U.S. Is Stuck With ‘Grim’ Iraq Options

In the latest standoff with Iraq, President Clinton has been compelled by events to pursue a strategy offering no appealing options and numerous opportunities to fail.

Whichever way he chooses to go, there is no assurance that the United States will succeed in advancing the fundamental objective of its Iraq policy for the last seven years: preventing President Saddam Hussein from developing new weapons of mass destruction.

Yet with the drumbeat of possible military action against Iraq growing louder by the hour, the Clinton administration appears to have concluded that the new course it is charting offers at least a flicker of hope for containing, if not curtailing, Hussein’s appetite for aggression.

And although the outcome ultimately may prove less than satisfying, the administration believes that it could beat doing nothing at all.

In the administration’s view, Hussein himself made the pivotal decision when he declared that the U.N. Special Commission, or UNSCOM, would no longer be allowed to look for evidence of weapons development, reneging on his previous commitments to Secretary-General Kofi Annan.

“There may not be much left to lose,” said one senior White House official. “UNSCOM has been moribund for the last three months.”

Rolf Ekeus, Sweden’s ambassador to the United States and former chief of UNSCOM, concurred with that assessment, saying: “The choice is not between using force and UNSCOM, because UNSCOM is not operating now anyway. The choice is between using force and not using force.”

Rather than directing all of its energy toward trying to eradicate the Iraqi leader’s ability to develop weapons of mass destruction, the administration appears to be retreating to a view that containment is the only realistic option.

U.S. officials acknowledge that a bombing campaign, no matter how extensive, cannot be expected to eradicate covert efforts to develop chemical, biological and nuclear weapons.

Moreover, the administration concedes that a military strike may in fact make it impossible for U.N. inspectors to ever root out such efforts on the ground.

The choice comes down to: “What’s better: ineffective inspections or ineffective bombing?” said Joseph Cirincione, an arms control specialist at the Carnegie Endowment for Peace in Washington.

The objective of containment would be to use the threat of military force to deter Hussein from ever using weapons of mass destruction, and, failing that, to punish him if he did.

“Military force as a tool of nonproliferation is an extremely blunt instrument,” noted Jonathan B. Tucker, director of a chemical and biological weapons nonproliferation project at Monterey Institute of International Studies.

“None of the president’s options are really very good. All of them look or sound like one-shot deals to inflict pain and are very unlikely to bring Saddam to heel,” said Eliot A. Cohen, director of strategic studies at Johns Hopkins’ Nitze School of Advanced International Studies in Washington. “It’s very hard to imagine that they won’t do something and very hard to see how anything they could do could do any good.”

Some officials and analysts hold out hope, however, that a substantial military strike might prod Hussein to allow the inspection teams to go back to work.

“The only way out of this for the security of the world is to force Iraq to comply with the inspection regime,” Cirincione said. “Any other outcome would allow Saddam to build and launch his weapons of mass destruction.”

But veterans of past U.S.-Iraqi confrontations warn that it is very difficult to force Hussein’s hand.

“Saddam didn’t change his behavior even when we bombed him in 1991 in a far greater effort than anything we’re likely to do now,” said Brent Scowcroft, who was then-President Bush’s national security advisor during the Persian Gulf War. “Clinton is in a really grim position.”

If it were up to him, Scowcroft said, he would be prepared to launch an open-ended series of military strikes, each one directed at a new target in Iraq. That, he said, would send Hussein an unequivocal message: “If you don’t like us taking them out one a week, we’ll go back to inspections. Take your choice.

“Does this administration have guts enough to stick to that?” Scowcroft added. “I don’t know. It’s a tough policy, but it is a clearly understandable policy.”

“The real question is, how long is the U.S. prepared to use force? Are we prepared to dish it out longer than Saddam can take it?” said Richard Haass, a former Bush advisor who now directs foreign policy studies at the Brookings Institution. “We’ll have no support if all we want to do is slap Saddam on the wrist with a few airstrikes. That’s just enough to make him mad.”

In fact, one of the problems bedeviling U.S. policymakers is Hussein’s approach to measuring the success of his actions, which defies Western logic.

“If he survives this confrontation, he will be strengthened, “ said the Monterey Institute’s Tucker. “He doesn’t have to win--just survive. In a sense, if he does, he will have won the Gulf War: He will still be in place and have the potential to rebuild his most dangerous weapons.”

Times staff writers Norman Kempster and Tyler Marshall contributed to this report.