U.S. Could Be a Winner Without Military Strike

The peaceful end to the latest standoff with Iraq might actually lead to greater reduction of Iraqi President Saddam Hussein’s chemical and biological arsenal while also avoiding major political costs for the United States, analysts agreed Monday.

United Nations inspectors, provided they are granted the access Hussein has now promised, have a far better chance of eliminating weapons of mass destruction than would be likely through a campaign of airstrikes, the analysts believe.

“If fully implemented--and that is the big ‘if’--this commitment will allow [the U.N. inspection team] to fulfill its mission,” President Clinton said Monday.

A military strike, on the other hand, probably would have ended U.N. access, at least for the foreseeable future. Of equal import, the prospective accord means that the U.S. will not have to face the probability of considerable political fallout from the use of force.

Military action could have resulted in American casualties and in heavy losses among Iraqi civilians. It could have led indirectly to the collapse of the wobbly coalition of Western and Arab countries formed seven years ago to oppose Hussein and added to the erosion of U.S. influence in the Arab world. It might have dealt a fatal blow to the struggling Arab-Israeli peace process.

Dangers Remain

With those risks in mind, the Clinton administration pursued diplomacy with determination even as it increased troop strength in the Persian Gulf from 20,000 to 34,000 and prepared for a series of limited airstrikes.

“The agreement is a big plus for the U.S.,” declared Charles William Maynes, director of the Eurasia Foundation and former editor of Foreign Policy magazine. “If it had been forced to bomb, the administration might have incurred very heavy political costs in the Middle East and the rest of the world. It showed itself to be very tough but also reasonable, and that’s ultimately going to be a plus for the United States.”

Richard Haass, Middle East specialist on the National Security Council under President Bush, said, “Using the military option was clearly costly, risky and never an end in itself. If we now got what we wanted through the threat of military force, we ought to be able to take yes for an answer.”

But as Clinton announced exactly that on Monday, he made it clear that the danger had not passed and that America will remain ready to strike militarily if Hussein fails to comply. “Our soldiers, our ships, our planes will stay there in force until we are satisfied that . . . Iraq is complying with its commitments,” Clinton said.

Just how long the large U.S. force will remain in place was uncertain Monday. Political and military analysts outside the government predicted that the U.N. inspectors will need months to go through new, previously restricted sites and to retrace their steps through older spots that might have been compromised in the four months since they were banned from Iraq.

“I would hope we would now establish a higher plateau for military forces in the region,” Haass said. “That way, if we had to use force, the administration wouldn’t have to go through a prolonged windup again.”

Pentagon Relieved

But for now, the sense of relief in the administration is clear and easy to understand. Historically, the use of air power has been an attractive option in these situations, partly because it can deliver considerable firepower without the high risks, costs and potentially messy involvement inherent in a ground operation. But as the 1991 Persian Gulf War reaffirmed, the effect of air power has also been consistently overrated.

In recent weeks, European allies--eager to head off a military strike--repeatedly noted that the U.N. weapons inspectors had found and destroyed more of Hussein’s chemical and biological weapons than were hit in 45 days of uninterrupted aerial bombing during the Gulf War.

Indeed, at the Pentagon on Monday afternoon, senior officials said many officials were relieved that they weren’t called on to carry out a limited mission that few expected would have much visible effect on Iraq’s behavior. “People at the Pentagon were good soldiers about it, of course,” one senior officer said. “But I don’t think you saw anyone on the military side who was very enthusiastic.”

The political costs to the United States--in lost influence and new levels of opposition--would probably have been high, mainly because the U.S. had lost the propaganda war in the region, analysts said.

As the situation intensified, it became apparent that few in the Arab world could see the sense of airstrikes, especially if there was no larger plan to depose Hussein. For many Arabs, the U.S. plan looked like gratuitous violence against nearly helpless brethren.

Sen. Robert Torricelli (D-N.J.), who recently visited the Middle East, said he left with the impression that most Arabs had not been convinced that Hussein’s weapons of mass destruction represented a real and immediate threat. In the Arab world, he said, this standoff was perceived as a problem between the United States and Iraq.

“We allowed ourselves to lose a propaganda war against the most unlikely of people,” Torricelli said. “Saddam Hussein defined this crisis in the streets of Arab cities of the region as a confrontation between the U.S. and an Arab Muslim country that was being treated unfairly and was held to an unjust standard. This was not a high point of American diplomacy.”

If the administration had gone ahead with the use of military force, it almost certainly would have touched off a wave of anti-American demonstrations across the Islamic world, regional specialists said.

At worst, these expressions of public outrage could destabilize friendly governments. At best, they would embarrass generally pro-American governments and aggravate anti-Arab sentiment on Capitol Hill, developments that could complicate the U.S. role as mediator in the Arab-Israeli peace process.

A ‘Sour Mood’

“Had we struck, there would have been more and larger demonstrations in the West Bank, Gaza, Beirut, Amman, maybe even Cairo,” said Richard Murphy, the State Department’s top Middle East expert in the Reagan administration. “All of that adds stress and strain to their leadership, and it is apt to provoke further anti-American criticism. It would have put further strain on some of our ties in the Arab world even though they don’t have much sympathy” for Hussein.

William B. Quandt, an international relations professor at the University of Virginia, predicted that bombing Iraq would have worsened a “sour mood” in the Arab world that is hampering U.S. efforts to bring Israel and the Palestinians to the bargaining table. Settling the Iraq crisis peacefully will not, in itself, restart the Arab-Israeli peace process. But “an attack probably would have made things worse,” said Quandt, who was a White House Middle East expert in the Carter administration.

U.S. bombing also probably would have riven the fraying coalition that fought the Gulf War. Conversely, the diplomatic solution preserves at least the facade of unity necessary to keep the U.N. sanctions in place. “There is a sanctions regime which is still intact which is the residual of the old coalition,” Quandt said. “That shouldn’t be sniffed at. It is the most effective part of the containment strategy.”

But it would have been difficult to hold the sanctions regime together if the United States had engaged in unilateral bombing, he said: “The Russians weren’t going to be happy; the Syrians were not on board this time. The Egyptians would have been concerned but not hysterical; the same with the Saudis. It would have been much more difficult to pretend that there was a broad international consensus behind keeping Saddam contained.”

A Senate Foreign Relations Committee staffer observed: “We haven’t lost anything, and we might have gained something. If it works, that’s great. If it doesn’t work, we haven’t lost any options. We can still bomb. Bombing might have ended the inspection regime.”

Times staff writer Paul Richter contributed to this report.