The problems of military action in Iraq - 13 February 1998

Something else to fret about – Iraq.

I see, to my own surprise, that since Saddam's first expulsion of the United Nations inspectors, way back there in the late autumn, I've talked about him only once. But I spoke on that first and only time to deplore the gobbledygook and the diplomatic double-talk of the November United Nations debates.

On the eve of that appalling talk-fest, President Clinton defined the problem and a policy simply and truly. The sites of Saddam's chemical and biological weapons, the labs and the materials of their production had to be discovered and destroyed.

If Saddam resisted the United Nations inspection team or otherwise hampered their work, he would have to be punished by the United Nations. The existence of these ghastly materials was known and the elements spelled out. The anthrax, the botox, the VX, that hideous, muscle-paralysing gas.

Saddam's use of at least one of these on the Kurds, also on his own people, is well authenticated. So we assumed, at the first emergency meeting of the security council in November, that a strong resolution would be written, would be put to the vote.

And, well, that was the end of all our hopes and assumptions, for it was plain in the earliest hours of the debate that at least three members of the security council, which alone can order action, meaning military action, those three members were among the earliest of the five originals – France, Russia and China – and they had no intention of punishing Saddam with war. A word never used then or since, by the way. And that was only the overture, or the first glimpse, of what would become an impenetrable maze.

Right at the start then, the United States resigned itself to no united action by the United Nations. So how about reviving the heartening alliance of the desert Gulf War? How about the main kingdom America was sworn to protect, the desert land from which 270,000 American, British and French troops swept in triumph around Saddam's western flank?

Well, Saudi Arabia refused to be a base even this time. And in the whole Arab world, only Egypt deigned to the politeness of commenting that perhaps military action would be inappropriate. So at the end of weeks of canvassing and cajoling and lobbying, only Britain was ready to join the United States in the punishment exercise. All that came out of the United Nations was constant talk of a diplomatic solution.

Saddam didn't talk about a diplomatic solution. He said, get those inspectors out and then later, well yes, come in but we'll tell you where you can go and where you can't. In the meantime, the President of the United States, with the promise of wide support from his Republican opponents, kept repeating what he'd simply said last November – let the United Nations team roam freely to every suspect site or we, meaning now the United States, will have to act.

And meantime, every day, we heard more and more about yet another aircraft carrier gone to the Gulf, a division of troops from this coast and that, the promise and the delivery of British troops and weapons.

Enter now most consciously, the secretary general of the United Nations. He seems to believe that there is what he calls diplomatic movement, discernable somewhere. Not only is Mr Annan against the thought of a United Nations war or anybody's war, he urged everybody the other day to be more flexible and announced, for quotation "we should not insist on humiliating Saddam Hussein".

This took me back to the now hard-to-believe eight months of almost total inaction after Britain declared war on Hitler and the scattering of pamphlets instead of bombs over Germany, on the principle Noel Coward sang of Let's Not be Beastly to the Germans.

Little comfort there for Mr Clinton or Secretary of State Madeleine Albright who, after another unsuccessful recruiting tour of the Middle East, said memorably "we should prefer to act multilaterally, but if necessary we shall act unilaterally". Not quite as memorable as Mr Churchill who, faced with a similar isolation with Hitler's legions poised on the coast of France and France just surrendered, "Well then, alone".

So after the secretary of state, the secretary of defence, Mr William Cohen, went off to the Gulf and succeeded in getting tiny Oman and tiny Bahrain to allow some American planes to refuel on their territory, but that's all.

Otherwise, Secretary Cohen had a frosty reception throughout the Arab states at the mere mention of military support. One correspondent going along with Secretary Cohen, put it in a sentence. Although few Arab leaders openly support Mr Hussein's government and some loathe it, they fear that an American-led attack would worsen the suffering of ordinary Iraqis and possibly prompt a backlash among their own citizens.

And so, apart from a reluctant offer of undefined support now from Australia and Canada, this backing and filling and hoping on the question of how much support from whom, has been the only perceptible diplomatic movement on the part of the UN, the state department and the Pentagon. The Pentagon in public, anyway. Privately, of course, it's been preparing the battle stations.

And that's where the pundits first, and then the Congress, and the public come in. It had been taken as given, since the autumn, that military action would mean air strikes at special targets with weapons, we were led to believe, that were smarter, more sophisticated – the Pentagon's words – than the ones used in the desert war.

However, we were not inclined to ooh and aah so much over this information since in the past seven years we've learned that these smart Gulf War weapons were not as smart as promised and that very many of them cost the taxpayer millions of dollars in what you could call imprecision bombing.

Then people began to talk and go into the likely consequences of air attacks on known or suspected weapon sites and labs and pretty soon, most experts began to have grave doubts about the ability of any weapon, however magical, to pierce a lab or a vat or how about a test tube, deep underground in one or ten or a hundred of thousands of underground hiding places.

The more it was looked into, the more the possibility appeared as a hint of doomsday if a missile did hit a tank or bin or whatever of a chemical or biological weapon and the stuff burst free and sprayed death and agony far and wide.

A team of experts has gone further in elaborating this doomsday scenario. This was a panel of experts in battlefield wounds and hazards and subsequent illnesses. It has spent two years studying a small cluster of various afflictions suffered by thousands of veterans of the Gulf War.

They put their conclusions in a letter this week to the president, saying that some of those veterans, many of those veterans, suffer from illnesses that can best be explained by their having been exposed to a nerve agent released from an Iraqi arms depot when it was demolished just after the war. The grim message here is, think twice before bombing the very materials you mean to destroy.

While this tense discussion about air strikes was going on among the learned and the ignorant – this is a democracy, isn't it – a new school of instructors came on the double, led by two of the most thoughtful conservative commentators. They announced that air strikes were, on several accounts, a hopeless response to Saddam's defiance.

What America, with its lone British ally perhaps, should do is finish off what was not done in the Gulf War – whose United Nations brief admittedly was merely to get Saddam out of Kuwait – but this time invade Iraq, on to Baghdad, track down Saddam himself, arrest him, or if need be, kill him.

Tough talk from rather intellectual commentators. It would, they admitted, involve several hundred thousand men with every sort of land weapon and massive aerial support.

This crusade did not go long unchallenged. In the past ten years or more, we've been fed such juicy expectations from aerial warfare, such a happy prospect of forces not being, as I think President Reagan said it first, put in harm's way.

Can you imagine any other time in history where soldiers were half promised not to be put in harm's way? I can hear one of Kipling's Tommies saying, " 'arm's way mate, is where I live". Anyway, the mention and then the drumming repetition of the dread phrase "ground forces" made both the White House and the Pentagon practically promise no such plan was in mind.

And the Congress, all the brave men who'd said they'd be right behind a warring president cried, "Whoa Dobbin". No hundreds of thousands, no thousands, no land invasion.

And that's about where we stand now, or wobble. As I speak, Saddam would have appeared to pull out an ace from his sleeve by changing his mind once more, by saying OK, you can come back and examine every nook and cranny of the palaces for two months only. And away in South Africa, Mr Mandela has said Saddam is right in saying strip the inspection team of Americans, they're only inflammatory.

And both Mr Clinton and the homecoming secretary of defence are giving heroic pep talks to the troops and saying, we'll be ready to go in a week or so. It suggests that they know about strategy or tactics in the use of an air strike that we do not, which is as it should be, which is what we devoutly hope.

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