Yet the Bush-Cheney-Rumsfeld war machine presses ahead for a war resolution on Capitol Hill. Democrats originally wanted to put off the vote until after Election Day, arguing that it was too important to be treated like a political football. They lost that battle. Now they want a quick vote on the theory that they can then get back to domestic issues. Senate Majority Leader Tom Daschle and other key Democrats made a valiant attempt on Thursday to return the national conversation to the faltering economy, but with protestors interrupting Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld’s testimony before a House committee with antiwar chants, Iraq continues to claim center stage, for better or worse.
Republicans want a broadly worded statement modeled after the Gulf of Tonkin resolution that gave President Lyndon Johnson a free hand in Vietnam. Democrats don’t want to cede that much power, and some are talking about the possibility of a separate Democratic version that is more narrowly drawn.
But that reflects more bravado than reality. Democrats don’t have the votes to pass anything, and they are exceptionally cowardly when it comes to opposing Bush on the war. “They’re likely to agree with anything the Republicans say the closer we get to the election,” says a Senate aide.
Republicans are the ones with the vested interest now in dragging out the debate. The GOP has started running ads touting Bush’s conduct of the war in key races around the country. “They’re treating it like a giant wedge issue,” says a Senate Democratic aide.
Bush’s problem is not with Washington; it’s with New York. Vice President Cheney warned Bush that if he started down the United Nations path, he would get sidetracked, and that’s what has happened. At the very least, Saddam has bought time. And he has prompted skepticism about Bush’s real goal. Is it disarmament or is it immediate regime change? Ramon Meyers, a scholar at the Hoover Institution, says, “If it’s disarmament, we should be able to figure out a way to disarm him without monkeying with Iraq’s sovereignty. If the inspectors can see what they want to see without a lot of elbowing and constraints, then the disarmament goal might be achieved. If that doesn’t work, then the U.N. for the first time might want to consider a resolution to direct the Security Council to infringe on the sovereignty of another country and remove the rulers.”
But that would take time, more time than Bush wishes to devote to this chess game with Saddam Hussein. “They’re afraid of that scenario because they don’ t want Saddam defanged,” says a Senate Democrat. “They want him dead.”
The window for military action closes sometime in March, the start of Iraq’s summer. So Saddam could easily buy another year of inaction. Besides, Meyers and other foreign-policy experts suspect Bush’s real goal is to change the character of Iraqi society and then go on to other countries in the region in what Bush envisions will be a contagion of democracy. This is a much grander vision than simply disarming or deterring Saddam and continuing with the less glamorous law-and-order task of disrupting Al Qaeda’s type of terrorism.
For now, Saddam poses no immediate threat to the safety of Americans, or to America. “The likelihood of us being attacked by Pakistani militants is a lot greater than being attacked by Saddam Hussein,” says Michael McFaul, a political science professor at Stanford. “He can be deterred; he’s demonstrated that.”
Saddam, of course, is a threat to his own subjects, but so are several despots around the world that the U.S. government supports and kisses up to. If he disarms, then he gets to stay in power. If he oppresses his people, is that reason to stage a military strike? Fidel Castro oppresses his people, too, but even the most zealous Castro-haters understand the futility of an attempted military overthrow of the Cuban regime. McFaul shares Bush’s goal of regime change in Iraq, but doesn’t think military invasion is the way to achieve it. “Regime change through invasion doesn’t have a very good track record-from Napoleon to Vietnam,” he says.
The danger is that the administration’s war talk could provoke what it is trying to prevent. Saddam has sociopathic tendencies. When he was losing the first gulf war, he torched all the Kuwaiti oil wells, setting off fires that burned for weeks and poisoned the atmosphere. It is quite plausible that once he sees American troops on the march that he would launch chemical and biological agents into Israel. Any attempt to expand the war in that direction could prompt Israel to respond with nuclear force. One congressional aide who spends his days war-gaming various scenarios says, “If I were Saddam, I’d have a secure location with a vial of anthrax and a store of smallpox under armed guard. The moment he feels all is lost, he can pick the terrorist of his choice, give him a plane ticket out, and say, ‘See you in Washington’.”
The point this aide makes is that Saddam will never give weapons of mass destruction to terrorists unless he is faced with a doomsday scenario. “The most effective way to get him to launch that attack is to provoke him,” says the aide. “His goal is survival. He has shown an eager willingness, even psychopathic joy, in order to remain in power.” Unlike Osama bin Laden, a true revolutionary who cannot be deterred with either force or the emoluments of power, Saddam can be deterred. Former President Bush had it right when he made the case for the first gulf war. He said there is a difference between evil, and evil on the march. Once Saddam invaded Kuwait, an oil-rich kingdom with economic and political ties to the West, he had to be stopped.
This time, at least so far, Saddam’s evil is confined within his own borders.
