Gwynne Dyer: US invasion of Iraq merely postponed, not cancelled

Hopes have risen that the United States may not attack Iraq and risk unleashing chaos in the Middle East despite the Bush Administration's obsession with getting Saddam Hussein.

The Bali bomb and even the Washington sniper have reminded Americans that the goal was originally to thwart terrorist attacks, not to bring about "regime change" in Iraq; the United Nations Security Council seems likely to pass a resolution that gives Washington much of what it wants; and the revelations about North Korea's nuclear weapons have provided an alternative focus for American fears.

Unfortunately, the hopes are probably misplaced.

There is unlikely to be enough time for popular opposition to the war to grow irresistible before the attack on Iraq starts. What's happening at the UN is not quite what it seems.

And the real lesson of the North Korean imbroglio is that any government expecting a confrontation with the US should make sure it has nuclear weapons because they raise the tone of the discourse wonderfully.

When North Korean representatives revealed to their US counterparts this month (in what an American official called a "belligerent" fashion) that their country was still working on nuclear weapons despite a 1994 treaty with the US in which it promised to abandon its programme, Washington did not demand "regime change" and threaten to invade.

On the contrary, it suddenly became a model of politeness.

It's an old axiom that societies which allow duelling are very polite. When insulting or bullying someone can lead, quite legally, to a bullet between the eyes, the whole standard of courtesy rises remarkably.

The same phenomenon applies internationally.

Iraq, which denies having nuclear weapons, has been the target of almost weekly threats of attack by President George W. Bush since he first discovered the "axis of evil" last January. North Korea, by contrast, is being treated with the softest of kid gloves.

"The President believes this is troubling and sobering," said White House spokesman Scott McClellan after news of the North Korean claims came out. "We are addressing this through diplomatic channels."

No threats of regime change, no demand for arms inspectors to go in at once, none of the abuse that is daily rained down on the (richly deserving) head of Saddam.

Why? Because the US Government does not really believe that Saddam has any seriously threatening weapons of mass destruction (despite what it tells the children), whereas it suspects that Kim Jong Il does.

Defence Secretary Donald Rumsfeld says he believes that North Korea has "a small number of nuclear weapons", which means, in practice, that there is zero likelihood of a US military attack on North Korea.

The probability of an American attack on Iraq remains high precisely because it does not, in Washington's view, pose a serious danger to America's armed forces.

The UN probably can't head the attack off either. The Security Council may meet US demands for a resolution that will send the arms inspectors back into Iraq with a tougher mandate, but it will not explicitly authorise Washington to launch an attack without seeking a further resolution whenever it judges that Saddam Hussein is trying to hinder the inspectors' work.

On the other hand, it is probably willing to fudge the wording of the resolution so that Washington can claim to be acting with UN authority when it does exactly that.

What is going on at the UN is pure damage control.

One of the most deeply entrenched bits of wisdom about international affairs is that the League of Nations, the UN's predecessor, failed mainly because the US was not a member.

Nobody wants to go through that again, so the permanent members of the Security Council are fashioning a resolution that will let them accept (or at least not violently object to) Washington's claims to be acting legally when it attacks Iraq in a few months.

Britain will gladly vote for any resolution Washington wants, and China will abstain as usual.

To win over the awkward squad, Russia and France, President Bush has now promised to go back to the Security Council for consultations before he declares the arms inspections a failure and starts his attack on Iraq - but he has given no promise that the US will wait for UN authorisation before going to war.

Sending UN inspectors into Iraq probably does mean a postponement of the US attack until early next year, but it was never clear that Washington wanted to act earlier anyway.

A November attack would have an unpredictable effect on voting patterns in the Congressional elections, and a December attack could undermine the Christmas retail binge. In the middle of a recession, you want the consumers out at the malls, not sitting at home glued to CNN.

But the American invasion of Iraq has just been postponed, not cancelled.

The Arab world does not want it, Nato doesn't think it's necessary, the Pentagon and the CIA are clearly unhappy about it in private, and American public opinion is becoming increasingly diffident on the question, but President Bush still has enough clout to make it happen.

It remains a mystery why he wants to blow most of his political capital on this enterprise, but there almost certainly will be a US attack, probably in January or February.

* Gwynne Dyer is a London-based independent journalist.

Further reading
Feature: War with Iraq

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