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.
