‘Wag the Dog’ It’s Not

“Butler Report + 1 day” has been on my calendar as the date of a probable attack on Iraq since Dec. 4, the day that United Nations biological weapons inspector Diane Seaman was denied access to an office on the lame excuse that it was Friday, the Muslim day of rest. One month ago, President Clinton pulled back U.S. forces minutes before launching an attack on Iraq. He was compelled to do so because United Nations Secretary-General Kofi Annan had extracted a pledge from Saddam Hussein of “full cooperation” with UNSCOM, the U.N. Special Commission charged with ensuring that Iraq abandons its programs to develop biological, chemical and nuclear arms as well as the ballistic missiles to deliver them.

Saddam’s Nov. 15 promise rang as hollow as all of his previous commitments. Few observers had expected better Iraqi cooperation with UNSCOM than had occurred in the past. The Iraqi regime remained true to form.

On at least three occasions in November and December, the Iraqis gave chief U.N. weapons inspector Richard Butler ample justification for reporting that Iraq had broken its commitments. The stakes were high because cooperation, certified by UNSCOM, would have triggered the first comprehensive review of U.N. sanctions against Iraq. The review might well have induced the Security Council to relax both the embargo on trade with Iraq and ended some of UNSCOM’s concerns.

On two previous occasions--March and November of 1998--Saddam has driven the United States to a kind of stalemate, one resolved before force could be used. In chess, when the same position occurs three times, a stalemate is said to occur and the game called a draw. Merely repeating the November stand-down would have foreclosed any hope of further effective monitoring by UNSCOM. Clinton and British Prime Minister Tony Blair had plainly resolved to avoid a reprise of November and a stalemated draw in favor of Iraq.

To do so, they needed to back November’s diplomacy with December’s force and initiate military action before the initiative passed to Annan or the Russian foreign ministry. The approach of Ramadan played a smaller role in the military timetable than did the worry that the opportunity provided by Butler’s report would be squandered.

A month of inspections probably provided some useful, if incomplete, information on the locations of the most important targets, including the current storage sites for the ingredients of forbidden chemical weapons and the archives of both programs.

If a diplomatic shuttle had begun, Saddam would have had time to move and hide the projects that had been reassembled during the break in monitoring from August to November. Targets worth striking could be found only if military action were taken without warning.

The same applied to the power base of the Iraqi regime. Given a few days of lead time, Saddam could easily disperse his armored forces and redeploy his mobile air defenses to prevent their destruction.

The timing of the latest U.S. strikes on Iraq was established by Iraqi refusal to honor its 1991 cease-fire agreements coupled with Butler’s plain-spoken recitation of Saddam’s most recent acts of obstruction and delay to protect his enormous investment in biological and chemical weapons.

Publication of Butler’s report on Tuesday started the countdown. The fear of a repeat of November set the hands of the clock.

Domestic politics--the “Wag the Dog” syndrome--played little role in Clinton’s calculations. It must have been as clear to him as to others in Washington that postponing a vote on impeachment could only increase the number of votes against him.

It is outrageous but predictable that supporters of impeachment deny support for a military action that they themselves urged on the president just one month ago.