Another Hussein, Another Bush

The other day Saddam Hussein’s eldest and increasingly visible son, Uday, recommended--which is virtually the same as ordered--that the map of Iraq displayed in its parliament building be redrawn to put Kuwait within its borders. It was a chilling reminder of the claim, asserted to justify the invasion of Kuwait in August 1990, that the small state with huge oil reserves is a lost province of Iraq, ripped from the motherland by colonial powers. That’s nonsense, and in November 1994, Iraq itself recognized Kuwait’s independence and boundaries.

Now Uday Hussein proclaims the Gulf War “not yet finished,” and Kuwait’s foreign minister tells other Arab leaders he perceives “a grave danger.”

The incoming Bush administration is sensitive to the danger. Half of a recent 90-minute security briefing for its top officials was devoted to Iraq. At his confirmation hearing this week, Secretary of State-designate Colin Powell repeated his intention to reinvigorate the sanctions on Iraq that have become increasingly flaccid. That won’t be easy, given the self-interested opposition to maintaining the restrictions on Iraqi trade coming from Russia, China and France, all members of the U.N. Security Council, and the sympathy for Iraq increasingly expressed in the Arab world.

George W. Bush said Thursday he would use military force against Iraq if it “crosses the line”--presumably meaning if it menaces Kuwait--or if “we catch [Iraq] developing weapons of mass destruction.” Analysts of the Gulf War of a decade ago have faulted then-President George Bush, along with Dick Cheney, his defense secretary, and Colin Powell, then chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, for halting the ground war prematurely, leaving Saddam Hussein in power.

Now Iraq is again at the top of a Bush administration’s list of foreign policy concerns. If it’s not quite history repeating itself, it’s close enough.