Steady On, George: The costs of going wobbly - support for war against Iraq

'We're taking him out." That's what President Bush said last winter about Saddam Hussein to a group of senators in the White House. On subsequent occasions, notably to the West Point graduates in June, he committed himself to the same end in more elegant language. Doing nothing about Saddam, he often repeats, is "not an option." He envisages regime change, and freedom and democracy for Iraq.

In his address to the United Nations on September 12, he spelled out Saddam's past crimes and present threats with an oratory many held to be Churchillian, and concluded with an appeal to both the United States and the United Nations: "We must stand up for our security, and for the permanent rights and the hopes of mankind." The military build-up is no secret either. On one hand, forces in Qatar, in Oman, Bahrain, and Jordan; on the other, anxieties about the use of bases in Saudi Arabia and the possible backsliding of Turkey, following the election of Islamists there.

Since the collapse of Communism, supreme power across the world has been tilting increasingly in favor of the United States. Everywhere and at all times, the strong and the weak, the just and the unjust, engage in tugs-of-war. Intractable cases such as the Balkans, Palestine, or Kashmir -- and even Northern Ireland -- have little to do with American national interests, but the parties call for U.S. intervention to resolve issues which they cannot resolve for themselves. President Clinton is still beating his breast for the self-imputed failure to stop genocide in Rwanda -- a horror, to be sure, but as far away from the American national interest as can be imagined.

Supreme power serves the indispensable purpose of providing a standard which allows people to predict with a reasonable chance of being right who is going to win and who is going to lose, insuring themselves against chaos. Saddam Hussein and the United States of course are unequal in every respect, but for a decade they have been locked in a tug-of-war which puts their relative power to the test.

What can be predicted with certainty about Saddam is that for his own purposes he will seek to maximize power, no matter the abuse involved, or the cost to anyone else. His invasion of Iran in 1980 first faced Washington with what was to grow into the present quandary. Resisting, Iran was about to break through to victory, in its wake spreading Ayatollah Khomeini's Islamism. To maintain a regional balance of power, the United States supplied Saddam with aid and intelligence. Saddam's invasion of Kuwait in 1990 further exposed the fragility of the regional balance of power. No Arab state or combination of Arab states had the strength to resist a dictator with his means and his ambitions. With the armed support of the principal Arab states, the United States then expelled Saddam from Kuwait, but for legalistic reasons to do with its mandate from the United Nations did not go on to overthrow him.

A good deal of the current hatred in the Middle East for the United States springs from the unpredictability which followed the unexpected reprieve of Saddam at the close of the Gulf War. The United States suddenly became inscrutable -- why had it allowed this enemy to live to fight another day? What ever is the point of supreme power if not to use it? Ask such questions of anyone in the "Arab street," and you will hear that Saddam must have been maintained in Baghdad as a secret agent, in order to provide Washington with a plausible pretext for moving militarily into the region. In one perspective, such conspiracy theory is laughable, but in another it is an attempt to make sense of America's otherwise inexplicable refusal to use its power as expected.

For some, though, the key to the puzzle is simpler. In Beirut in 1983, a Hezbollah suicide bomber killed 241 Marines sent to keep the peace there. When the entire force was then withdrawn in panic, a single terrorist appeared to be more powerful than the United States. In Somalia, the death of a dozen American soldiers was enough to scupper another peacekeeping mission. Since the Beirut bombing, a series of terrorist attacks claimed around 400 American lives and damaged civilian buildings, embassies, and ships, provoking in response the ineffective firing of cruise missiles and lots of language as fierce as it was empty. Osama bin Laden and his kind, and Saddam Hussein and his kind, conclude that the United States is not the power it pretends to be.

The decision in September to put the issue of Iraq into the hands of the United Nations is a victory for unpredictability. The applause for Bush's speech there has long since died away. The United Nations did not care for that plural "we." Russia and France both have pretensions to be arbiters of power, and they nurture grievances about their impotence to fulfill that role. Providing an object lesson in prevarication, these two countries have wasted weeks of time and caused the maximum international dissension. In their hands, the proposed regime change in Iraq has slithered away into disarmament, a euphemism for the status quo. Deceit of all kinds frustrated the best efforts of previous U.N. inspector teams right up to the time when they were withdrawn in 1998; and the Iraqis have now had four more years in which to disperse and conceal their weapons of mass destruction. In charge of yet another putative inspection, Hans Blix, a veteran Swedish official with no technical qualifications, is sketching out a program which will drag on well past next April when the weather becomes too hot for campaigning, and the will for regime change will largely have dissipated.