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The unreality
of imminent war
By Jim Lobe
WASHINGTON - There is something very unreal
about being in Washington at the present time.
On the one hand, there is a general assumption
that the United States is going to invade Iraq - perhaps
with UN Security Council approval, perhaps no later than
mid to late-March, and possibly as early as next month.
On the other hand, there seems to be almost no
effort to build already soft public support for war with
Iraq. On the contrary, the ongoing and patently more
dangerous crisis over North Korea's nuclear program has
forced Iraq off the front pages, while a growing number
of mainstream commentators and politicians - not to
mention US allies - are asking why containing Iraq is
not a better option than invading it.
The
build-up to war is inescapable. Top officials, including
US President George W Bush himself, visit military bases
and warn that Washington is ready for war. The
television is virtually filled every day with pictures
of worried embraces between soldiers and their families
as, in the tens of thousands, troops, marines, pilots
and sailors set off for the Gulf. At the current rate,
the US should have close to 200,000 military personnel
in the immediate vicinity of Iraq by the first week of
February.
Adding to the impression of
inevitability are confident declarations by people
outside government who are in a position to know what
the top war planners are thinking. Richard Perle, head
of the Pentagon's Defense Policy Board and an intimate
of Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld and his top deputy
Paul Wolfowitz, tells reporters that he has no doubt
Bush will go to war by March, with or without Security
Council backing.
Similarly, the slightly less
hawkish, more multilateralist former secretary of state,
George Shultz, a confidant and adviser of National
Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice, tells the Washington
Times that the UN inspection team's failure to find
evidence of weapons of mass destruction will not deter
Bush from going to war, and that he is confident other
countries will follow.
And there is logic to
this sense of inevitability of an invasion sooner rather
than later. As neo-conservative hawks like Perle have
repeatedly pointed out, Bush has breathed so long and so
heavily about "regime change" in Iraq that to back off
now would create a possibly lethal loss of credibility
in the international arena.
Moreover, Washington
has no desire to bear the costs of keeping the 200,000
or more military personnel now on the way to or already
deployed around Iraq in the field for months on end.
But the other hand is also a gnawing reality.
First, the eruption of the nuclear crisis over
North Korea has eclipsed Iraq as the most "clear and
present danger" of the moment. While Iraq indeed may
have weapons of mass destruction and may even be working
on a nuclear arms program (evidence for which has yet to
be uncovered), US intelligence agencies believe that
Pyongyang has one or two bombs already and is capable of
manufacturing half a dozen more within a few months of
re-starting its Yongbyon nuclear reactor. And, unlike
Iraq, North Korea has medium to long-range missiles to
deliver its weapons, not only to Seoul, just 60
kilometers away, but to Japan and possibly even to
Hawaii and Alaska.
North Korea's defiance and
the danger it creates are raising awkward questions in
the public's mind. Earlier this week, former
Representative Jack Kemp, a prominent rightwing
Republican close to many neo-conservative hawks and the
party's vice-presidential candidate in 1996, wrote in
the Washington Times, "There seems to be a growing
belief by some in Washington that even though Iraq
appears to be cooperating with UN weapons inspectors,
the diplomatic options in Iraq are rapidly dwindling and
war is inevitable. But why must war be inevitable?
"There also seems to be a consensus that unless
North Korea does something outrageous, like attacking
one of its neighbors, we should pursue non-military
options. Why is that very reasonable approach to North
Korea not also applicable to Iraq?"
The
administration thus far is doing a very poor job of
answering these questions from people like Kemp, who are
not known for their dovish views. And while it tried to
defuse the crisis this week by agreeing, under pressure
from allies Japan and South Korea, to "talk" but not
"negotiate" with Pyongyang, it appears that Kim
Jong-il's style of brinkmanship will not permit Bush to
change the subject back to Iraq.
While no major
new public opinion polls on Iraq have been conducted
since before Christmas, experts with access to private
polling say that support for invasion has, if anything,
declined over the past month, partly due to the North
Korean crisis. For most of the past year, polls have
shown about two-thirds of the public support invading
Iraq, but only if authorized by the Security Council or
backed by major US allies. Less than 30 percent of the
public have said they support unilateral action.
Support for war may even have dropped as UN
inspectors have fanned out, unimpeded, across Iraq over
the past few weeks. Indeed, a central element of Bush's
case against Iraq - that Baghdad's order for thousands
of special aluminum tubes offered proof that it was
building centrifuges to enrich uranium for nuclear bombs
- was substantially undermined when the director of the
International Atomic Energy Agency said that he found
Iraq's claim that the tubes were for making rockets to
be credible.
So, faced with all of these
obstacles to building a convincing argument for war with
Iraq, why is the administration not trying harder to
rally public opinion?
Stephen Kull, director of
the University of Maryland's Program on International
Policy Attitudes has a theory, "Either they [the
administration] don't have a card to play [to prove
Saddam has weapons of mass destruction in order to win
public opinion and Security Council support], so they're
trying to create a sense of momentum or inevitability
with all these deployments - in which case there's no
evidence that it's working. Or, they do have a big card
to play and they're waiting for the right moment to play
it."
That theory contradicts senior intelligence
officials, who for months have been telling reporters
that they do not have a "smoking gun".
(Inter
Press Service)
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