Editorial: Stunts, credibility and march to war

Credibility is an indefinable commodity. President George W. Bush seems to have earned plenty of it at home - witness his party's success in last November's congressional elections - but not so in the world outside. His Secretary of State, Colin Powell, was labouring against that scepticism when he appeared before the United Nations Security Council with the long-promised "evidence" to warrant an invasion of Iraq.

By all accounts the Security Council was singularly unmoved. The much-quoted "Adlai Stevenson moment" - a reference to a previous US representative who produced photographic evidence of Soviet missiles in Cuba - did not happen. Mr Powell produced photographs, quite convincing ones of sites cleared of buildings that the US says were bunkers for forbidden weapons. He played tape recordings of Iraqi military officers talking about "evacuating" certain ammunition before a UN weapons inspection. He also produced other things, such as a vial of harmless powder to illustrate a quantity of anthrax. That cannot have helped.

If the world, or even Iraq's neighbours, really felt threatened by Saddam Hussein right now, Mr Powell's pictures and tapes would be all the confirmation most people would need. But the truth is, almost all other countries cannot sense a threat and no amount of US rhetoric will convince them.

Most countries' leaders needed no convincing that the Iraqi regime has some chemical and biological weapons material. Iraq's acquisition of those arms seems universally known in the international diplomatic and intelligence community. It is a matter of such certainty that inevitably it arouses suspicion that the material might have been supplied with the knowledge of the US or its allies, possibly in the 1980s when Iraq was outnumbered in a long war with revolutionary Iran. The US can dispel such suggestions by convincingly accounting for the source of certainty that Iraq possesses the prohibited material.

In one respect, however, President Bush's credibility in the world is extremely high. Nobody seems to doubt his determination to go to war, with or without the blessing of the Security Council.

Most important, Saddam Hussein probably has no doubt that the President means what he says. Mr Bush's resolute attitude has already forced Saddam to allow the inspectors back in and let them go about their work unimpeded. He risks being held guilty of defying a UN declaration, because the order Mr Bush obtained from the Security Council late last year requires that Iraq actively co-operate with the inspection. That, by common admission, has not happened.

So, however unmoved most of the 15 Security Council members may have been by Mr Powell's presentation, they will be obliged to enforce the resolution they passed in November. Nothing short of a sudden act of compliance in Baghdad is likely to stop the UN endorsing a war that will carry unforseeable consequences for Iraq, the Middle East and international order.

This would be the first war conducted on the policy of "pre-emption" outlined by the Bush Administration in response to September 11, 2001. US and world security, the White House insists, now depend on identifying possible threats and eliminating them before they can strike. There lies the credibility problem. Who decides when a threat exists, and on what basis?

Some overt threatening behaviour is surely the minimum. It cannot be enough to decide a regime constitutes a threat simply because it has a capability and its character is dictatorial. When any state presents a credible threat to the peace and security of others, nobody should need pictures and stunts to be convinced of the need to act.

Herald feature: Iraq