Iraq’s invitation to the UN’s chief weapons inspector to visit Baghdad for talks about the resumption of arms inspections suggests that Saddam Hussein is genuinely worried about Washington’s threat to remove him by force. The offer would not have been made otherwise. However, how effective that strategy will be depends on what exactly Baghdad has in mind.
If the letter from Iraq’s foreign minister, proposing talks on allowing in weapon inspectors to ensure that it is not producing weapons of mass destruction, was received with skepticism at the United Nations, it is because the world body has gone through the same act any number of times. There were offers of talks and talks about talks, but nothing had come out of them, other than more of the same. Even Iraq’s friends in the Security Council, such as Russia and France, have come to see Baghdad’s on-and-off offers as a delaying tactic.
True, the UN will take all the steps that it is required to when such an offer comes. Secretary-General Kofi Annan plans to hold consultations with all the 15 Security Council members on Monday on the letter. However, the invitation, as so many earlier ones, seems to be designed to be turned down because the procedure proposed, according to Annan, “is at variance with the one laid down by the Security Council in its resolution of 1999”. The possibility of such conditions being accepted has always been remote. It is nonexistent now.
Is Saddam Hussein in an advance stage of developing, weapons of mass destruction? President Bush and the hawks around him are sure he is. The rest of the world is not. They are not giving Saddam a certificate of clean health either. Nobody in his right mind will. But they haven’t seen the “smoking gun” that Washington hawks say they are ready to produce on demand. So, the only way for Saddam to prove that he has not been doing what he had undertaken not to do, as a term for ending the Gulf War and saving his power as well as life, is to let the inspectors in so that they can see it all for themselves. There is no other way. He has already played game after game over arms inspections, both before the UN inspectors pulled out in 1998, after having been constantly harassed, delayed and given the general runaround to prevent them from finding evidence of such weapons, and since. Baghdad has proved itself to be good at the charade. But now it has to prove that it is also good at knowing when the time for charade is over.
For the moment, everyone — except George Bush and the Iraqi opposition — agrees that an attack on Iraq would send disastrous shock waves throughout the Arab world. Saddam is right in that assessment. But he is wrong, suicidally wrong, in assuming that it is because the Arab world wants him to acquire such weapons. They would be insane to feel so; they know, from past experience, where he will use them. The Arab anger is because, for them, the priority is the Palestinians, not some possible future attack by Saddam Hussein. Washington has to understand that. Unfortunately all the signs are that it does not.
What is needed is for Iraq to agree to unfettered access for arms inspectors. But with an unbroken record of never failing to do the wrong thing, how much hope can be there of that happening?
