TIME: Almanac 1993/TIME Almanac 1993.iso/time/092490/0924014.000

Text File | 1992-08-28 | 3.6 KB | 82 lines

                                                                                THE GULF, Page 35

THE POLITICAL INTEREST

Waiting for the Pretext


By Michael Kramer


    It feels like the Falklands. During the weeks it took
London's strike force to reach the South Atlantic in 1982, a
flurry of diplomatic activity failed to avert war. Like George
Bush in the current crisis, Britain's Margaret Thatcher refused
to reward Argentina's aggression with a face-saving compromise,
and Argentine President Leopoldo Galtieri compounded his
original miscalculation by insisting that "the British won't
fight."

    "An interesting analogy," says a Bush Administration
official. "Like Galtieri, Saddam seems to think we are too soft
to fight unless he invades Saudi Arabia. He figures we'll
eventually tire of sitting in the desert and his occupation of
Kuwait will become just another of the world's sore spots that
remain unresolved for decades. He's wrong -- but fewer and
fewer of us believe he will learn that lesson short of war."

    As Defense Secretary Dick Cheney and Joint Chiefs Chairman
Colin Powell concede, the deployment of U.S. forces to the gulf
has been less than flawless. But it will be completed shortly,
and a decision to wage war will probably follow. Most if not
all of the serious diplomacy of recent weeks has concerned
preparedness, not peace. And the latest from the mullahs in
Tehran supports the view that the ecoembargo, if it could ever
squeeze Saddam sufficiently to cause his unilateral withdrawal
from Kuwait, would take well over a year to do so -- a period
too long to sustain the support of the world's anti-Iraq
coalition.

    But staying power is the least of it. As pessimism about the
embargo's long-term effectiveness leads logically to battle,
so the Administration's goal of crippling the worst of Saddam's
war-fighting capacity appears unattainable without resort to
force. The President has danced around this objective for
weeks, but the evidence grows that merely restoring the status
quo ante will not yield "security and stability" in the gulf,
one of Bush's publicly stated goals. As he told Congress last
week, America wants "to curb the proliferation of chemical,
biological, ballistic-missile and, above all, nuclear
technologies."

    Can the neutering of Iraq's capabilities in these areas be
negotiated? "In theory, yes," says a State Department official.
"An overall Middle East arms-reduction agreement might be
created, but that's the longest of shots. The fact is that if
we are serious about going beyond getting Saddam out of Kuwait,
and we are damn serious about it, then war is just about
inevitable."

    Assuming this analysis prevails, what is left for the
Administration is to fine-tune the run-up to hostilities. The
question now being debated concerns provocation: What Iraqi
action could credibly justify a fight? Is the invasion of
Kuwait in itself adequate? Some in the Administration argue
that it is, but "the longer war is delayed, the more contrived
such a pretext would appear," says an American
intelligence-community planner. "We've been bedeviled by the
pretext thing for weeks, but we were greatly heartened by the
Iraqi raid of foreign embassies" in Kuwait last Friday. "That
kind of stupidity shows that Saddam is capable of providing a
provocation at any time, even though everyone has assumed he
is too smart for that."

    Whatever the pretext, some will always complain. But if the
will to battle is there, as it now seems to be, some pretext
will be offered. And as always with war, in the end the only
justification that will stick is victory.