Often this week I found myself wondering how Saddam Hussein would celebrate Aug. 5, the first anniversary of his spectacular victory.
In my mind's eye I saw magnificent stomping and feasting in the great halls of his palaces, and in my ear is the contemptuous slapping of thighs about the United Nations and its top bureaucrats who worked so hard to give Iraq this wonderful victory.Certainly no dictator has more reason to rejoice. Eight years ago he was ground into the desert sands by a coalition of nations, led and organized by Americans. Parades were held in the United States. Coalition leaders drank toasts to one another.
None were so small-minded as to comment on Saddam's refusal to show up to sign Iraq's surrender document. Nor, almost a decade later, do they stop to mention his failure to appear at any of the meetings where Saddam's victory has taken place -- U.N.-Iraq meetings in Baghdad or the elegant chamber of the U.N. Security Council, created half a century ago in New York for the cause of peace and freedom, as it is still put with a straight face.
The meetings last year were to try to find the exact words of Chamberlainism that would persuade Saddam to permit the United Nations to carry out inspections in Iraq for nuclear, bacteriological and chemical weapons. When he lost the gulf war, he promised the inspections would be satisfactorily finished in 15 days.
Early last year, despite his relentless daily effort to block inspection teams, they found that Iraq could become a nuclear power within a year or two if inspection ceased and could mount a chemical and bacteriological war after three months.
But most council members, except America and Britain, sabotaged the inspection teams and their chief, Richard Butler, one of the most staunch and skillful U.N. officials I have known in the United Nations' lifetime.
In conspiracy with Saddam, Russia led the council members who fought inspection. Their goal was to lift the commercial sanctions against Saddam, which prevented them from doing billions in business with Iraq.
Never do these nations speak the truth that sanctions, which hurt the ordinary Iraqi, would be lifted almost instantly if Saddam lived up to his inspection promises. Forbes magazine estimates he is the sixth-richest man in the world, so we can assume he has plenty to eat.
When Butler's inspectors drew too close to Iraqi weaponry, last Aug. 5 Saddam curtly told the United Nations no further inspection would be allowed.
What the United Nations did about Saddam's tearing up of the gulf peace agreement was exactly nothing.
The United States, acting outside the United Nations later, did mount an air campaign against Iraq. It lasted just four days because of the advent of the Muslim holiday of Ramadan, which apparently took Washington by surprise. Iraq and other Muslim states attacked Israel in 1973 when Yom Kippur and Ramadan came together.
Butler's contract expired about two months ago. Neither he nor the United Nations' top bureaucracy wanted any further part of each other. Now he is a fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations, writing.
In the first issue of Talk -- Tina Brown's loving gift of heartburn to the magazine world -- the Australian Butler is a hard fast bowler, or whatever they call it in cricket.
He pays his respects to Secretary-General Kofi Annan, who had boasted that he could do business with Saddam. He did, straight to bankruptcy. Butler accuses Annan of handing Saddam the "greatest possible prize" -- destruction of the U.N. inspection commission, the only barrier to Iraq's achievement of weapons of mass destruction.
So by another Aug. 5, possibly the next, Iraq will be resurgent with the combination of mass-death weaponry and Saddam's passionate commitment to control the Mideast, including all Western roads to it.
One strategy, only, will block this. The United States should inform all its allies -- real or pretended -- that helping Iraq continue to refuse inspection, or in any other way, would be considered an act hostile to America's high national interests and we will no longer regard them as allies or true friends, real, pretend or would-be.
I do not think U.S. leadership is wise or strong enough to adopt that strategy. Saddam will be allowed to follow his own, with consequences we are afraid even to consider, yet.
New York Times News Service