Bush battles Baghdad backwards

R. BERNARD MANN SPECIAL TO THE JEWISH BULLETIN

President George W. Bush's Oct. 7 talk to the nation on preparing for war with Saddam Hussein had a few well-turned conciliatory phrases aimed at Democrats, U.S. allies and the United Nations at large. Bush was taking care of business that he should have attended to half a year ago at least, namely, winning their support for resumption of weapons inspections under beefed-up criteria and, upon their failure, Security Council endorsement of a military operation – a justified war.

It will be impossible to remove all weapons of mass destruction in Iraq without the presence of an armed American-led force dedicated to that end, but without international support exercised through the United Nations, an independent U.S. invasion would be condemned by most of the world as arrogant and high-handed. The fallout of Bush unilateralism, even though it is merely in the paper and speech stage at present, is already an astounding balance sheet in the red.

Consider Germany's recent elections, in which Gerhard Schroeder promised to keep his country out of Iraq. Consider Kuwait's stated intention of refusing to allow U.S. forces to use its bases to attack Iraq unless such an attack has been sanctioned by the UN in advance. Consider Saudi Arabia's stated refusal to allow U.S. operations to proceed from its bases, period. Consider the threat of veto in the Security Council by France, Russia and China. Consider the outpouring of opposition to Bush's approach by an apparent majority of American citizens.

In the long run, the United States will end up in Iraq. Hussein is obsessed with weapons of mass destruction, drunk with power cruelly exercised and inflamed with a desire for revenge both against the United States, for its hammering of Iraq in the 1991 Gulf War, and against Israel, for its air strikes on Iraq's Osirak nuclear reactor in 1981. The SCUD missiles fired at Israel in the Gulf War, which carried no biological or chemical warfare components, were just an inkling of what he would try on the Jewish state if he were only given the chance.

Bush's headlong or, as might be said in plain Texan, rump-backwards approach to the challenge, is in line with the administration's new National Security Strategy of the United States of America, published in September. In this jaw-dropping manifesto for aggressive "going it alone after the evil-doers," rationales for seeking legitimization for actions against Iraq (or, say, North Korea or Iran) from the UN Security Council are more or less dismissed.

While correct in many respects, such as its premise that traditional deterrence is ineffectual against terrorist networks and rogue states headed by irrational and trigger-happy dictators, the push for solo campaigns to establish law and order, without first attempting to bring the Europeans, Russia and China on board, is gravely flawed and deeply suspect around the world. Hendrik Hertzberg writes in the Oct. 14 and 21 issues of The New Yorker that this vision "goes much further than the notion of America as the policeman of the world. It's the notion of America as both the policeman and the legislator of the world, and it's where the Bush vision goes seriously, even chillingly, wrong. A police force had better be embedded in and guided by a structure of law and consent. There's a name for the kind of regime in which the cops rule, answering only to themselves. It's called a police state."

Bush also preferred the political hay of a six-shooter media stance on Hussein to the diplomatic harvest to be gained from quieter work with overseas allies, squandering America's credit further. Consider Bush's earlier international debacles over the Kyoto treaty on greenhouse gas emission controls, tariffs on steel imports and the spurning of outgoing President Bill Clinton's initiatives on Israel-Palestine and North Korea.

Hussein must be beaten. Every one of his toys of death must be found and destroyed. But the United States must also prosecute its campaign against Al Qaeda and its allies in terror. To do this effectively requires the co-operation of the governments, not the masses, of the Muslim world as well as the governments of basically every nation on earth.

Bush's blustering September characterizations of the UN Security Council as a "debating society" and the renewal of weapons inspections as a waste of time gave way in his Oct. 7 speech to respectful references to the UN and the renewal of inspections. It would now be inspections first, war the mailed fist that follows the velvet glove. This was as much a recognition of the widespread distrust by Americans of war with Iraq, as detected by recent polls, as it was a signal to America's traditional allies and its presumptive Middle East allies that he was taking a softer, more inclusive position and wanted to meet the rest of the world about half way ... kind of.

This is the way it should have started out.

And so it may come to pass that the Security Council, reassured by Bush's conciliation, will adopt a new resolution that will toughen conditions for weapons inspection and require new revelations by Hussein on the nature and locations of his weapons caches. Iraq will produce a new list, but, as before, it will not be a truthful and full disclosure. The weapons inspection teams will proceed to Iraq and discover and destroy new caches of weapons. Hussein will allow the teams to do their job at some number of presidential sites, but will certainly balk at others.

This will assuredly justify armed action to scour the remainder of the presidential sites and palaces – and every corner of the country – until the anthrax and sarin stockpiles and nuclear bombs in the making are found and destroyed. And the engineers and scientists in Hussein's thrall who have been working to bring them into being, Iraqi and foreigner alike, are identified, judged and incarcerated for life.

In this next round with Hussein, the United States will hopefully take better measures than it took in the 1991 Gulf War, or the 2001-2002 actions in Afghanistan, to avoid civilian casualties, the complexities of offensive operations and the proximity of targets to civilian neighborhoods notwithstanding. This will mean American and allied soldiers ordered into dangerous urban areas on the ground and, in many cases, engaged in urban street fighting.

Israel's own brave incursion into the Jenin refugee camp in the spring of this year, in which Israel Defence Forces troops marched into the dangerous alleys of the camp to pinpoint terrorists, find hidden arms and explosives, and avoid the civilian casualties that would have been certain with the bomb-them-from-the-air option is a case study of what may be necessary. That Israel tragically lost 14 good men in one alley doesn't alter the necessity of this kind of battle plan for the location and extinction of weapons of mass destruction concealed in urban areas. To do otherwise would accelerate exponentially the disaffection with the United States that Bush do-it-alone doctrines have already triggered.

What does all of the above tell us about Israel's exposure in the event of a U.S.-led attack on Iraq?

The first and gravest worry is that Hussein will unleash SCUDs at Israel, armed with chemical and biological weapons. Israel's new Arrow anti-ballistic missile defence system, developed by Israel with partial U.S. funding and technology, is a marked advance over the Patriot, the American system that failed against Hussein's SCUDs in 1991. Arrow batteries are being installed near each of Israel's larger cities, a process that may take a year to complete. If a U.S.-led coalition invades Iraq in, say, March, upon the collapse of new UN inspections, Israel will have only partial Arrow coverage by that point. An earlier attack date would leave Israel even more exposed.

A second question is whether Arab forces would exploit U.S. preoccupation with a battlefront in Iraq to attack Israel. Although Hezbollah in southern Lebanon is a real threat, even without the excuse of an Iraq war, it is highly unlikely that Syria or any other Arab nation would willingly join Hussein with his back against the wall. Similarly, the Palestinians would be engaging in folly if they thought an Iraq war would be to their advantage.

The last question is whether the Bush doctrine of go-it-alone policemanship is in Israel's interest or not. To put it in a nutshell, the fall-out may only add to Israel's present isolation. To the extent that Israel's economy, already severely impacted by the Palestinian intifada and its repercussions, is highly dependent on exports, technology transfers and other interdependencies with the nations of the world, Bush's turn to unilateralism and, as some see it, an imperialist push, can only work negatively on Israel's external relations.

R. Bernard Mann, whose David Legacy columns originate in the Austin Jewish Outlook, is a past correspondent for the Jerusalem Post, a founding member of the Austin Jewish Writers League and creator of Legacy Crosswords.

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