Independent on Sunday
In the countdown to war, the focus shifts to the United Nations. This is progress of sorts. Last month, it appeared as if the divided US administration was heading for the worst option of all, a unilateral strike against Iraq with only Britain lending a helping hand. The more pragmatic figures around George Bush have prevailed in the short term, convincing him that he should appear to take the UN seriously. Whether the frantic diplomatic activity this weekend reflects a genuine engagement by the US is another matter. The underlying message from Mr Bush and Tony Blair has been that the UN matters, but only if it comes round to their point of view. But whatever the crude calculations that have brought about the involvement of the UN there is now a cause for limited optimism. It is possible that a UN resolution, calling for weapons inspectors to have unfettered access, will be drafted soon. Saddam Hussein, not a leader who has shown suicidal tendencies, might comply rather than risk obliteration. This is the only desirable scenario.
The US and its echo in Britain have not explained why they have contrived to place the world on the brink of war. Indeed, it is Saddam's lack of suicidal tendencies that raises one of the big questions about US strategy. Deterrence has worked. Since the failed attempt to invade Kuwait, he has been a weaker figure – a tyrant, of course, but a cautious tyrant. Even when his troops were routed after the Gulf War, and Baghdad seemed threatened, Saddam did not unleash his armoury of chemical and biological weapons. This was not out of some newly discovered moral rectitude. He feared retaliation. If he feared it then, presumably he fears it now. He appears to recognise that if he were to launch an attack anywhere in the region, or outside, he risks obliteration by the US and much of the international community.
Mr Bush has reached a different conclusion: that Saddam is newly and irrationally emboldened, that he is ready to strike in the knowledge of the fatal consequences for his regime. Both Mr Bush and Mr Blair argue that 11 September provides the justification for a pre-emptive strike. The Prime Minister rightly suggested at the TUC conference that if he had made the case for war against the Taliban on 10 September last year, there would have been an outcry. A day later, and most of the world backed military action when it was, on one level, too late. Yet in the case of al-Qa'ida terrorists, the world was facing people willing to die for their cause. They were a different threat, and a more serious one, than a state run by a weakened tyrant who shows no sign of being prepared to wipe himself out.
The pre-emptive strike introduces a new balance of risk in the build-up to war. In effect, Mr Bush and Mr Blair are seeking support for the loss of innocent lives on the basis that more lives could be lost if an attack does not happen. It will take some persuading to convince people of that argument. In the face of a sceptical electorate, Mr Blair needs more evidence. The balance of risk would change if he could prove that Saddam had acquired stocks of, say, the smallpox virus. Instead, the most that we have is conjecture about the scale of the threat. Even the report from the International Institute for Strategic Studies was speculative. It stated that it was unlikely that Saddam would acquire the means to deploy nuclear weapons, and that it had only limited scope to use other forms of attack. Perhaps the British government's dossier, to be published next week, will produce more, but for now the case for a destabilising pre-emptive strike against Iraq is still not made.
