In truth, however, the Bush administration is probably in a stronger position vis-a-vis Iraq and the rest of the world than it has been in a long time. It’s also clear that a day of reckoning for Saddam Hussein is coming; the only question is how soon. Whatever the unease in foreign capitals about George W. Bush’s ultimate intentions–mainly whether he intends to just disarm Saddam, or kill him–no one could deny it was the administration’s threats that forced the Iraqi dictator last week to agree to what he has refused to do for four years: admit U.N. inspectors unconditionally. And whatever the grumbling in Washington’s back rooms about the “U.N. tar baby,” the administration is united publicly for the first time in months on its Iraq strategy. Other major powers, meanwhile, are squabbling and faced with an embarrassing new iteration of the Bush doctrine: do you prefer to stand with Dubya, or with Saddam Hussein?
So dramatically has the mood shifted, in fact, that German Chancellor Gerhard Schroder, the most noteworthy dove among the major governments, now seems to be taking more flak abroad than Bush. Caught in an uphill election battle, he pandered to German voters by opposing any use of force against Iraq–to the point where French commentators even accused him of “unilateralism.” Since Jacques Chirac was re-elected president earlier this year, he’s worked to shore up ties with Washington–and defending Iraq isn’t part of that agenda. When U.N. inspectors roll into Iraq, says a senior official in Paris, “there must be no red lines, no off-limits ‘presidential’ sites. The idea is to keep up the pressure on Iraq, but keep the international community united.”
The Bush juggernaut gained still more momentum with a surge of domestic backing. Last week the president used his U.N. strategy to pull cowed congressional Democrats in line–having robbed them of their chief argument, that he wasn’t seeking international consensus–and virtually assured himself of a resolution authorizing him to take “all means” necessary to disarm Iraq.
Now the president is using this revived domestic base to give Secretary of State Colin Powell a strong hand abroad as the fog of diplomatic war descends over New York and Washington. The issue in coming weeks will be whether the Security Council issues no new resolution, one resolution or two resolutions authorizing action in Iraq. The key player will likely be Russia. Last week there was an audible sigh of relief in Moscow when Iraq announced its readiness to readmit U.N. weapons inspectors. Foreign Minister Igor Ivanov quickly followed up by insisting that no new U.N. resolution was necessary–and if Ivanov has his way, it’ll be at least another six months before there can even be talk of a resolution threatening military action against Iraq in the event that the inspectors can’t do their jobs. That might prevent the Bush administration from going to war within the next year, because by then it will be too hot in the Iraqi desert to fight.
Russian President Vladimir Putin doesn’t want to have to decide between Iraq, with which Russia has strong commercial ties, and the West, which he sees as his country’s future. But the united Bushies are in no mood to let Moscow off the hook, and indeed Bush called Putin to make his case late last week. While the outcome is not clear, according to diplomatic sources a deal might be as follows: the United States and Britain want a new, tougher resolution that gives Saddam a very short deadline to cooperate with inspectors, who will be given full run of the country. In return for French support (which could help bring along the Russians and the Chinese), the Americans and the Brits might leave the way open for a separate resolution authorizing force if Saddam doesn’t comply. While Washington prefers to do both in one new resolution, Powell has flexibility.
To keep up the pressure, the British were preparing to publish, on Tuesday, a “dossier” that the Blair government hopes will help make the case against Saddam–and catch Iraqi Foreign Minister Naji Sabri, who insisted in a speech last week that Iraq “is clear of all nuclear, chemical and biological weapons,” in a lie. Blair will flog the dossier for all it’s worth, but few experts outside Blair’s inner circle yet believe that it will contain a “killer fact” lethal enough to make a truly new case against Saddam–one that answers the 800-pound question that has been lumbering around Europe for weeks: “Why now?” Iraqi officials, meanwhile, are still chortling over their divide-and-conquer strategy at the United Nations. “The return of the international inspectors to Iraq was the only argument or instrument in the hands of Washington and the present American administration which they could have used as a pretext for starting military action,” Abbas Khalaf Kunfuth, Iraq’s ambassador to the Russian Federation, said in an interview. “So we started consultations to take this trump card away from Washington, and they lost that card. Now, as you see, the American government is in complete international isolation.”
Not quite. In fact, it is Bush who now believes he holds the trump card: should Powell fail to get a new resolution, the president can argue he went to the United Nations and it refused to act. Ultimately, there is little doubt that Washington will move militarily against Iraq. Apart from when, the only real question going forward is, will this famously fractious administration hold together long enough to build and maintain an international coalition to do so? Cheney and Rumsfeld continue to signal that “regime change” is what they really want. That, of course, tends to undermine the Bush team’s argument that it only wants disarmament, and even Britain says it cannot publicly sign onto that goal. Bush also indicated he hasn’t given up on unilateralism when, in comments to reporters last week, he pushed for a congressional vote before the Nov. 5 election. “I can’t imagine an elected member of the United States Senate or House of Representatives saying, ‘I think I’m going to wait for the United Nations to make a decision’,” he said. A White House official told NEWSWEEK that the administration is also focused on correcting other Saddam sins, like his brutal treatment of his people. He cautions, “Don’t focus on inspections; it is not our focus.”
Bush’s new turn to multilateralism is not merely cosmetic. The administration learned in recent months that a harsh unilateralism doesn’t always serve it well, both with its own public and in getting the rest of the world to cooperate in the war on terror. Bush will have to move carefully on Iraq. As a White House official says: “No president gambles when it comes to American lives.” The administration, in its new national-security strategy published on Friday, also carefully hedged its new policy of pre-emption, which has worried many allies, who fret that Washington has created a new and potentially dangerous rule of international behavior. While the administration reserved the right to pre-emptively strike terrorists, it indicated that when it comes to striking other states it will move deliberately and in consultation with allies, warning too that “nations should not use preemption as a pretext for aggression… The reasons for our actions will be clear, the force measured, and the cause just,” the document says.
But the world should take notice: the titans back in Washington are no longer clashing. America has all but reached consensus on Iraq, if the rest of the globe hasn’t yet. Even the moderate Powell has been sounding indistinguishable from his archrival Rumsfeld lately. As the secretary of State told the House International Relations Committee last week: “I’ve been known as a reluctant warrior; it doesn’t bother me in the least. But the threat of war has to be there; and when a decision is made to fight a war, it’s also well known that I believe strongly in doing it decisively.” And like it or not, the administration’s decisiveness has moved the Iraq issue farther than it has gone in years.
