“WILLING to wound, and yet afraid to strike.” The poet Alexander Pope might have been thinking of President Clinton and his recent raid on Iraq when he wrote that famous line. The bombing was enough to irritate and arouse, but not enough to have any sort of decisive consequence. Coinciding with the impeachment of the president, the timing of the operation placed a somber question mark over the strategy. The United States may have bought a little respite while Iraq repairs the damage, but Saddam Hussein is free from United Nations weapons’ inspectors who stick their noses into his military secrets. The war goes on, as several official mouthpieces of Saddam’s like to boast. A most peculiar war it is too, one that is highly instructive about the state of the world today, with lessons to be drawn about the nature of power and the likely course of the future.
Mr. Pryce-Jones, a London-based scholar and journalist, is the author of, among other books, The Closed Circle: An Interpretation of the Arabs.
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