No Retreat for U.N. in Face-Off With Hussein : Security Council’s credibility is in the balance

Iraq’s defiance of the United Nations grows steadily more impudent, and more dangerous. U.N. inspectors who since July 5 have been denied access to the Agriculture Ministry building in Baghdad, where secret files on Iraq’s outlawed missile program are believed to be kept, have been driven from their nearby observation posts by rising threats of violence from government-mobilized mobs. The confrontation is the most serious since Saddam Hussein was forced to accept U.N. terms for ending last year’s Persian Gulf War. But it is also part of a spreading pattern of challenges to the authority and will of the Security Council and its key members. First and foremost, it is a challenge to the United States.

What accounts for Hussein’s boldness? Some see it as an effort to reassert leadership in response to spreading domestic discontent. Others think it stems from a perception that the key members of the coalition that threw him out of Kuwait last year have no stomach for resuming punitive military action to enforce U.N. resolutions. Certainly the coalition cannot effectively act without U.S. leadership and weapons. Hussein may be calculating that President Bush, facing a tough reelection campaign, dare not risk a renewal of even limited fighting against Iraq.

The White House, while not committing itself to any course of action, has again not ruled out air strikes as a means of exerting pressure on Hussein to conform to U.N. resolutions. The political downside to such actions could be that they would remind voters that the military victory over Iraq, Bush’s most vaunted achievement, was incomplete and equivocal. The political benefit is that military actions would probably be almost universally applauded as evidence of a determination not to be pushed around by one of the world’s most detestable regimes.

What the United States may be prepared to do--and no less important, whether Saudi Arabia and Turkey would cooperate in allowing their air bases to be used--is likely to be known sooner rather than later. If air strikes are in the cards they would have to come quickly, so there would be no doubt about their direct relationship to Hussein’s efforts to thwart the U.N. inspectors. This much at least is clear: The United Nations cannot afford to back down, compromise or dissemble in the face of this direct challenge to its authority. Should it do so, the political and moral credibility it has only so recently regained would be lost.

What also becomes steadily clearer as congressional committees release more and more once-classified documents is the folly of the Iraq policies pursued by the Reagan and Bush administrations from about 1985 to 1990. Their ostensible aim was to help build up a counterweight to Iran’s ambitions in the Persian Gulf, while inducing Hussein to moderate his own villainous behavior. To that end, and despite repeated intelligence warnings, some remarkably foolish measures were approved at the highest levels, including sales of technology that ended up advancing Iraq’s nuclear and other weapons program. Ultimately, U.S. policy worked only to strengthen Hussein’s repressive rule and wildly inflate his self-confidence. The price of that misguided effort continues to be paid.