Beyond contingency
After spending a week speaking to senior US officials, Ibrahim Nafie finds Washington determined to go to war
US officials I met during my visit to the US undermined the evidence US Secretary of State Colin Powell presented to the UN Security Council yesterday, saying Powell's case would not be based on compelling hard evidence but rather on circumstantial links and conjecture. One US official confided that Powell is likely to have presented "dots" which need to be connected in order for any bigger picture of Iraqi deception to be drawn.
In light of Powell's address yesterday, and assuming that the status quo on Iraq and in the Arab region continues, it will be the Security Council that decides what happens next. Discussions in the Council will revolve around whether there is a need to continue the inspections for a few weeks longer -- as requested by the UN weapons inspectors and the majority of both Council members and the international community -- or whether the evidence presented by Powell shows Iraq in "material breach" of Resolution 1441.
Reports to the Security Council last week by the UN Monitoring, Verification and Inspection Commission (UNMOVIC) Chief Hans Blix and International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) President Mohamed El-Barad'ie were mixed, though both pointed up discrepancies between Washington's claims and what the inspectors had found on the ground. El-Barad'ie reported that as yet there is no evidence that Iraq is pursuing a nuclear weapons programme; for his part Blix noted that Iraq needs to explain several omissions in its weapons programme declaration as presented to the UN in December and criticised Iraq for obstructing the work of inspectors. Both agreed that several more months were needed to complete inspections, much to the embarrassment of the US administration.
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An Iraqi woman watches as UN weapons inspectors enter a compound in Baghdad on Saturday in their continuing search for weapons of mass destruction
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Whether Powell has made a strong case against Iraq, providing new information and incriminating evidence, will therefore be decisive. Till now US intelligence reports have provided only circumstantial evidence on Iraq's alleged stockpile of weapons of mass destruction, often drawing ridicule from American experts. And while most commentators believe furnishing new evidence will strengthen the US position a watertight case is unlikely to be made. There is, after all, no information that cannot be refuted: the kind of verification that would be required to produce "quality" evidence is a time consuming process.
Yesterday's Council meeting was never intended as a forum to decide what happens next. In its wake the US administration is expected to launch extensive consultations towards the drafting of a new resolution.
The US can choose one of three routes. First, either Washington or London will draft a resolution asking the Security Council to mandate the launch of war against Iraq. The success of this option will depend on the strength of the evidence Powell presented yesterday. It remains an unlikely route given the opposition the US will face on such a motion within the Security Council. Should any such motion fail, and the US still launch an attack, then the war will have lost any fig-leaf of legitimacy. It is a risk Washington is unlikely to take given that it can rely on the ambiguity of Resolution 1441 to launch an attack without a new resolution.
A second possibility would be the passage of a new resolution warning Iraq that it is in material breach of Resolution 1441, as well as other resolutions, and calling upon Baghdad to fully declare and destroy its stockpile of weapons of mass destruction. This warning, which would take at least two weeks to finalise, is likely to include a timeline for Iraq to comply or else face "severe consequences". With such a resolution the decision to go to war will loom closer, and any default could result in the US declaring a state of war. While this is a more likely scenario than the first again it depends on the strength of evidence furnished by the US and the amount of pressure Washington applies to members of the Council, particularly France, Russia and China.
The third possibility is that the US will begin consultations on either of the above and, sensing that the opposition is too strong to either, abandon the process and launch an attack anyway, imposing a de facto situation.
While Bush will not deliberately risk his chances of re-election for a second term he has so far proven to be the least sensitised US president to domestic and international public opinion. On several occasions he has admitted that he acts upon what he believes and not what public opinion might dictate. And despite a recent glitch in the US public's support for a war against Iraq, it rose to 66 per cent following Bush's State of the Union Address last week. This confirms the US right-wing's view that the nation will stand behind its government in the eventuality of war -- especially after the events of 9/11.
I left the US convinced that the US administration remains determined to move quickly -- within weeks -- and invade Iraq.
