Risk Now Is Mainly to the United Nations : Baghdad’s challenge to Security Council must be answered

This weekend a team of U.N. inspectors is scheduled to go to Iraq to demand and oversee the destruction of facilities used to make Scud missiles. It could prove to be a fateful journey.

Baghdad’s stalling on meeting its commitments to the United Nations to scrap all of its weapons of mass destruction, including most recently its resistance to demolishing the Scud factories, has already brought exasperated condemnation from the Security Council. Now it is also evoking increasingly more direct warnings of punitive military action from the United States.

MILITARY MATTERS: Administration officials say that the Pentagon has given President Bush a list of possible military targets; all are apparently involved in building or delivering nuclear or chemical weapons. They also say that Bush continues to believe existing U.N. resolutions give him full international authority to resume the air war if he chooses.

Certainly all the power needed for that option is available, if the war of nerves becomes a war of weapons. Attention has been drawn to the “routine” movement into the Persian Gulf of the aircraft carrier America, with its 80 planes. Also in the Gulf is the cruiser Normandy, armed with Tomahawk cruise missiles. About 150 U.S. Air Force planes are stationed in Saudi Arabia, including F-117 Stealth fighters. Other warplanes are based in Turkey.

Bush pretty clearly would prefer to have Iraq cooperate so as to forestall military action, for that option is not without political pitfalls. The leaders of Egypt and Syria, two Arab countries that contributed to the anti-Iraq coalition symbolically--if something less than militarily effectually--have already said that they oppose further military steps. The Administration regards Egypt as a major Arab friend, and it is eager to keep Syria participating, however grudgingly, in the Middle East peace conference it has organized. Saudi Arabia has apparently sent mixed signals on how it feels about the military option. The latest, perhaps subject to change at any moment, seems to be that the Saudis would support military action if it were unavoidable.

POLITICAL MATTERS: Other political considerations also have to be weighed. A U.S. air attack could see Iraq again firing missiles at Israel. This time around, it could be taken as a certainty that Israel would retaliate, setting the stage for the inevitable allegation in the Islamic world that Americans and Israelis premeditatedly joined forces to attack an Arab country. Bush must also consider the effect of an attack on his own political fortunes. Probably most Americans would support his action. At the same time most would also be reminded that last year’s war left Saddam Hussein not just in power but disturbingly well armed.

Thursday saw both the State Department and the United Nations denying that Iraq faces any early deadline for agreeing to the destruction of its Scud facilities, thus removing the impression left by earlier leaks that renewed bombing might be imminent.

But deadline or not, political pitfalls or not, there seems to be a powerful sense both in the U.N. Security Council and the Bush Administration that Iraq must be made to comply fully with the disarmament resolutions, that it cannot be allowed to defy the international consensus.

Are there measures short of resumed bombing that can be taken to try to compel Iraqi compliance? Yes, most notably tightening the economic squeeze on Iraq by seizing its billions of dollars in overseas assets frozen after the invasion of Kuwait. But if that doesn’t work, what then? Then the stark choice would inevitably seem to become one of using force to destroy Iraq’s weapons of mass destruction or of seeing the newly revived political and legal credibility of the United Nations suffer a deep and perhaps fatal wound.