 |
|
September
20, 2002 12:20
p.m.
Death
Dances
Are
all the Iraq contingency plans in place?
|
|
hey teach you
at the war colleges and cognate places of learning that soldiers and diplomats
of experience always need to prepare contingency plans. This is wonderfully
validated by the Iraq situation. The mind ponders the responses the White
House is assumed to have considered. As regards the United Nations, President
Bush could have proceeded in several ways.
1. I wish to
inform you, honorable members of the Security Council, that as president
of the United States I am invoking that clause in the U.N. Charter that
authorizes member states to act in their own defense. It is our judgment
that the government of Iraq is complicit in a war of terror against the
United States. Under the circumstances, you will see the United States responding
according to its own lights.
Or: 2. The government
of Iraq has defied 16 U.N. resolutions and it is the U.N.'s responsibility
to specify what is to be done to enforce the word of the U.N. in Iraq.
Or: 3. We remind the Security Council of the continuing defiance of Iraq
and hope that renewed demands on the government of Iraq will be more effective.
Most interesting, of course, is contingent planning for what has now happened.
The U.N. has not "acted," but the diplomatic community was sufficiently
roused by Mr. Bush's talk to acknowledge that something would need to
be done. It was thought a fine diplomatic move by the president to approach
the U.N. in the first place. His doing so suggested due process in pre-military
moves leading to possible confrontation. What we do not know at this moment
is what will happen if the U.N. temporizes.
Probably it will
do so, because there are enough parties leaning against it, pressing this
or that nuance in the gestating resolution. On Sunday the third most powerful
economy in the world will rename as chancellor Mr. Schroeder, who has
placed his bets on the likelihood that the world will turn away from any
offensive marshaled by the U.S. He has said, just days before the national
election, that he will not assist in any military venture against Iraq
irrespective of what the U.N. does. Mr. Schroeder is one voice,
at the far end of appeasement. But there are others, and some of them,
like the Pope's, argue for non-military movement as a matter of principle.
What is the nature
of an ultimatum that might be directed at Saddam Hussein? Two days after
Schroeder's grandfather's generation marched into Poland, the government
of Great Britain, as it had promised to do, simply declared war against
Germany, even though it was all but incapable of counter-aggressive action
until some years later.
But that pattern
can't inform our own situation. Britain couldn't do very much to Germany
in September 1939, save enunciate the war. We, by contrast, could eliminate
Baghdad tomorrow.
But we don't want
to do that, though we very much want to be left free to devise our own
approaches with the implicit sanction of the U.N.. Question: What do we
do if the Security Council votes to permit Iraq another 100, or 500, days
to make good its offer to open up its secrets?
That is the contingency
for which no preparation appears to have been made. All that we have done,
in Washington, is to denounce Iraq's offer as one more installment in
the ruses with which it has led us by the nose for ten years.
Now the formulation
of the right answer here needs of course to take Congress into account.
To date, Democratic leaders have made it plain that they will approve
war-like action by the commander in chief. But a movement to suspend such
action until Iraqi bona fides are once more tested can mount quickly.
Democratic leaders can, without appearing disloyal, importune the president
to give Hussein one more chance.
All of this adds
up, in my own conjecture, to the likelihood of a very quick strike, of
some kind or another. Decisive enough to make moot further diplomatic
wrangling. But of limited military meaning, because we don't want to use
our ultimate silencer.
|
<% dim printurl
printurl = Request.ServerVariables("URL")%>
