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Bush-Cheney Stumbling Over Iraq
NewsMax.com
Monday, March 5, 2001 The new American administration is in disarray contriving an apparent Mission Impossible strategy toward Iraq to replace the bankrupt policy bequeathed by Bill Clinton.
It comes down to this: To get tougher on Saddam Hussein's dictatorial regime, President Bush and Vice President Dick Cheney now feel they must first go softer on him, or lose the cooperation of other Arab states when the time comes to get tough again.
Thus, in the emerging Bush-Cheney strategy, having inspectors of mass-destruction weapons in Iraq is no longer as important as once thought.
And allowing Saddam to import more foreign-produced goods, even those that could be used for military as well as peaceful purposes, is essential before it is possible to crack down effectively on military items going to him.
They are having a difficult time selling this on Capitol Hill, especially to Republicans.
The implications of this current confusion, compounded upon inherited disaster, extend far beyond the city limits of Baghdad and the many palaces of the Iraqi dictator.
Legacy of Failures
It is a compound-complex migraine of cascading, interconnected foreign policy collapses that are part of the legacy of the late Clinton-Gore administration.
And the architects and implementers of the emerging Bush-Cheney foreign relations and national security policies are attempting to hold their splitting heads and at the same time come up with clear-minded corrective measures.
They are not off to a good start.
In the mother of all ironies, as the fog around the United States' new foreign policy begins to lift, what should be seen sitting right there at the middle of America's discomfiture but the familiar figure of Saddam Hussein?
It is almost as if the Persian Gulf War of a decade ago never happened.
At least Saddam is acting that way, and with each revolution of planet Earth he manages to unravel even more the coalition that Bush's father wove together to defeat him ?if only temporarily.
How It Came About
Here is how the castles in the sand left by Operation Desert Storm began to blow away, and with them the entire construct of what passed as Bill Clinton and Madeleine Albright's foreign policy regarding Iraq:
?Saddam managed to force the United Nations to withdraw its on-the-ground inspection teams in Iraq that were compiling evidence of his defiance of the terms of surrender forbidding him to build an arsenal of weapons of mass destruction ?nuclear, biological and chemical.
?Then-President Clinton put up little resistance.
?Saddam began whining that U.N. sanctions on everything except medicines and food necessary for his people were decimating and starving them.
?He gathered sympathy with that line among his Arab neighbors, even those he had just gotten through attacking, despite incontestable evidence he was diverting those supplies away from his civilian population.
?He began making end runs around the international embargoes on the purchase of his oil by developing, with the eager help of American allies such as France, a thriving black-market petroleum-smuggling trade.
?He encouraged all manner of illicit trade with a growing number of such nations greedy to trade with Iraq.
Flights of Defiance
?International sanctions became an international joke, symbolized by illegal but blatant resumptions of daily commercial flights linking Baghdad with a long list of other capitals.
?As that was going on, Saddam's gunners became increasingly emboldened, "painting" radar "fixes" on, and taking ground-to-air missile shots at, American and British planes carrying out their international responsibilities to patrol Iraq's northern and southern "no fly" zones, established to keep him from slaughtering his own people in those regions.
?Clinton's response was a milquetoast tit-for-tat sporadic bombing of Saddam's missile batteries.
?Saddam's agents of propaganda did a masterful job of taking his spurious case to "the Arab street," whipping up pro-Iraq sentiment in the major cities of nervous Arab rulers who were once part of the elder Bush's alliance that won, so most everyone assumed, the Gulf war.
All that has conspired to put Bush and Cheney in this predicament once they came to power Jan. 20:
?Apparently the Bush-Cheney national security team badly underestimated the seriousness of the deterioration of the Clinton-Gore policy toward Iraq, whatever that actually was.
Powell's Reconnaissance
?Secretary of State Colin Powell was commissioned to pack his bag and take an exhaustive ?and probably exhausting ?fact-finding and get-acquainted tour of the Mideast, from the eastern shore of the Mediterranean to the eastern entrance to the Persian Gulf.
?Powell returned after a week, visibly sobered ?some close observers believe deeply shaken.
?First, Powell acknowledged he had no idea things had turned so hostile in the Israeli-Palestinian non-peace process.
?He left that precarious jar of nitroglycerin convinced it was a hopeless situation Clinton was never able to extricate himself from and a tar baby Bush should be very wary of touching.
?One of the major impressions Powell said he brought back ?making it sound as a rude surprise to him ?is the alarming extent to which America's role in the Israeli-Palestinian tangle is now the overriding perception of the United States in the Arab Gulf states.
The upshot of Powell's look-see overseas is that the Bush-Cheney administration has had to face up to the fact that it is confronted with a world dramatically different from, and more hostile and more volatile and less manageable than, what they had imagined.
Saddam the Ubiquitous
Perhaps the most-unsettling aspect is how the Iraq card plays almost wherever America chooses to sit at the global poker game.
