Iraq continues to play cat-and-mouse, engaging in amazing twists and turns to avoid the ultimate loss of war. Having garnered months more time during US/UN negotiations on what a Security Council resolution would look like, it has offered grudging acceptance of its terms.
That’s the clever thing to do, of course, since the US clearly is primed to beat the snot out of Iraq, and that’s the one outcome Saddam Hussein knows he can’t win in. What will be interesting to see, as the UN inspectors plan their return, is how much Iraq tries to get away with. How well have they hidden things, since the spotlight focused again? How underground are their labs? How cleaned out are the likely targets of inspections? How many games can they play with a possible hair-trigger response?
And, knowing about the response if Iraq does play games, how willing will the UN inspection crew be to actually report non-compliance? And, given that, how eager will the US be to provide intelligence info this time out to the UN, not knowing how it will be used?
More interesting times ahead. And the longer Iraq can drag things out, the more difficult it becomes to keep up the pressue on him.
Stay tuned.
SDB does some examination of the actual acceptance letter from Iraq, and is even less impressed. The point that that I think he misses is that Iraq will suffer no cognitive dissonance between saying “We have nothing, absolutely nothing” now, and then dealing with reporting of discoveries later. Iraq’s strategy from the get-go has depended on every instance being taken on its own, not as part of a pattern, not as a contradiction of anything that was said earlier.
It’s an effective tactic, since it sets the playing field in their favor, and they’ve been allowed to get away with it by the “Well, let’s give them one more chance to prove themselves” crowd — if you ignore everything except the current, most recent misbehavior, it’s easy to forgive and go easy on them.
Heck, to carry this around to another topic, it’s similar to the California Three Strikes rule, where even petty, non-violent crimes can count as a final strike and send you to jail for life. I’ve protested that before, but that’s because there’s one difference between a guy who’s done time and now is shoplifting videos, and Saddam’s behavior: the shoplifter has supposedly served his time, so to some degree those earlier crimes should be “off the table,” at least as far as deciding that shoplifting videos is a life offense. Saddam, on the other hand, has never admitted to wrong-doing, and he’s defied and worked around any punishments levied against him.
Still, that raises an issue I’m sure will come up. What level of noncompliance will be sufficient to send the bombers over Baghdad? Because if the bar is set too high, then Iraq just continues to do what it’s done since 1991. If it’s set too low, then the critics of armed reprisals against Iraq will trumpet that the war is being justified because of the trivial crime of one guard blocking one inspector from one door, or because one rocket was found that wasn’t on a manifest, or because one factory was found that might have been able to produce a chemical weapon but wasn’t mentioned by Iraq earlier. “For that you’re willing to kill 500,000 innocents?”
It’s a question that can only be answered if you look at the pattern of behavior as a whole. But that’s a complex analysis, and the folks who want to stop the impending war are the same as the “one more chance” crowd — they want to reset the violation-meter every time.
At some point, you have to say no. You have to have the straw that breaks the camel’s back. Otherwise, we might as well just pack up and let Iraq do whatever it wants. Until it does something unequivocably war-worthy, something so ghastly that even the peaceniks fall silent for a few moments.
By which time, it will be too late.