The Next Step for the USA - 15 February 2002

Some time ago - it must be two months ago - a cold, brilliant morning was darkened by an alarming newspaper piece by a former assistant secretary, an expert on the Middle East, a very steady, pragmatic fellow, whose analysis of any subject was always so thoughtful that his partisanship, if any, was hard to discover - the very best type of civil servant.

But the piece was an earnest plea to the administration, to the Bush team, to mount an attack - and I don't mean in Washington rhetoric - a military attack at once on Saddam Hussein.

Mr Perle, the writer, had not changed his character, he'd not turned into an hysteric. What indeed was so impressive about his piece was the deadly quiet, the tone, in which he recited a catalogue of blood-curdling facts about Saddam's readiness for either a nuclear attack, a germ, a chemical attack on the United States or on one of its outposts.

"The time," he said, "is now."

Disappointment

Well, after a careful thought or two of my own I decided to not to talk about it.

It stirred only a small rumpus in the foreign offices of Europe which anyway, once the Afghan war was won, were beginning to draw on the old venom of anti-Americanism on other matters.

And an American, anyway, did not have to read very closely between the lines of liberal editorials to sense that there was a secret disappointment that the United States had not followed the path and followed the fate we all feared it would, namely the long years of frustration and final retreat of the British in the 19th Century, the Russians in the 20th.

And if that sounds mean let me say at once that's what I feared in the beginning and was as mightily relieved as anybody when we discovered the formidable gifts of Secretary Rumsfeld for waging and winning a war.

No allies

It was just when we were all asking - Where next? - that Secretary Perle's piece appeared and filled me, for one, with dread.

Dread of, this time, the whole Arab world being mobilised against America. Dread of the thought that since Saddam was in the habit of burying his biochemical and other lethal items underneath hospitals, in the basement of children's schools, dread therefore of the inevitable pile of civilian casualties.

And the most discouraging thing - what seemed to me the inevitable denunciation of most, if not all, European governments, of whatever political stripe. In blunter words: No allies.

I kept these unpleasant thoughts to myself believing the president had apparently silenced the flapping wing of the Pentagon that was ready to give the answer to where next - Baghdad.

Frustration

So we talked in the meantime of many things, some of them cheerful, and then suddenly the president gave his State of the Union address and all anyone will ever recall from it will be the grim phrase "an axis of evil".

Not only had the president revived Mr Perle's menace of Saddam Hussein but linked him, as a partner in criminal intent, with Iran, which had lately been mooching towards official relations with the United States.

But also North Korea, thus disheartening the president of South Korea, who's been hoping that the long and rough history of post-war rumbles with North Korea might be coming to an end.

It is true that few Europeans know much about North Korea or can even guess at the maddening frustration successive American presidents have suffered.

Split

America, in recent years, has paid off, bribed if you like, North Korea to the tune of over $1bn in exchange for a promise to build no nuclear arsenal.

The North Koreans have taken the money and instead of using it to alleviate the starvation of their own people have devoted the gift to the making of advanced nuclear weapons and along the way becoming the world's main exporter of missiles - selling to Iran in particular a missile capable of striking Turkey, Israel and Saudi Arabia.

Nevertheless there remains a split in the strategical beliefs inside the Pentagon. The sceptical faction doubting very much whether even the one and only super power has the resources - military, naval, aerial, manpower, let alone morale - to wage two wars in Arabia and one in Asia.

But the foreign ministers of Europe it seems are not ready to contemplate even one war, however swift and short, against Saddam.

Melancholy

At this low point in our meditations the telephone rang. It was my oldest English friend.

"Please," he begged, "is there any good news?"

"Yes," I said, "I think there is."

"What, what?"

"Gently, take it easy and pay attention," I said.

I hope some of you remember some of my New Year's talk about the Russian orthodox cathedral round my corner and the bell that for 51 years has given out at eventide two melancholy tollings, bemoaning, I liked to think, the enslavement of the church under Bolshevism and its stern dictate that religion is the opiate of the masses.

Well I told you how a week or two earlier the bells had rung merrily, a defiance of some sort that was explained only a few hours later when there on the tube was a small, slim, dapper man, slipping into the church - no retinue, perhaps a friend - and suddenly it was Mr Putin going to his devotions.

Spiritual

I've hardly recovered from the shock of seeing the president of Mother Russia reverting, shall we say, to the service of holy Russia.

Last week two American journalists - the proprietor of the Wall Street Journal and a senior reporter colleague - sat down with that man, that same Vladimir Putin, for an interview of such directness and candour as I don't ever remember with any previous Russian or Soviet chief.

Miss Karen House put the question which I'm sure no one, no foreigner, had ever put before: "Are you a religious man?"

Mr Putin paused for the first time, dropped his soft voice still lower and gravely remarked that everybody should have within a moral, spiritual basis and there was none better than religion which the communist ideology had replaced.

And now I quote him directly: "If there is a God, he, it, must be in the heart of a person.

President or Pope

"Religion is very important for a country like Russia for nothing can express universal human values in a human soul as effectively as religion can. Religion makes a person spiritually richer."

He said he'd leave it at that, leaving his two stunned journalists wondering whether they were interviewing the president of Russia or the Pope.

Well I have no way of knowing if my old friend will be impressed, let alone gladdened, by this shock. Throughout 35-40 years I've never put to him the question Miss House put to Putin. I suspect he's a heathen.

But there is, I think, very good secular news from the same source.

Once Mr Putin in that Moscow interview had said "we'll leave it there" they got on to topics that are worrying both Americans and Europeans, especially topic A - Iraq, Saddam.

Merciless defiance

Simply and directly with no fudging jargon Mr Putin said the problem with Iraq is completely different from Afghanistan and the very last thing that should happen is unilateral military action by the United States.

He implied that no single country can solve the problem of Saddam's flagrant violation of the treaty accords he signed - oh what? - 10 years ago, and throughout all the time his unyielding expulsion of every United Nations team that went to track down his nuclear, chemical, germ labs materials, hidden resources.

Mr Putin is surely well aware of this merciless defiance and the frightful demoralising effect it had on the United Nations inspectors, yet Mr Putin says he's perfectly willing to help the United States but only under the auspices of the United Nations. Start again, is what he's saying.

There will be a tidal wave of relieved sighs in Europe but not, I fear, in the United Nations.

Oh yes, "Let's go to the UN and impose sanctions" has been the automatic peace-making slogan for years and years.

Co-operation

But quite apart from the steady ineffectiveness of sanctions - you easily get what you want through giving a false recipient nation on the manifest - the United Nations loves to be appealed to and activate yet another committee.

But what is never recalled by eager supplicants to the UN is that in spite of the grandeur of its charter - "in order to save succeeding generations from the scourge of war" - and the promise of successful arbitration, the UN is powerless. The United Nations doesn't own even a water pistol.

Consequently though it has advertised sneaky aggressors often enough to make them publicly withdraw, it has not been able to prevent, since its founding in 1945, over 240 wars.

Mr Putin says the best hope of a stable world is the continuing co-operation of Russia and the United States and, through what he called his close and warm relationship with President Bush, there has developed a new and very high level of trust.

Months

Well the practical effect of this remarkable interview in Moscow - though it could be just a case of "post hoc, propter hoc" - is that President Bush and Secretary Rumsfeld and Secretary of State Powell have declared that they're not going to attack anybody for some months, that they have a plan, a sequence of actions, and that the United Nations and another bang on the inspection gate is an early one.

So, old friend, there you are. Maybe the words from Moscow are just what the doctor ordered - or could be another Munich.

We must take a deep breath and wait and see.

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