Inaction on Iraq Is Unacceptable

The White House says that all military and political options in regard to Iraq are still under review. But it has become clear that while force remains the last resort following Saddam Hussein’s ending of all cooperation with U.N. weapons inspectors, the moment is approaching when force may be seen as the only resort. Even Iraq’s most influential erstwhile sympathizers, Russia and France, have vented their exasperation with Baghdad’s defiance of U.N. Security Council resolutions. That doesn’t equate with an endorsement of threatened U.S. and British military strikes to punish Hussein’s adamancy. But it does show that Hussein has recklessly overplayed his hand and in so doing alienated those whose diplomatic support he so assiduously cultivated.

U.S. officials are being careful not to raise exaggerated expectations about what airstrikes against Iraq might accomplish. Bombing won’t, for example, eradicate Iraq’s clandestinely maintained chemical and biological warfare capability, because targeters simply don’t know where all those sites are. Strikes would instead be aimed at discrediting and weakening Hussein by concentrating on the essential props of his regime: command and control systems, military headquarters, the Republican Guard, the pervasive and brutal intelligence services. Coupled with the unrelieved hardships brought on by seven years of economic sanctions, these attacks might force a change in top-level Iraqi thinking or, with luck, even its leadership.

It’s quite possible, to be sure, that when the dust cleared, Hussein would still be in total control, the U.N. inspection system would be ended and work on secretly developing terror weapons would go on. In short, except for what could be a large degree of fresh destruction to Hussein’s political and military infrastructure, nothing essential would have changed. That is a clear risk. But it is not as great a risk as doing nothing while an aggressor state brazenly defies the Security Council and forges ahead with creating weapons that are capable of indiscriminately killing tens of thousands.