Issue 700, 20 December 2002

Iraq: War a near certainty

It would take 30-40 days for the USA to mobilise the land force it needs to prosecute a war against Iraq, and only six hours for the US Air Force and its British allies to start an air campaign that would obliterate President Saddam Hussein’s military industrial complex, according to one of Washington’s best informed analysts. War against Iraq is no longer a possibility, or even likely: it is a near certainty, close to becoming a fact that Gulf states and their allies must come to terms with. The world is living through a subtle but nonetheless clear shift in the tide: political and diplomatic behaviour is increasingly founded on the assumption that the first half of 2003 will bring a US-led assault on Iraq and Saddam’s removal from power.

This is all the more striking when set against the United Nations’ success in securing Saddam’s consent to the return of the weapons inspectors. It is only a few weeks since the international community achieved hard-won consensus around the need for this final but serious attempt to control the Iraqi threat through the inspections process. Yet belief in the probability of war is actually hardening – in Washington, Europe, across the Middle East, and even in Baghdad.

Saddam is unlikely to comply with the UN unless he is convinced this is the only way to avoid an otherwise certain US attack. President George W Bush has to play hard cop to the Security Council’s soft cop. But the line between this and a conviction that war will happen anyway is fading, and that is starting to create diplomatic ‘facts on the ground’.

The Bush Administration is a judge as well as a policeman, and in Dubya’s court the decision that Iraq should be an integral part of the ‘war on terrorism’ was made by key players such as Defence Secretary Donald Rumsfeld even in the dark days of mid-September 2001 if veteran journalist Bob Woodward’s impressive new study, Bush at War, is to be believed.

It is no surprise to see the new mood among the ever hopeful Iraqi opposition, meeting in London on 13-15 December to pencil in plans for a post-war country. On one level, the US-backed conference was less important for its outcome than for conveying the wider message that the Saddam era is drawing to a close.

The change in mood is also starting to affect governments and opinion formers in the Gulf and in NATO. Turkey’s new moderate Islamist government appears to have extracted strong US-support for its European Union membership bid in return for hinting it may allow the USA to launch UN-approved air attacks on Iraq from its territory. Others too, are adjusting to what they now perceive as almost inevitable. This helps to make the political preparation for war easier. Washington has succeeded in a fostering an atmosphere in which those who treat inspections success and Saddam’s survival in power as a serious possibility are seen as unrealistic, talking into the wind.

In the aftermath of the 11 September attacks, Bush was not persuaded by Pentagon hawks’ case for an early assault on Iraq, for all Rumsfeld’s powers of persuasion. Interviewed by Woodward this August for Bush at War, the President said he had “no idea” whether he would attack. But his belief in the moral need to deal with rogue states such as North Korea and Iraq, if need be through pre-emptive action, was as clear as his trust in the USA’s right to set a lead. “We’re never going to get people all in agreement about force and use of force,” Bush told Woodward. “But action – confident action that will yield positive results provides kind of a slipstream into which reluctant nations and leaders can get behind and show themselves that there has been – you know, something positive has happened towards peace.”

Four months after those words were spoken, signs of a building slipstream effect are apparent.