disagreeing with France and Germany, can we manage that in a way that
does not do long-term damage? We haven't made it easy for them, taking a kind
of contemptuous attitude rather than trying to speak to the issues that the
Europeans are raising, some of which are quite fair."
But for an administration on a roll, these were idle doubts. "We will, of
course, win militarily if we have to," Mr. Bush said. "But we'll also want to
make sure we win the peace as well."
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