WORLD AFFAIRS

The search for fig-leaves

SUKUMAR MURALIDHARAN

As international resistance to the U.S. scheme becomes increasingly evident, the Bush administration shows signs of going wobbly in its drive to war with Iraq.

EVAN VUCCI/AP

A demonstration for peace, in Washington, near the Vietnam Veterans Memorial, on October 26.

AS the month of October passed with no resolution from the United Nations Security Council (UNSC) on the issue of Iraq, the war clique in the United States began giving vent to its frustration. President George Bush's September 12 ultimatum that the U.N. should act within "weeks rather than months'' had gone unheeded, and commentators in some of the more partisan organs were beginning to hold France singularly responsible for it. Those with a single-minded commitment to the remaking of West Asia's map were even wondering aloud whether France really deserved a permanent place in the Security Council, reaching far back into history in self-serving rationalisation.

In background briefings, the French put out a different version. The debate, they said, was more about the U.S. than Iraq. It was a crucial test for the system of international legality enshrined in the U.N. and a measure of how far the will of the international community counted in restraining the U.S. military in its hunt for quarries around the world. "France is not interested in arguing with the United States,'' said a top French official in Paris: "This is a matter of principle. This is about the rules of the game in the world today, about putting the Security Council at the centre of international life, and not permitting a nation, whatever nation it may be, to do what it wants, when it wants, where it wants.''

These reflections, as also the spat between Prime Minister Tony Blair of the U.K. and President Jacques Chirac of France, were symptoms of a new climate of bitterness in international relations. But by early-November, the official spin being placed on the Iraq negotiations turned more positive. U.S. Secretary of State Colin Powell had till as late as the summit meeting of the Asia Pacific Economic Cooperation (APEC) forum in Mexico, been expressing scepticism about the likelihood of an acceptable resolution in the UNSC. Rather than waste time in futile bargaining, the U.S., he indicated, would force a vote on a tough new resolution and move on to the next stage of its campaign with a firmer knowledge of who stood with it and who against. He changed his tune in a matter of two days. The UNSC, he then said, was moving closer to agreement and with a little more work could put together a resolution that would accommodate the interests of allies "without in any way handcuffing the U.S.''. For one, the arguments over the "one-two issue'', said Powell, had been settled.

This was a reference to a fundamental point of divergence between the French and U.S. positions on the renewed hunt for weapons of mass destruction (WMD) in Iraq. Where the U.S. had been insistent that the resumption of weapons inspections in Iraq and the initiation of military operations should be rolled up in one portmanteau resolution, France had been calling for a clear two-stage process. The UNSC, France argued, should grant the authorisation for military action only after the weapons inspectors made an assessment of the threat posed by the Iraqi WMD programme, and reported back on the extent of cooperation they received.

What the U.S. dreads above all in a two-stage process is the prospect that it could be confronted with a veto in the UNSC just when it begins revving up its engines of war. This fear, specifically articulated by U.K. Foreign Secretary Jack Straw is, in essence, illogical, since any country that could summon up the political will to veto a second resolution could as well do it at the first go. This seeming ambivalence is easily comprehended from the U.S.' record of coercive diplomacy on Iraq.

Early in 1998, the U.S. was much like now, gearing up for a final solution to the Iraq question. With international opinion being decisively against a fresh assault on the nation, U.N. Secretary-General Kofi Annan flew to Baghdad for negotiations with Iraqi President Saddam Hussein. The outcome was an agreement that removed all residual problems of access to sensitive sites for the weapons inspectors. The U.S. insisted that the agreement should be formally incorporated into a UNSC resolution with warnings of "severest consequences'' if it was violated. The UNSC complied, promising, as with all such matters, to "remain seized of the matter''.

Most members of the Council argued then, as they do now, that there was no sanction for military force built into the resolution. As the Russian Ambassador put it, inventing a word that he has had occasion to repeat, there was no "automaticity'' about the sanction to attack Iraq. The U.S. said, quite simply, that it was there. Later that year it managed to engineer a failure of arms inspections — with the connivance of the Australian diplomat Richard Butler who was then the programme chief — and proceeded to launch an aerial assault on Iraq.

The renewed inspections, as conceived in the U.S. draft resolution now before the UNSC, are again programmed for failure, since they are little else than a full-fledged armed incursion in disguise (see "The prey and the predator'', Frontline, October 25, 2002). With memories of 1998 still fresh, France and Russia, with the tacit approval of China, have for this reason been holding firm to the proposal for a two-stage process.

