Charles Krauthammer: Powell must point out weapons inspection charade
01/12/2003
URL:http://www.dallasnews.com/opinion/viewpoints/stories/011203d...
By CHARLES KRAUTHAMMER
The single most remarkable passage in Bob Woodward's Bush at War has gone unremarked. In early August, Secretary of State Colin Powell decides that the Iraq hawks have gotten to the president and that he hasn't weighed in enough to restrain them. He feels remorse:
"During the Gulf War, when he had been chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Powell had played the role of reluctant warrior, arguing to the first President Bush, perhaps too mildly, that containing Iraq might work, that war might not be necessary. But as the principal military adviser, he hadn't pressed his arguments that forcefully because they were less military than political."
Now, it is well known that Mr. Powell had been against the Gulf War and for "containment." What wasn't known was that, if Mr. Woodward is to be believed, Mr. Powell still believes that sanctions were the right course and that he should have pushed harder for them.
That is astonishing. After a decade of bitter experience, we know that sanctions are utterly useless in dealing with Saddam Hussein. If he didn't give up his weapons programs in response to the most stringent sanctions imposed after defeat and humiliation in war, imagine how little effect sanctions would have had if he had been left in control not just of Kuwait and all its oil but of all his military assets as well.
Advocating the sanctions Band-Aid 12 years ago can be forgiven. But after what we have learned since then, how can one still think that would have been the better policy? Even Dick Gephardt admits that, in retrospect, the Democrats' (and Mr. Powell's) advocacy of sanctions simply was wrong. It would have left Kuwait under Saddam Hussein and left him in possession of a nuclear program that was just months away from success. Only the Gulf War prevented Iraq from becoming a nuclear power.
Mr. Powell regrets not having prevented the war that prevented that outcome? That places Mr. Powell's actions in the current Iraq crisis in a new light. In August, he persuaded the president to go to the United Nations. The pitfalls of such a course were obvious. International support is lovely, but key members of the Security Council have long undermined any serious effort to disarm Saddam Hussein and have opposed the president's policy of regime change.
Did Mr. Powell go to the United Nations to garner support for the president's policy? Or did he go to undermine that policy and implement instead the preferred Powell policy of "containment" – leaving Saddam Hussein in place – by setting up an endless inspection process that keeps America at bay?
Which is it? We don't know. But if it was Mr. Powell's intention to advance policy rather than thwart Mr. Bush's policy, it is incumbent upon him to help the president out of the U.N. inspections box Mr. Powell created.
It is impossible to find weapons of mass destruction in an uncooperative country. Even strong, determined inspectors will fail. Look: The United States was attacked with anthrax – and more than a year later, we still can't find the stuff even with the cooperation of the entire national government and every law enforcement agency in sight. How do you expect to find anthrax in a country in which the authorities are hiding it?
Chief U.N. inspector Hans Blix is neither strong nor determined. He was handpicked by France and Russia in 2000 for precisely that reason. Everyone knows that the only way to find weapons is to question Iraqi scientists under conditions of protective asylum outside Iraq. Yet Mr. Blix has dismissed that option as running "an abduction agency."
Instead, he is running a farce. President Bush has been outspoken in expressing skepticism about the inspection process. But the president shouldn't be out front taking the public-relations hit for being openly skeptical. That is the job of the secretary of state. It is the job of the man who set up the Blix inspection game in the first place.
On Jan. 27, Mr. Blix will present his findings to the Security Council. They will be equivocal. He already told the Security Council last week that he found no smoking gun. (Surprise!) Mr. Blix's report will call for endless more inspections and will be seized upon by defenders of the status quo on the Security Council to deny the legitimacy of American military action. It then will be Mr. Powell's duty to discount the Blix charade – to point out, for example, that Mr. Blix hasn't taken a single Iraqi scientist out of the country for interrogation free from Iraqi coercion – and to explain why America can't be deterred by it.
Or is charade Mr. Powell's intention, the way to vindicate his misgivings about Gulf War I and to ensure that Saddam Hussein's regime remains merely contained – and intact?
Charles Krauthammer writes for The Washington Post |