Consider these non-insignificant hunks of unwelcome and apparently unanticipated consequences:
?Taking fresh courage from Saddam's ability to thumb his nose at Washington and suffer no serious penalty, the masters of Communist North Korea have ratcheted up their hard line toward the United States.
?That did get the Bush team's attention, and its response has been to announce determination to push ahead with a meaningful anti-missile defensive shield to protect American soil from the real possibility of a nuclear missile launched by North Korea. Or Iraq. Or Communist China.
?Also noting Saddam's winning strategy toward the United States, Beijing wasted no time instructing the new, untested president that he does not have, and cannot ever expect, China's permission to defend the United States against such a "rogue nation" nuclear attack.
?More to the point, following tortured Chinese logic, Beijing regards an American defensive shield as a threat to its ability to attack Taiwan at will.
?And to let Bush understand they aren't kidding about that, the Chinese recently poured planeloads of military and civilian technicians into Iraq to install a state-of-the-art fiber optic network that links Saddam's radar sites with his ground-to-air rockets.
Bombs Awry
?Before, just barely before, this work was to have been completed, Bush, in cooperation with the British, dropped on those installations the latest "smart bombs," some of which even hit their targets.
?When it became known publicly that the job was poorly executed, Bush then reached for a diplomatic weapon. At his first press conference, the president criticized the Chinese involvement in Saddam's new communications network.
?If the Chinese were impressed, they failed to say so. Nor did they bother to embarrass Washington by noting that fiber optics were on the list of made-in-America goods the Clinton-Gore administration had approved for sale to China.
There's an Iraqi parallel in that.
In feeling around for a new policy toward Saddam, the Bush-Cheney team now proposes to ease up on exports to Iraq. It would broaden the approved list of dual-use ?that means domestic and/or military ?equipment, such as fiber optics, that Iraq may import.
Powell said he encountered strong support for this approach in his swing through five Arab states last week.
Meanwhile, Back Home
He cannot say the same for the reaction he's getting from the one place Bush and Cheney should have expected foreign policy support ?Republicans on Capitol Hill.
Sam Brownback of Kansas, the GOP chairman of a key Senate Foreign Relations subcommittee, held a hearing March 1 in which he rained all over the softer-sanctions idea.
On March 7, Powell must go up the Hill to defend the new policy before the House of Representatives International Relations Committee.
The chairman, Henry Hyde, R-Ill., said:
"The rationale for sanctions is to prevent the production of weapons of mass destruction. Does weakening sanctions help us achieve that goal?"
The growing resistance was summed up in a March 5 article by Wall Street Journal reporter Neil King Jr.:
"... critics of the proposal say it will be all but impossible to implement."
Disconcerting Questions
"How, they ask, do you persuade such diverse countries as Turkey, Syria and Jordan to clamp down on smuggling?
"How can you stem the production of weapons of mass destruction by easing up on so-called dual-use products that might go toward building a chemical or biological bomb?
"How can you be certain that easing sanctions would actually help the Iraqi people when Saddam Hussein still has the power to dole out food and medicines on a whim?
"Several administration officials share the fear that a new approach toward sanctions, especially one so dependent upon support in the Arab world, will further empower the Iraqi leader."
The president's national security adviser is insisting that the Bush-Cheney team is united on this developing policy. It wasn't pulled together after Powell returned from his trip, said Condoleezza Rice, but was worked out, agreeably, in advance.
But, as the Washington Times noted in a March 5 report, that is at odds with a position Powell took, just before his trip, that sanctions would not be lifted until inspectors are allowed in again.
Standing Firm, Vigilant
"Let the inspectors in," Powell said, "and we can get beyond this. Until [Saddam] does that, I think we have to be firm. We have to be vigilant, and I will be carrying this message to my friends in the region."
The message he actually took, or brought back, was quite different ?downplaying the importance of inspectors and featuring softer sanctions.
In an interview March 2 with the Washington Times, Cheney seemed to be making that very point:
"I think we'd like to see the inspectors back in there. I don't think we want to hinge our policy just to the question of whether or not the inspectors go back in there."
When asked if the inspections program is now considered by the new administration to be less crucial than in the past, Cheney responded:
"It may not be as crucial if you've got other measures in place and you've got a [sanctions] regime that people are willing to support. So we'll have to see."
Or Maybe Not
Later that day, however, Cheney's chief of staff, I. Lewis "Scooter" Libby, phoned the Times to "clarify" the vice president's position on that point:
"We expect the Iraqis to live up to all U.N. resolutions, including getting inspectors back in."
Libby acknowledged, though, that the return of U.N. weapons inspectors to Iraq is not imminent.
The Bush-Cheney team is finding out that it is one thing to watch another administration's foreign policy fall apart and something else to construct your own replacement atop the ruins.
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