The U.S. believes now that it has managed to surmount this objection by clever phraseology. Rather than affirm that the UNSC would "decide'' on a further resolution authorising military force, the first resolution, it has proposed, should merely say that the UNSC would "consider'' a second resolution. But their declaration of triumph may well prove premature. In an interview with Le Figaro on October 28, the French Foreign Minister Dominique de Villepin was putting a rather different construction on the two-stage process: "In the first, the Security Council must define the practical arrangements allowing the inspectors to be sent to Iraq and, in a second, if Baghdad does not fulfil its obligations, the matter would be again referred to the Security Council on the basis of the United Nations inspectors' reports... Now that we agree with the Americans and all our partners on this approach, the text presented by the Americans must not contain any other mechanisms circumventing it.''

Effectively this means France and Russia are likely to hold out against the assertion in the U.S. draft resolution that Iraq is already in "material breach'' of its obligations under earlier UNSC resolutions. The phrase has been construed in the past as an automatic trigger for military action as it will undoubtedly be in future.

Hans Blix, designated executive chairman of the U.N. Monitoring, Verification and Inspection Commission for Iraq (UNMOVIC), briefed the UNSC on October 28 on the practical steps needed for inspections to resume. Emerging from his meeting, he declined the honour he had been accorded by the media, of holding the balance between war and peace in West Asia. That honour, he said, belonged exclusively to the U.N., to which he was obliged only to report in an objective and dispassionate manner. And even though his team would appreciate a comprehensive resolution setting out the parameters for future inspections, he was convinced, above all, that unanimity within the UNSC was the key to a successful mission.

The U.S. and the U.K. read this as a resounding endorsement of their joint resolution. What they omitted to mention were the numerous qualifications that Blix chose to make. First, he had spoken of the impracticality of the tight deadline of 30 days that had been specified for Iraq to make a full disclosure of its WMD programmes. He had also deprecated the clause that empowered weapons inspectors to take any individual with his or her family out of Iraq for interrogation. Such a clause would unnecessarily entangle the inspections in the political asylum laws of sovereign countries, he said. And finally, he had been unconvinced of the need for air and land exclusion zones within Iraq, where citizens of the country would be proscribed from entering.

Immediately afterwards, Blix proceeded to Washington, accompanied by the Director-General of the International Atomic Energy Agency, Mohammad Al-Baradei. After meetings with some of the most uncompromising figures within the Bush administration — notably Vice-President Dick Cheney and Defence Secretary Donald Rumsfeld — Blix seemed upbeat about the prospect of resuming weapons inspections at an early date. Temporarily banishing the earlier talk about "regime change'', a spokesman of the U.S. National Security Council spoke with optimism about a "peaceful resolution'' and the execution of the U.N. mandate for disarmament in Iraq.

There have been other signs of the U.S. going wobbly in its drive to war. Six weeks after he called the world community to war in the cause of the U.S. oligarchy, President George Bush himself seemed to trip up in the maze of conflicting objectives he has been seeking to negotiate.

The aim of the Washington war clique has been little less than supplanting the Iraqi regime with one that would be more amenable to U.S. tutelage. Maximalists within the administration see the subjugation of Iraq as the first step in a wider game of re-mapping the region and eliminating all sources of resistance to U.S. geopolitical designs. But on October 20, Bush gave an indication of just how confused the strategic parameters of this plan are. Shortly after meeting with a top official of the North Atlantic Treaty Organisation, Bush indicated that "regime change'' in Iraq as official U.S. policy, could be read in the figurative rather than literal sense. By acceding to U.N. demands on disarmament, the Iraqi regime, he remarked, could well be an accomplice in its own transformation. If Saddam Hussein were to meet all the conditions of the U.N., said Bush, "that in itself would signal the regime has changed''.

White House Press Secretary Ari Fleischer was quick with the clarification. Regime change remains the U.S. policy, he said, "however it is defined''. Even by the standards of obfuscation he has set, the spokesman who recently introduced gangsterism into international diplomacy by advocating the resolution of the Iraq problem with "one bullet'', seemed this time to have surpassed himself.

Seeking a multilateral cloak for its self-interested goals in West Asia may yet turn out to be the U.S.' biggest foreign policy mistake in recent years. The day after his conceptual stumble, Bush hit the campaign trail in a closely fought and pivotal mid-term election to the U.S. Congress. Warming to the contempt of multilateralism of his core right-wing Republican constituency, he derided the U.N. as a body that had been made to look "foolish'' by the Iraqi regime. If the U.N. did not act, he warned, the U.S. would lead a "coalition'' that would complete the job of disarming Iraq.

