Iraq's Midsummer Nightmare - 15 November 2002

The day before the Congressional elections the papers and the tube resounded with all the best known pundits having the last word.

The word is prediction - a word most of them would rather not have to speak in view of the dim record of the human race in prophesying anything, including presidential elections.

What their prophesies amounted to in the Congressional elections was - everywhere a very tight race, maybe once again the stalemate of a 50/50 Senate.

So what happened? A comparative landslide for George W.

For the first time in 137 years, since the Civil War, no Republican president and only one Democrat has ever actually gained seats in both houses in the mid term, after his first two years in office.

I remember explaining this in a talk years and years ago by saying that once every four years the people elect a president and think or pretend they've found Moses, who is going to lead them into the promised land.

After two years they invariably discover that he's not Moses but yet another president with flaws and frailties, just like you and me.

But now I'm pretty much obliged to talk about a much larger and even less predictable victory for President Bush than the mid-term elections, which is the unanimous 15-0 vote in the United Nations Security Council in favour of what is substantially the Bush resolution of warning to Saddam Hussein.

Admittedly it took eight weeks and packs of lawyers from 15 delegations working day and often into the night, before the resolution was finally expressed and approved.

The administration had expected at best that there would be 12 approving votes with Russia and France abstaining.

What Syria would do was always a mystery - Syria is and has been to previous administrations a dire threat to peace in its region and to the interests of the West and by only a last-minute change of mind was it not publicly branded as a member of the evil empire.

Yet, Syria voted yes.

You'll be relieved, I hope, not to have me recite the text of the resolution which to laymen - which means everybody who is not a graduate in international law - is a march on stilts of gobbledegook, which the well-beloved Safire, the language buff, defines as the stilted circumlocution of officialdom - an official directive sometimes meant to be hard to understand but usually the result of a lazy lapse into legalese.

The wonderful word gobbledegook was coined by a Texas congressman, long gone but never to be forgotten, maybe because his father gave his name to an unbranded calf and therefore by extension to a politician who is a loner - the word was maverick.

His son, Maury Maverick, was once asked how come he thought up gobbledegook to describe a particular sort of jargon.

He said: "I don't know, maybe it came to me in a vision.

"What I must have been thinking of was the old, bearded turkey gobbler, back in Texas, who was always gobbledegobbling and strutting with ludicrous pomposity.

"At the end of this gobble there was a sort of, well, gook!

"So," Congressman Maverick went on, "it's a type of talk which is long, vague, pompous, involved mostly with Latinised words."

Maury Maverick, whom I must say I had the honour of knowing, was a very rare politician.

He knew all the professional lingo and deplored it. And in one marvellous article he mocked the language of his colleagues - the lawyers and their business advisers - by quoting first Alice in Wonderland and then the Bible.

From Alice: "'Speak English,' said the Eaglet, 'I don't know the meaning of half these long words and what's more I don't believe you do either.'"

And from the Bible: "Except ye utter by the tongue words easy to be understood, how shall it be known what is spoken?"

I hope and believe this warning prefaces a good idea because the United Nations resolution looks like, and is to us, needlessly pompous Latin but it is to the men who composed it a finely woven texture - of legalisms, to be sure - which can be and will be interpreted differently by different delegates, different people, different nations.

There's no need to go further than one phrase which I believe could make the difference between war and peace or to be more precise, a United Nations war or a war started by America, Britain and any other willing ally.

The phrase is "material breach".

The new resolution achieves a feat to have every member of the Security Council agree that Saddam did not do what he promised to do when he signed the Gulf War ceasefire agreement after he surrendered.

Which was mainly, among other things, to destroy chemical, nuclear and biological weapons and accept a United Nations peacekeeping force.

Well, after one year it was made clear to the intelligence services of several Western nations, not American alone, that Saddam was - can you believe it - actually violating the surrender agreement.

So the United Nations worked out a Security Council resolution setting up inspection teams.

They would go into Iraq and discover and destroy the weapons that Saddam had started burying and hiding in many ways.

Saddam said "Oh my, I hadn't noticed but yes, here's a weapon, there's a lab" - and he went on hiding and manufacturing more stuff just the same.

So the United Nations moved in with a resolution ordering him to do what he'd promised and failed to do twice - allow inspectors to disclose and destroy any weapons of mass destruction.

Same result - no effect on litmus.

More resolutions, saying the same thing, more dodging and pussy-footing and evasion and violation going on with the helpless concurrence of the Western Europeans, the secretary general and the chief executives of Western Europe, including - name your prime minister - and President Clinton.

So after, what was it, 16 resolutions and 10 years? Saddam's still busy increasing his arsenal of mass destructive weapons and by now throwing out the UN inspectors, sometimes at actual gunpoint, the United States elected a president who decided that 10 years of evasion, violation and nose-thumbing of the United Nations was enough.

He's the first president to tell the United Nations itself that it was becoming irrelevant to the maintenance of peace and that if the council members did not come together to do what they'd been created for in the first place - to put down aggressors - the United States would move into Iraq with whatever allies it could recruit and disarm him itself.

The foreign offices of Western Europe were appalled, giving Mr Bush's declaration a wonderful Gilbert and Sullivan translation into saying - this is awful, here we've been at peace with that terrible Saddam all these years and now along comes an American president who wants to make war.

President Bush's response was to demonstrate time and again that he meant what he said.

There was now positive intelligence that Saddam's biological weapons and his Scud missiles were at the ready, so that Saddam could, if he chose, overwhelm Israel and maybe get to the Gulf and all the oil fields.

At last even the French have come to believe - half believe - that Saddam is a very present threat to the peace of the Middle East.

The new resolution orders the head of the inspection teams to supervise a new round of searching and destroying and if he finds that Saddam is still being naughty - that is to say "in material breach" of the resolution - then what?

Then the Security Council meets again and will decide on "serious consequences" - which, being translated, means the UN will be faced with sanctioning military action or watching the United States and its allies go it alone.

Enough time is being allowed for Saddam to split hairs on what constitutes material breach and to reveal this and hide that and delay the promised business of searching the presidential sites or palaces - which constitute, by the way, the area of the nation's capital city, Washington DC.

More than anybody President Bush will be watching these evasions on the calendar, knowing that if the council dillies and dallies over a new resolution, new temporising, the hideous midsummer would have descended on Iraq, made drinking water scarce, generating a vast explosion of military flat tyres and revealing the struggles of the invading military men to walk successfully, let along fight, in their new chemical-resistant, enormously cumbersome uniforms.

But by now the council must know this and knows that the president knows it.

Meanwhile Secretary General Kofi Annan has urged the president to exercise patience.

Mr Bush is as capable as any leader in a crisis to stay patient but if patience means another winter of United Nations debating, a performance of gobbledegook, going into next spring then by that time Saddam would have achieved his great triumph - to stretch the 15 nations' arguments into the season when any punitive military campaign would be impossible in the blinding heat and the far-reaching drought of Iraq's midsummer nightmare.

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