It was a warning that he had occasion to repeat on an international forum a little later, though in a distinctly irritable manner devoid of the bluster he reserves for domestic audiences. Meeting with Mexican President Vicente Fox on the sidelines of the APEC summit in Cabo San Lucas, Mexico, Bush was told he could not count upon the support of the U.S.' substantial southern neighbour. "The crucial thing,'' Fox lectured Bush, "was collective action'', and for this it was necessary to ensure that any UNSC resolution enjoyed the broadest possible backing.

With all the subsequent manoeuvres, the U.S. now appears convinced that it has brought on board other potential dissenters in the UNSC. This could assure it of the nine votes required for approval of its draft resolution, provided France, Russia and China abstain. But a split verdict from the UNSC would be a dubious triumph for the U.S., especially since most members have stated that they are more inclined to go with the resolutions that France and Russia have put into play. Though not formally introduced for consideration, the French and Russian drafts have been commended for providing a clear vision, devoid of the ambiguity that could justify a rush to war. By focusing on disarmament, these drafts have highlighted the inherent dangers of the U.S.' wild oscillations over the appropriate objectives to pursue in Iraq.

In late-October, an official of the U.S. Joint Chiefs of Staff Committee (JCSC) paid a visit to Israel for high-level security consultations. According to reports in the Israeli media, the substance of his discussions with outgoing Defence Minister Benjamin Ben Eliezer and other military officials was that the U.S. intended to go to war after the month of Ramadan, in order to minimise the risks of offending Islamic sensibilities. Weather conditions in the region would still be appropriate for a large-scale deployment of the U.S. military machine, though the window of optimal opportunity could rapidly close when the summer heat sets in.

The JCSC recently circulated a document outlining the new U.S. military doctrine on urban warfare. In publicising this document, the U.S. is believed to be heightening the psychological pressure on Iraq. With little subtlety the document speaks of casting U.S. military strategy in terms of an "urban triad'', whose three distinguishing characteristics are "the physical terrain of an urban area'', "the non-combatant population'' which in turn is "characterised by the interaction of numerous political, economic and social activities'', and the "physical and service infrastructure'' that supports the population. Urban warfare, the document notes, could be costly for both attackers and defenders: "Ground combat is the most difficult and costly type of military urban operation. All those aspects of urban ground combat that have historically extracted a terrible price on attacker, defender and non-combatant alike remain present today, multiplied by the increased size and complexity of urban areas and increase in the number of inhabitants.''

The document acknowledges that urban warfare could reduce the advantage enjoyed by the technologically superior forces. The optimal response for the urban military commander would then lie in "shaping the battle space'' and securing "operational objectives by exerting appropriate influence on adversary forces, friendly forces, the information environment, and particularly the elements of the urban triad''.

Translated into plain language, the JCSC sets out a chilling vision of employing massive firepower in urban areas to kill and intimidate civilian populations and devastate the infrastructure. The inevitable international backlash is then to be contained by outright disinformation. These basic tenets of U.S. strategic doctrine are familiar to the people of Iraq, but the new context compels the U.S. to bring immensely more firepower into play in order to minimise the hazards faced by forces it intends to put on the ground.

In recent times, the U.S. has been encountering threats to its forces and personnel from rather unforeseen sources. Early in October, two men in a pickup truck attacked a U.S. Marine platoon conducting training manoeuvres on an island off Kuwait. Two marine commandos were killed before the attackers were mowed down. On October 28, a diplomat with the U.S. aid agency in Jordan was shot dead just outside his Amman residence, sending a frisson of panic through the monarchy which has closely allied itself with the U.S.

Domestically too, the Bush administration has been encountering a rising tide of public scepticism over its war plans. With consumer confidence at a nine-year low, unemployment figures on the rise and the number of those living in poverty having increased for the first time in eight years, large sections in the U.S. are beginning to see the war plans as Bush's "weapon of mass distraction''. That was the singular message from a huge peace rally in Washington on October 26 that attracted the participation of 100,000 people from all over the country and heard an impassioned plea from civil rights leader Jesse Jackson for "regime change'' at home. After having long fed audiences with the nostrum that Bush's approval ratings are higher than ever, most polling agencies have now reached the grudging conclusion just prior to the mid-term Congressional elections, that it is the economy and not Iraq that is the main public concern in the U.S. National security today is the only theme that Bush is able to invoke to contain the rapid erosion of his political legitimacy. Finally, it may just prove to be a pretence too thin.

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